 | Advanced Link Manager User Guide |
Almost all major search engines that exist today, rank a web page based on the number and the quality of links that point to that web page. The quality of the links directly affects the position of our website for relevant keyword searches. It is thus very important to keep track of the quality links we already have while trying to get more quality links in the meantime.
The Unverified Referrers report gives us a comprehensive view of our referrers as they are reported by the search engines.
It is very important to understand that the referrers listed in this report may not have a link to our website. The referrers displayed here are reported by the search engines to have a link to our website. The search engines crawled the page at some point in time and found a link to our website, but that link may have since been removed or more links may have been added meanwhile. That is the reason why they are called Unverified Referrers. In the next tutorial, we will talk about the Referrers report, which will provide us with accurate information about our existing links.
The Unverified Referrers report allows you to sort the referrers which will make identifying them an easy task:
Sort referrers by importance.
Using the "Rank" column we can sort the referrers by their rank. We can now easily see the most important referrers. Referrers with high rankings will cast a more powerful "vote" to our pages increasing their relevance in search engine results.
Click on the "Rank" column header to sort referrers by their Rank.
Sort referrers by IP.
Click on the "IP Address" table column header to sort referrers by their IP address. You now can easily see the referrer domains with the same IP address. This is a valuable indicator of the quality of your referrers. If one of your pages is linked from multiple websites or webpages with the same IP address, it will not rank as well as if it were linked from multiple IP addresses.
Sometimes the number of web pages reported by the search engines as linking to your website can be overwhelming. Filtering these web pages using a certain criteria will help in most cases. Here are some of the filters that can help you with this task:
Filter referrers by rank.
Using the "Rank filter" we can filter out the referrers that have a lower rank. We can thus limit ourselves to monitoring only the important referrers.
If you are not interested in monitoring referrers that have a low rank, you can safely delete them. Just filter them by rank below 3 (for example) and then right click on the report and choose [Remove] -> [Selected].
Filter invalid referrers.
The referrer information in the search engines can sometimes be outdated. As a result, we will have a lot of referrers that are invalid (the referrer web page no longer exists). The "NotFound" filter from the Display drop down will help us with this task. Once we select this filter, we are presented with the list of invalid referrers. If you see a website that is supposed to be linking to yours in this list, you may want to get in touch with the webmaster and tell him about that. Otherwise we can safely delete these referrers, to unclutter the list.
Filter referrers by domain.
Let's say you want to see only the links linking to you from a certain referrer domain.
It's pretty easy, just:
1) select your website's domain in the left panel,
2) choose the "Domains" value in the "Filter by:" list box,
3) type in the domain of your choice in the "Filter by:" text box.
Next, check out the Referrers Tutorial to learn how you can manage the real referrers of your website.