Assignment 8, Bootcamp #5 - Backlinks Report

[iCraft Admin]

This is our last assignment for this Bootcamp. It will focus on backlinks report.

Unfortunately, there is no one perfect (free) tool that gives you backlinks report in a nice and easy to understand way. You sometimes have to use multiple tools to compare results, and even then, you are not getting all the info. That's why it's always a good idea to keep your own spreadsheet of all backlinks that you built over time and the anchor text associated with those links for your own reference.

One of the best free tools for getting Backlink Reports is Ahrefs.com
When you enter your URL, you will get a report like this one for Fairy Cardmaker.
If you register on ahrefs.com (free), you could actually compare up to 5 different URLs per day.

I also emailed you guys some stats from Google Webmaster tools (Kat, sorry no results for you for some reason) and from BacklinksWatch.

SEOMoz has Open Site Explorer that offers the same information, but unless you have a Pro membership the amount of the information is restricted.

Kat, unfortunately, I can only see results for your store URL using ahrefs.com and Open Site Explorer. None of other services produced any results. Here is your Ahrefs.com report and your Open Site Explorer's report.

So here is your assignment for this week:

• Do research on how to measure and interpret backlink reports. Share links to good articles you find in this thread.
• Analyze backlink reports for all 4 stores, using various services.
• Tell me what you've learned from all those reports. I am not going to say anything yet, as I want to see how you all are going to interpret those results, and what you think you need to do now to improve those results.
• Ask questions, if you are not sure about something.
• By the end of the week, I want to hear from all of you not only your conclusions on your own store reports, but your thoughts on your fellow Bootcampers' store reports as well.

Good luck!  

[Fairy Cardmaker]

All but one or two of mine on the BacklinkWatch Excel report are from my blog.  On the other, excluding my own blog and iCraft itself, I still have 16 sources on that page, so that's encouraging.  There are some I thought would be there that I don't see.  Interesting.

I was out of town for work the last three days.  Have to catch up on the office but will try to do some reading starting tomorrow.

[Jewelry by Kat]

http://www.vistaprint.com/my-services/websites/site-activity.aspx?alt_id=RWXMW-V1A49-3M1&st=1&nd=1

Are these considered backlinks?   There are a lot from my review on emilys review

this is so confusing to me

[iCraft Admin]

Sorry, what is that URL Kat?

[Jewelry by Kat]

I AM NOT HAVING ANY LUCK GETTING THE URLS TO WORK ON THESE WEBSITES   I can only do 3 tries a day   It says my domain names are inncorrect

[iCraft Admin]

Kat, I assume you are talking about ahrefs.com with 3 tries per day. As I mentioned before, if you register a free account with them, they will increase that to 5 tries per day. However, this is a free service, so they have their limitations.

I am not sure how else I can help you with. You don't provide any details on URLs you have difficulty with.

[Red Rock Designs]

Hi Admin, from the Google reports you emailed us, on my report I received 4 backlinks from bit.ly and 1 from t.co.  I don’t know what these sites are?   Also, I don’t see my other media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr on the report,  which are sites I’m using frequently. 
Should I keep using these sites, or probably more time is needed ?

I’ve registered at Ahrefs.com, and my shop page shows:
URL Rank: 24      Domain Rank: 99.2   Backlinks: 29 K      Referring Domains: 63

I don’t really understand .....29,000 backlinks?  But my shop page views is about 11,500.
Also, what do the terms Text and Redirect mean?  And NoFollow and DoFollow?

[iCraft Admin]

bit.ly and t.co are the a URL shorteners, usually associated with Twitter links.

If you don't see some of the domains listed in one backlinks report, try to compare reports from other services. If none of them show domains that you know you should have backlinks from, that means that search engines didn't find those links yet.
Actually, that's strange that you don't see social media sites listed in those reports, as links from those sites are usually the first links Google finds.

Sometimes there are multiple links from the same page to your store, but not all of them will be clicked. That's why there are more backlinks than page views.

Text probably refers to Text links  (which are better) vs. Image links. DoFollow links are better than NoFollow links.

[iCraft Admin]

Both Fairy Cardmaker and Red Rock Designs mentioned that there are some backlinks that they were expecting to see in the reports, but didn't. One thing you can try to do is to promote those links through a couple social media sites, like FB and Twitter, and then run reports again in a few days. Sometimes that's all it takes to get Google to notice your links - to create some buzz in social media.

As an experiment, ask your fellow Bootcampers to share some of those links too, or re-tweet them on their social media sites. Usually, the more buzz you create, the sooner search engines crawl your links, as they'll perceive them news-worthy.

[Jewelry by Kat]

I may not understand everything I am seeing but I can see by the  graphs that my backlinks amount went way up after doing the reviews and the guest blogs.

[iCraft Admin]

Yes, exactly, Kat! Those are good backlinks and they count big time, so keep working on those.

[iCraft Admin]

So how's everyone doing with this assignment? Any questions?

[Red Rock Designs]

Well, I can see from the reports you sent us that Fairy Cardmaker obtains the most backlinks through her website/blog; JaJeJems and I get most of our backlinks from icraft.ca.   I'm going to assume these stats are also in relation to how long our stores have been open.  Fairy Cardmaker's store has been open the longest and she's had a more time to build a following to get the backlinks.

I'm thinking with Kat's stores, maybe because she has 2 stores selling jewelry, the backlinks gets kind of "skewed" from one store to the other? That's maybe why there's no report for her?  If she used anchor texts specific for each store, would this generate more reports?  Like "handmade bracelets" or "handmade earrings"....instead of using a broader term like 'handmade jewelry".

I think that the problem I have is that I'm on a lot of media sites, trying to update all of them, but I'm starting to see that I should just focus on the 1 or 2 that I get the most responses from. 

This was a good bootcamp!  Thanks for all the info.

[JaJeJems]

http://ezinearticles.com/?My-First-Website---Analyze-Backlinks&id=4664263
I found a few articles that I found easy to read and understand including this one.  I have to confess that this has been a hectic week in my personal life with moving two households!  I apologize for not putting more effort into this weeks homework.  Having said that I did learn a lot from looking at the a link reports that you sent, also afrehs, majestic SEO and SEOmoz.  I learned from my reading that analyzing these reports regularly is very important and I can see why.  I find that this is a very time consuming process and now realize how I can make the best of my efforts so i can ise these reports to my advantage.  My backlinks certainly increased since we have been doing this bootcamp session!  I also learned why analyzing the reports of competitors is essential to see where they are getting backlinks.  Like Red Rock I see that FairyC had a lot from her website, me mostly from icraft, although I think that some of mine must have come from comments that I made on others sites.  Is that possible?  I also saw a few from sites like Indiepublic where I am not very active.

One question about anchor text.  In one report the listed anchor text was mostly my name or jajejems.  I thought it would be sea glass jewellery or at least jewellery??  Maybe I don't really understand anchor text and keywords well enough.

Since this is the last assignment I just wanted to say how much I have enjoyed bootcamp.  You have been a great help Admin and I appreciate the ongoing support of my fellow bootcampers.  By the way I have secured a guest post on Crave Handmade which I have to submit next week and my other possibility for a guest post has firmed up so I will be doing that in about a week.  Let me know if you need more info!

[iCraft Admin]

Yes, Jajejems, backlinks can be from comments from other sites. If you follow URLs where backlinks came from, you should see your own comments there.

Anchor text is the text you use on your links. I agree, your current anchor text is far from the Keywords you used to optimize your store. On this page http://www.jajejems.com/1/archives/04-2013/1.html you use "our jewellery" as anchor text to link to your store. That's a very generic term and it looks like you used it multiple times in your site. Instead, you should try to have more anchor text with variations of "sea glass Jewelry".

I am glad you've learned new things in this Bootcamp. Backlinks is not an easy topic to master. So make sure you keep reading and researching it later on your own. Just look for articles no older than 1 year, as there is a lot has changed lately in the SEO world - Yahoo Site Explorer doesn't exist anymore and Page Rank is not as important as it was thought of before.