Inbound Link Quality Extension
Bob Mutch at SEO Company created an inbound link quality extension for Firefox. You can download the extension from his home page, or access the tool online (again on his home page, but the web based tool has been slow). The tool checks to see if a site is listed in the Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ. In addition it searches Yahoo! for the number of .edu and .gov links pointing at a website.
The extension looks like this
While in some cases there are some .edu and .gov sites that offer up spammy links, the theory behind the tool is that most .edu or .gov links are going to be harder to get / more pure / of higher quality than the average link from most commercial sites. In that sense, the raw number of .edu and .gov links can be seen as a proxy for an indication of if a site has any quality natural editorial inbound links and an estimate of the depth of quality citations a site received.
Comments
Wow that's a pretty cool little invention there! Have you had any experience with it yet? Any recommendation on it's abilities or faults?
Worked great for the first few tries but then it quit returning data for most of the sources. No listed links for IQL, Yahoo, or Dmoz for the same sites that previously showed data here.
Excellent tool! Works and is still working great!
I haven't been using FireFox regularly and maybe I should. Instead, I looked at the Inbound link Quality Checker online tool to test some ideas about sites I know about and see if the sites' ranking might correspond with thw quality of it's Inbound Links.
Google Query for "house plans"
houseplans.com [ILQ 393 | Y! 33 | DMOZ 0 | edu 8 | gov 0]
dreamhomesource.com [ILQ 1,428 | Y! 33 | DMOZ 0 | edu 31 | gov 0]
eplans.com [ILQ 1,135 | Y! 33 | DMOZ 0 | edu 23 | gov 1]
architectualdesignes.com [ILQ 661 | Y! 76 | DMOZ 0 | edu 13 | gov 0]
Does not look like the inbound link quality has anything, or much, to do with how the top 4 sites are ranked in Google.
Tools like the Inbound Link Checker might be helpful - need to test it a bit more to see if I'd use it as part of my SEO work.
The tool is just like PageRank. It is no absolute measurement, just a hint at a range. Also some industries may not be well represented in the .edu space.
As far as I am aware of there are no accredited college courses teaching SEO, while there are tons of them about information retrieval. Also search engines and internet information retrieval tools are rapidly changing what it means to be a librarian. It shouldn't be surprising then that information retrieval tools are heavily represented by librarians and by teachers in that market, whereas there is exceptionally limited coverage of search marketing or SEO.
Yea I am familiar with the previous version of this tool, it was also supposed to show the site age and that feature never worked, also the values for .edu/.gov etc links were sorta random at times. Hope it's fixed in the new version. Downloaded it, gonna see how it works.
Hi Aaron,
I just tried to add your RSS to My Yahoo and it would not work. Thought you should know.
Thanks for the great info on your blog.
It would be nice if this tool also showed those EDU links and where they are coming from. More tada please!
Great tool Bob! I'd like to suggest a follow-up post with tips on how to get the most use out of the Link Quality Tool.
"It would be nice if this tool also showed those EDU links and where they are coming from. More tada please!"
Ditto Bob. Would be cool to click the extension and then " see links" to verify the number there is no bull and also so you know who to go and nag for a link.
It would also be nice to have a disable feature like with the "seolinks" plugin.
I'm guessing it's running quite a few queries on every pageview, which can be problematic for those of us in the "tinfoil hat" crowd.
Great extension...jus' don't want it running ALL the time.
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