Improve Domain Diversity – Better Backlinks Series
Let’s look at the difference between link popularity and domain diversity. Too often you’ll be measuring your link building success by looking at link value counts in toolbars like SEO Quake and SEO Book Toolbar. You’ll see something like this:
Don’t get me wrong, tracking your rough link popularity over time is a solid way to see growth in your link profile, but this data is extremely limited. That fact that it’s inaccurate, varies constantly, and counts nofollow links is a topic for another day. Today I want to discuss domain diversity. A factor that seems to get heavy weight these days (correlates really well with sites that rank well). So if you want to rank higher, you need to focus a bit more on domain diversity.
Traditional View of a Link Profile
Below is a diagram that shows a very traditional view of how you achieve links to your site. The dark blue circle is your site and the light blue/gray circles are sites that link to you. The gray circles are pages on that site that link to you. Traditional link analysis looks at links on a page by page (or link by link basis). In the example below, the site has 7 links.
Domain Diversity View of a Link Profile
Next is a diagram to show the domain view of a link profile. The circles still represent the same thing, but this time we’re looking at the link graph on a domain level. Instead of saying “this site has 7 links”, we’re saying “3 domains link to this site”.
Why Is Domain Level Analysis Valuable
Domain level link analysis allows us to dampen the impact of a sitewide links from a large domain. If you’ve ever had the chance to get a sitewide link on a domain with hundreds of pages, you’ll know you do not get the value of “100’s of links”. This is diminishing returns in play. Not only does diminishing return impact sites on the same IP, but impacts fully qualified domains.
Real Life Example
I’m working with some cool people right now and may be doing some SEO work for them soon. They’re an internet marketing company that focuses on non-seo stuff. Although they are a PR 5 and have some links from some AMAZING domains, they do not rank nearly as well as my blog does. They do rank “ok” for a few terms, but do not rank well for many terms. The question many may have is “why”. Their site is older, it has a higher PR, they have “ok” anchors, and our link popularity is comparable.
Here is a quick overview of our domains from the SEOMoz Toolbar.
My Domain
Their Domain
As you can see, their site generally has more juice, authority, and trust than my domain. Here is the major difference.
Their Domain
My Domain
I have links from 273 more domains. Although my links may come from lower quality sources, I am competitive against their handful of powerful links.
If they chose to let me SEO their domain, I will be focusing on increasing the volume of domains that link to them. If they add quantity to their quality, they will have a very strong domain.
How to Do This
There are many ways to get links from many different places. Simply focus on not getting stuck on one place. If you, for example, publish 10 hubs on hubpages to promote a niche site, it will not pay as much to continue to publish more hubs for that niche site. Instead, move on to a new link source. If you get a guest blogging opportunity, and have already published 5 guest posts there, you would benefit more from making a guest post at a new domain over publishing more at the same domain.
Linkbait, resources, widgets, tools, etc are all great methods of having a broad appeal. These can earn you links from a diverse set of domains.
Popularity: 20% [?]
What about links to different pages to your domain from the same domain or IP address? Like linkbuilding to all your deep pages from the same domain with different anchors. Will they diminish also?
Try to get as many different domains, but that doesn’t mean “don’t get multiple links on the same domain”. If you already have several links from several pages on the same domain: a new link on a new page will help some, but a new link on a new domain will likely benefit you more.
More links are always a good thing, but I’d rather have 100 links from 50 domains, than 100 links from 10 domains.
If you can get a link, get it, even if you already have one on that domain. Don’t read as “don’t get these links”, but “try to get more of these in addition to what you’re already doing”.
Thanks Justin! Your info is a great value and I love Thesis theme for the simplicity. With your examples I got it working in one day. So easy to manage with inside wordpress panel. Had to thank you in this post cause commenting is closed on the old posts :)
Nice round up here Justin.
Link diversity is becoming more and more important, A quick scan of the top seo site showed link diversity at around 10% on average, and I have seen sites with low PR out rank other sites simply through a more diverse link profile.
Very Powerful
Hey Justin,
You wrote me a justifiably upset email a couple of months ago because I used your grizzly theme, took the footer link out, and gave you a no follow link in one of my posts. I understood as soon as it was pointed out to me by yourself that it was a mistake and instantly changed the link to “do follow”
I was incredibly new to MMO so I didn’t really understand what I was doing and just thought that it was best to keep my link juice in my new site without giving it out. Selfish I know, but at the time I didn’t know any better. I wasn’t trying to piss you off and didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. Sometimes people just genuinely make mistakes and given the chance will try to rectify things as quickly as possible.
The reason I’m writing is because I just realized that you posted about the incident on your blog. It was kinda funny and totally understandable to read that you think I’m a jerk. I’ve been on the receiving end of people stealing my content so I now know how frustrating it can be for people to take shit for nothing without giving recognition. I thought though that the fact that I corrected my mistake as quickly as I did would have taken some of the heat out of the situation and can’t understand why you still wrote about it in your blog telling the world I’m a douche. An anonymous douche I suppose, but a douche none the less :o)
Anyways, this rambling email has gone on long enough, just wanted you to know I’m not a total jerk in real life and the episode was caused by a newbies foolish mistake rather than an intention to take something from you for nothing.
Ric