The Chatterbox

Common Link

This post is to announce that the Common Link tool has officially progressed beyond Beta status. Woohoo!

First, a bit thank you to the guys and gals at Yahoo! for their support. After some mail back and forth (well done on that Debra!) Yahoo have decided to allow us more queries than the normal 5,000 that comes with their API license. They've graciously upped that to 25,000 queries per day.

Note that unlike Google's API license, the 25k counts against the server IP number that the script is on. So all of the Yahoo API scripts on this particular server will count against the total. But none of the rest of them are nearly as query intensive as Common Link is.

Let's take a moment to explore what Common Link is, what it was created to do, how it can help, etc.

In a nutshell Common Link helps you to analyze the backlinks that are helping some sites rank well. First and foremost it gives you an easy way to get a list of the sites linking to the Top Ranking sites for any keyword phrase on Google or Yahoo. As a webmaster it's pretty helpful in that you can quickly identify sites that are already linking to sites in your niche. (read: Your Competitors)

Given that fact, those should also be sites that will accept the premise of linking to your site too, as long as it's up to snuff.

The second part of the equation is a bit of theory, which there is no way to prove or disprove. Though I personally think it's quite true. The theory goes like this...

Not all links are equal. Links from some sites --commonly called Hub/Authority sites in the SEO/SEM industry-- carry more weight than the average link. Because they've been identified by the search engines (via clustering technology?) to be good authorities on a given subject.

Add another loop to this base theory and it makes sense that the top ranking sites may have more backlinks from these Authority sites. More links from powerful sites = Better Rank.

Okay, got that?

What Common Link does is looks at the backlinks for the Top 10 (or whatever) sites for a given keyword phrase and compiles the data in a way that is different from anything I've ever seen before. The script looks at those linking pages to figure out how many of the top ranking sites that particular page links to.

The idea being that if Page X from Site Y links to four sites who all happen to be in the Top 10, it may well be the case that Site Y/Page X has been determined to be an Authority on the subject. And that link is helping those four sites to rank as well as they do.

Mix, roll and extrapolate. If Page A from Site B also links to multiple top ranking sites --maybe the same four as above, but not necessarily-- it may also be an Authority site.

So there's the brief description of what Common Link does. It tries to help you identify which of those other sites may be Authorities, which of course you should try to get a link from. And if you can identify more than the current top ranking sites do, those backlinks should help you (somewhat) to obtain a good ranking for your own site!

Hopefully, that all made sense. Like I said, there's a lot of theory in there.

Now, here's the caveat...

There are no filters whatsoever being applied to the Common Link results. So it's still going to require a good bit of human judgement to determine if a given site is a Quality site or just another fake directory or scraper site. You'll want to avoid those like the plague!

But in the meantime, if you can get as many or more links from those Authority sites as the competitors, it should put you on equal footing with them where this one ranking factor is concerned. In my very limited experience during testing of the script and its results, it certainly looks like the theory will prove itself out to be true. Those backlinks from Authority sites do indeed appear to carry some extra weight.

Something to note: Common Link needs to run several hundred queries against my Yahoo API license each time it is run. So it's quite possible that you may get an error if the script starts to be heavily used. Even with the additional queries Yahoo have granted.

That's the reason why when you get to the last step it allows you to save the data as a .csv file for later viewing. If you save that file you won't have to run the data again the next time you start to work on it. Plus you'll be able to keep notes in the Excel file. eg what sites you've decided to approach, the date you asked for a link, the results of your request, etc.

Also, because of the license limit, I'll be making the code available for download and installation on other people's server. I need to find some time to clean up the code a bit and comment it much better than it now is before I make it available, but that's the plan. When that happens I'll be looking for people who want to mirror Common Link. The sole requirements are that your server must have PHP installed and must have DOMXML installed and enabled. You can tell if that's the case by running a phpinfo(); query. If it's enabled you'll see a box for DOMXML giving the details.

Another approach, which I'm considering if I can find anyone who wants to do it, is to convert the current PHP code into Java or VB script. With this approach the script would be a self-contained module that you can run from your own computer. Which means that the daily license limit will count against the 5,000 queries per day that is allowed for your computer's IP number.

If anybody out there is interested in converting it to something that can be run straight from a users computer, contact me. I would actually like to convert several useful API scripts into self-contained applications. Java would probably work best, since it would run on either PC's or Mac's. Unfortunately I'm well out of the Java development loop these days, and simply do not have enough time to take a refresher course.

Anyway, there it is. Have fun with it!