How to measure the effectiveness of its Netlinking strategy?

When you take a look at a website's SEO strategy, the word "Netlinking" inevitably appears on the table. But it is a method that is sometimes complex to set up: it generally requires significant resources, but especially a lot of time. And the most difficult thing is still to measure its performance. So how do you know if your efforts are really paying off?

February 12, 2021

lsandil

What is a Netlinking strategy?

For those who missed our article dedicated to this question, let’s do a quick reminder. In SEO, Google’s robots analyze your pages in order to give them a score. This score depends mainly on tangible data, such as display performance, the presence of the right keywords, or theoretically intangible data, such as the quality of your content. Of course, as they are robots, which are therefore still unable (for the moment) to appreciate your prose, the American giant has found some parries to evaluate it.

It is therefore based, among other things, on the notoriety of your content. And here, we go back to quantifiable, and therefore measurable data: time spent on each page, bounce rate or even… Incoming links! Yes, the more sites that link to your content, the more Google considers it as qualitative. Of course, Google also measures the popularity of these sites in order to weigh in fine the relevance of your page. Thus, netlinking is an SEO strategy based on the accumulation of a maximum number of links from external sites in order to raise its overall score and climb in Google’s search results.

How to quantify Netlinking?

A few years ago, Google proposed what was called the Page Rank Tool Bar.A small discrete indicator that rated from 0 to 10 the value of each site, allowing everyone to situate themselves and thus measure the value of the links they could return. Unfortunately, this quickly gave some greedy people the idea to sell their links at a high price as soon as their score allowed it. Annoyed by this practice which distorted its indexing method, Google removed this tool in 2013. However, if the search engine no longer provides access to this precious data, many external players seems to offer indicators capable of evaluating the quality of your campaigns! Here is a brief overview…

Majestic SEO

To date, it is by far one of the most efficient tools on the market. Trust Flow is an ultra-complete confidence indicator that offers a score ranging from 0 to 100 and is based on the world’s largest database (after Google, of course). It is the reference tool in SEO agencies, but like everything else, quality comes at a price. That’s why we will talk about two other tools.

SEMrush

With its Backlinks Analytics, the Boston-based SEO platform promotes what it calls the Authority Score. Although backlink analysis is clearly not SEMrush’s specialty, its tool remains relatively complete and takes into account in its calculations more than a dozen data items. A precision therefore appreciable, but still far from perfect.

Moz

If it was initially an SEO consulting firm, Moz quickly began developing automation and optimization softwares. MozRank is one of them and while it claims to be able to replace Google’s indicator, it is not at all. The calculation method is consistent, it gives an overall view, but remains very, very far from PageRank.

There are of course other tools, such as Alexa Rank or Ahrefs. But as you will have understood, all of them are not on the same level. That’s why you will have to adapt your requirements to your budget. Not everyone can afford a monthly subscription, sometimes very expensive, but small budgets also have the right to get an idea of the quality of their campaign. Right ?