Do you know who’s linking to your site? What about that product or feature you just launched, is anyone talking about it?
I just got back from Webmaster World in Las Vegas, where there was a lot of talk about backlink. I had not used them before and it was mentioned that there were some limits to the Google back link tool, and the MSN tool was difficult to find and use. So this weekend I hacked together my own little back link tool using the Live Search API. Then I spent some time thinking about how this information could be used by a modern marketing professional - here's what I came up with:
Tracking Product and Feature Launches with Back Links
By tracking who and how many sites are linking back to you, you might be able to answer some questions about your business. Here's a few examples:
Who’s talking about my product vs. my competitors? A couple weeks ago Microsoft launched their Live Search Box product. It is a simple AJAX widget that webmasters can put on their site to enable site search or some other custom search. I want to know, who’s talking about this product and how does that compare to the competition? The chart below summarizes the results:
|
Language
|
Live Search
|
Google Coop
|
Yahoo! Builder
|
|
English
|
935
|
77%
|
22,658
|
73%
|
2,009
|
69%
|
|
Chinese
|
21
|
2%
|
117
|
0%
|
28
|
1%
|
|
Japanese
|
12
|
1%
|
662
|
2%
|
33
|
1%
|
|
German
|
11
|
1%
|
115
|
0%
|
57
|
2%
|
|
Spanish
|
8
|
1%
|
660
|
2%
|
33
|
1%
|
|
French
|
6
|
0%
|
1,769
|
6%
|
41
|
1%
|
|
Turkish
|
3
|
0%
|
5
|
0%
|
1
|
0%
|
|
Total
|
1,220
|
100%
|
30,906
|
100%
|
2,931
|
100%
|
Looking at the data, it appears that Google’s product is getting more attention than Yahoo! and Live Search's products combined. Microsoft could use this to possibly infer that Google may have 20x more people using their service versus 2x for Yahoo. Also, if you look at the percentage of use that occurs in English vs. everything else, you can see that Microsoft has the smallest non-US reach.
Another use for this information could be when Microsoft is ready to launch their product in Germany. They could use all the sites listed above on the “German” row as beta testers to get the word out, leveraging the work of their competitors.
Which Product is going to be most successful? T-Mobile has 3 different Windows Mobile smart phones: The SDA, MDA and Dash. I’ve pulled a list of referrers for each of those smart phones plus a non-smart phone.
The first thing that this data suggests to me is that people don’t talk about the Motorola V188. If you look at the phone, there really isn’t anything special about it. I bet that no one ever goes into a T-Mobile store and asks for a V188, it is probably just the default phone that people get for free with their plan. However, I think the other 3 smart phones are very different. Based on the data above, it looks like demand for the MDA is going to be significantly higher than the SDA. Is there anyone at T-Mobile who would be willing to confirm? (Interestingly enough there are 4x as many MDAs than SDAs for sale on eBay right now)
Build those relationships – It is a lot easier to get people who’ve already talked about your site to talk about it some more. So, invest some time and effort into those sites referring to you. Invite them into your private betas, send them some swag, or setup conference calls to walk them through your products.
Other Uses for Back Links
The last legitimate use I could thing of for back links is if you’ve recently changed your domain name. You could us it to find a list of sites pointing to your old URL and contact them to request they update their links to your new URL.
Okay, so what am I missing? Is any of this stuff useful or not? What would be useful. Let me know.