Backlinks and PageRank.

My program Keyword SEO Pro will find the top 10 pages on Google of the domain of your choice and then analyse these top 10 webpages for the PageRank of the page itself and the PageRank of the HomePage. I call the HomePage PageRank G-Factor-1, as I believe it is the top factor involved in keyword positioning on search engine results pages.

 I am looking to find keywords for which I may successfully compete for my website 2womenshealth.com. In this analysis, I have looked at keywords related to the menopause and the menopause itself. And although the majority of these webpages have relatively high HomePage PageRanks. There is one within range of my website my website has a HomePage PageRank of 4 and we can see that in position four there is a webpage with a HomePage PageRank of 3, and I want to use this as an example for detailed analysis of backlinks. This is the web page, 'menopausematters' and we'll be looking at the backlinks specifically to this page.

You can find the links in each search engine database associated with a webpage by typing into the search box Link: and then the page URL. In this case for the webpage that we are analysing menopausematters.current UK/symptoms.php for Google and the web on Google.co.uk there is only one link in the Google database.

I have found SEO Spyglass to be an excellent program for backlink analysis. To begin one clicks on 'new' we next enter our page yURL and click on 'next'. We are offered an extensive list of search engines, and I'm going to choose all the USA and UK search engines available and click on 'next'. In this case 304 backlinks have been found in just over a minute and a half. We then click on 'finish'. The program offers an extensive list of factors, and if we have any further suggestions then they will consider them. The analysis presents us with an enormous amounts of data, and I would like to break it down into meaningful conclusions.

 I am  going to use this data set to arrive at the following conclusions:

1. firstly that in the link value depends on the PageRank of the linking page.
2. It depends on the number of links on that page
3. anchor text is probably important but not essential.
4. On-site links are as valuable as external links,
5. and Google is not showing us specifically which links they consider to have value.

To my mind, the most important data provided by SEO Spyglass is

1. the PageRank of the linking page.
2. The total number of links on that page,

and SEO Spyglass has a simple algorithm for calculating a link value. We are not told exactly how that algorithm works, or indeed if there was any validation to prove its value.

We can click on the header of any column to sort the data, by that column. I'll choose page PageRank. We can then say you are backlinks sorted according to PageRank. It is apparent that the web page being analysed they have achieved backlinks from some very authoritative websites, some of which have PageRanks of 7.

It would seem that iSEOSpyglass is using an algorithm, which approximates to the PageRank of the linking page divided by the total number of links on that page. Here we have two examples of webpages with PageRanks of 3 total links of 90 and 95 in approximately the same link value. This web page has a PageRank of 1, but only 30 links, and again the link value is 0.028.

According to SEO Spyglass it is apparent that link value depends on PageRank and the number of links on the page. One would strive for links from high PageRanked webpages, but its value may be diminished if there are a large number of links. A link from a page with a low PageRank, but with very few links on it may have a lot of value.

Anchor text is the text used to make a link. Menopausematters has many backlinks with 'menopause' in the anchor text. There is some debate over the importance of the domain name. To my mind 'menopausematters' shows us that by having 'menopause' in their domain name the word 'menopause' will tend to come up in anchor text of many linking pages.

When analysing backlinks to other webpages on other sites, I have found high-ranking pages with backlinks devoid of the keyword in the anchor text. I therefore suspect that anchor text is an important factor, but not critical and as far as I can see SEO Spyglass does not include anchor text in the algorithm to define the value of links.

Here, I have highlighted two webpages with backlinks to 'menopausematters'. One is an external link and the other is internal. It comes from the website itself. Both these pages have PageRanks of 3 and both have total links of approximately 90. According to SEO Spyglass, their link value is virtually identical. If SEO Spyglass is correct, then on-site links can be as valuable as off-site links.

At the beginning of this video, I showed that Google tells us that it only has one backlink to the index page and this fact proves to be present on SEO Spyglass it is an internal page with a PageRank of 0, and therefore a link value of 0. This would suggest that Google cannot be using the links it shows us in its ranking algorithm, and I suspect that it must be using some other dataset to define the importance of a webpage.