Checking the Link Health of Your Website

The Google Penguin update is affecting lots of business, but mostly small business.  The problem with being a small business, is that you also probably do not have the funding to get a professional in to fix this issue for you.
Google Penguin is Google’s way of weaving out what they feel are “good” sites and “bad” sites.  Many things have changed from past SEO techniques to now, much of this is due to the Google Penguin update.  One of the huge things that affects your sites ranking is links and link building, since the release of the Penguin update, link building has become a very bad practice that can damage your sites ranking. There are many types of links:

  • Brand Links – these are links that contain your website URL, your product name or your company name in the anchor text.
  • Target links – these are links that contain specific keyword phrases that you are trying to target in the search engines in the anchor text.
  • Generic Links- these are links that contain random words or phrases in the anchor text.
The important thing to the Penguin update is the ratio of these three links, too much of one is bad for your site, especially target links.  The best thing you can do is to figure out the state of your back link health, and find out the ratios of your existing links. How to perform a links network check in 5 minutes?  The first thing to do is get Market Samurai, now open it.  Create a new project, then choose a keyword, then open the SEO Competition Module and click custom URL button.  Add your website URL.  The programme will now pull data about this URL, click the down arrow in the URL box, then click the Anchor Text Analysis button.  The programme gives you the top 1000 links to your site, and the anchor text.  Due to the ratio being the most important information, you need to find out the ratio.  Click the Export Anchor Text Data button, then click save to export data to your desktop.  Now visitwww.marketsamurai.com/c/linkhealthcheck.
To start, click the choose file button, now select the file you exported from the programme.  Here you can perform a health check on your site.  The page will now upload your back link data, now you will need to go through the list and define whether they are brand, target or generic links.  Now you have classified your links, you can see your ratios.  At the top of the screen, there is a pie chart showing this information.  The ratios for this should be:
  • Brand links 40%
  • Target links 20%
  • Generic links 40%
It is very important to do these link health checks as it hugely effects the ranking of your site, doing these checks every so often is a great way of keeping an eye on your sites link health for the future.
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