How to Determine the Strength and Quality of a Website: LinkVoodoo
Trent Blizzard | 4 March 2009 | 5 Reviews »
LinkVo0doo
LinkVoodoo has a Quality Score Calculator that detemines the strength and quality of a website. It was born as a tool to help search engine marketers determine how good a website and therefore make a decision on whether to obtain a link.
While it is certainly handy for determining whether a site is worth obtaining a link from, it is also a pretty good overall indicator of any website’s online presence. I like to run a bunch of competitive websites through it to get an analysis of which competitors are the strongest or weakest, comparatively. I find that it correlates very strongly with a website’s overall online presence. So, if you have to look at just one indicator of a websites online strength, LinkVoodoo might just be the tools.
LinkVoodoo Search Engine Tool
LinkVoodoo uses a weighted algorithm to calculate its score, making sure that important factors (like backlinks) are counted 10X more than minor factors (like Alexa Ranking). Here are their factors, in order of importance:
Inbound Links: Inbound links is the total volume of site wide links that point to your site.
External Links: External links checks to see how many outbound links you have on your page. It is never good to exceed 100 dofollow links on any one page. The less the better with the LinkVoodoo scoring engine.
Domain Age: Domain age is important as spammers tend to open and close sites very rapidly. As a result, Google & Yahoo trust sites that are registered longer because it shows your site is serious about sticking around for the long haul. Also, having your domain registered for more than one year at a time can help build trust.
Backlink Profile: Your backlink profile takes into consideration the volume of links that point to the index of your site, and compares it to the total volume of links across your entire domain. If the majority of your links point to the index of your site, it makes your backlink profile appear to be artificially inflated, as organic links tend to link directly to content as opposed to the index.
Directories: Directories do not hold the value they once did, however there are a couple of human edited directories that are still considered to hold value. These directories both increase your ‘Trust Rank’ as well as help stop constant fluctuation and bring stability to your rankings
Google Page Rank: While pagerank means a lot less than it once did, it is still a small indicator of quality. The majority of sites that are PR5+ still tend to be very strong in this day and age
Title Search: Title search takes the first four words in your Title tag and checks to see if you rank in the top 5 places for these words combined.
Social Bookmarking: If you have quality content, and a decent user base, your content should most likely appear amongst the larger Social Bookmarking sites.
Alexa Ranking: Alexa rating is your current ranking amongst other sites on the internet according to Alexa.com.
I recommend you combine this tool with SEMRUSH — use SEMRUSH to analyze how a competitor is ranking in Google and use LinkVoodoo to see factors that impact and influence rankings.
Read more about LinkVoodoo at LinkBuildr
March 13th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Great info. Since SEO can be such a mystery, it’s great to see a list of the important SEO factors in order of importance (even if it is just LinkVoodoo’s opinion of importance).
I tested Link Voodoo, and it is very user-friendly….it took me about three minutes to set up an account and run a report on my site. Not only does it give you a score for your entire website, but it breaks down each factor and offers tips for improving the factors that are lagging behind. This will be a “go to” to improve my site and analyze the website’s performance in comparison to competitors.
March 18th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
I just tried this on my site. This is a very handy tool which offers a good overview of the various factors determining trust on the Internet. Honestly I rank quite low but my site is still new, so I am optimistic that my score will increase over time. Thank you
April 6th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
This is a fantastic tool. However, the worrying thing for me is that it reported my website as being listed in the Yahoo directory which it is not. So questions over it’s accuracy. But i’m sure that once these bugs are ironed out, it could be a valuable resource for many webmasters!
May 3rd, 2009 at 11:33 am
The Quality Score Tool is just fantastic as written in this article. I have checked the score of my web site as well as some competitor and satisfied with the results. It is a very helpful tool for competition analysis as gives all the required information about competitors.
When I move to back link analyzer tool any how it got failed. I was supposed to download launch.php but it gives a file named “false”, not able to run this file with Java.
May 6th, 2009 at 5:48 am
Oh no. I didn’t do very well at all. I am just learning about this SEO business as I try to improve my website rankings in the search engines. This is the best tool I have come across so far that helps with this so thanks very much!
Lisa