True to our progressive approach, we’ve had a wave of enhancements on Ace Media recently, including the addition of NEW pre-configured, customisable metrics in our PR measurement tool – Reports. Amongst them, we’ve included an intuitive metric that measures both the quantity and quality of backlinks (aka ‘inbound links’ or ‘incoming link’) based upon a pre-defined URL.
Why is this important?
For those less familiar with the term backlink and the purpose a backlink serves, let me fill you in… a backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website. Generally speaking, the more backlinks you have pointing to a site, the more popular it will be; particularly in relation to search engine ranking through the likes of Google.
However, backlinks are not all equal in terms of their ‘value’. For example, a backlink alone is not as good as a backlink with a mention, which is less favourable than a backlink with anchor text, finally there’s the follow backlink, the crème de la crème of backlinks and, needless to say, highly sought after yet notoriously difficult to achieve.
Whether a link is ‘followed’ (i.e. the site owner has specifically instructed search engines to pass link equity) is definitely relevant, but it doesn’t render the value of a no follow backlink entirely meritless. Even a mere mention on a high-quality website can provide a valuable boost.
This is where the source of the backlink comes in – whether it’s from a low-authority, potentially spammy site or a high-authority, trustworthy, popular site. Cue the metric, Domain Authority (DA) which is used to determine the rank value of a website.
Because of these variables, it would be of no advantage for us to merely produce a ‘count’ of backlinks, to truly assess their worth we need to dig deeper, and our clever new metric does precisely this… it automatically analyses each backlink to assess whether it’s ‘followed’ whilst providing the DA to help determine it’s impact in terms of SEO.
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