Measure of Backlinks (MOB) Feature

Micro Niche Finder offers a Measure of Backlinks (MOB henceforth) feature that is extremely useful for internet marketers trying to determine a niche or market’s viability.

The MOB feature gives the estimated number of backlinks required to land on the first page of Google search results. Google LOVES backlinks, but they have become more discerning about the backlinks they deem acceptable or worthy in recent algorithms. To understand how backlinks currently work in Google, it’s important to understand what happened in the past so that you DON’T try a method that has been proven not to work. If you have been in the internet marketing business for a while, you probably already know a lot of what I am about to say; but for people new to internet marketing, this information should help not only explain backlinks but also put backlinks into context.

In the past, a person could join a “Link Farm” and accept and give out their links to just about anyone else in that Link Farm community (and this membership cost money, of course). A person who had a website about organic dog food could have links pointing to a travel website in Fiji, and the person that owned the Fiji travel website would have a link pointing back to the organic dog food website. These two topics are completely unrelated, but Link Farms encouraged “reciprocal linking” – the practice of two parties linking to each others websites, regardless of content. The result was reciprocal linking on such a massive scale that basically Google had to change how it calculated backlinks.

From Google’s perspective, backlinks should give clues about the content and pertinence of a related website; for example, an organic dog food website could have a backlink coming from a website about organic cat food. This demonstrates that there is an underlying related content – organic pet food. This link therefore adds value and displays that the website is important to queries related to this niche. But when websites have links pointing to them from a billion unrelated websites, the backlinks don’t add value to any website and give no clue to the content and pertinence of any website. Google despises websites that have backlinks coming at them from link farms. If you want your website to rank highly, stay away from reciprocal links farms. Google wants a website to have quality backlinks, not a large quantity of backlinks (although a quantity of quality backlinks is the ideal to strive for).

Quality Backlinks…so important! If an authority website has a link pointing to your website that makes for an excellent and high quality backlink. Examples of authority websites include ezinearticles.com, amazon.com, nextag.com, squidoo.com, wikipedia and various other encyclopedic and shopping websites, etc. There’s many more authority websites than the ones listed above so don’t feel confined. Authority sites tend to be big, old sites because Google loves old sites (they feel like these websites are in it for the long haul) and they love big sites because of all the worthy backlinks they provide. If you can get a link from these websites pointing straight to your website, you will climb up the rankings.

Here is an example of how to get a quality backlink that Google will love: if your niche is “Color Changing Shower Heads”, write a good article about showers or shower technology (anything to that effect, try to keep it related to your keywords) on ezinearticles.com. Make sure your keyword(s) (Color Changing Shower Heads) is the title of your article. Once Ezine publishes it, you will have a high-ranked authority website pointing links right at you! These are excellent backlinks, and as an added bonus if you include the link to your website in the author bio box, you will see increased traffic to your website.

Now that you understand the concepts behind backlinks, let’s discuss the actual MOB feature.

To see your MOB feature, you must first click on your “Exact Phrase Count”. If you don’t click on the Exact Phrase Count first, your MOB column will appear blank. Once you click on the Exact Phrase Count, you will see “Get MOB” appear in the MOB column – but before clicking on MOB, click on SOC. The SOC and MOB features sort of cross check each other so it’s good to look at both.

Measure of Backlinks (MOB) - Order in which to check the features

Once you have found a niche that has suitable Exact Phrase Counts and SOC (for this example, the phrase I’m investigating is ‘Basco Shower Doors’), click on your “Get MOB”. A number will appear in the category.

MOB

This number is NOT the number of backlinks there are for this term. However, it is the median number. Click on the number and a small screen will appear:
 

MOB Analysis

You will see some of the links are highlighted – these are the figures we are using to find the median. Obviously, if the MOB feature shows a low number for the median, the less backlinks you will need to get on the first page of Google. If your median amount of links is high (ex: 200) you are going to have to put in a considerable amount of work to get enough backlinks to get on the front page. It’s not impossible to do but it can be difficult.

These are the top ten websites (and their corresponding backlinks) on Google for your keyword. You can explore these links listed under the “Link” column by clicking on them. A new window will open and you will automatically be directed to the website you clicked.

If you click on the number listed under the “Backlinks column” a new window will open and you will see the backlinks that corresponding website has. This is an excellent way to scope the competition and find new avenues for you to try and get backlinks from.

You can also click on the “Click Here to see the Google Results” text on the bottom of your screen – a new window will automatically open and you will literally see the exact search results page in Google. Once again, it’s just another way to see how your competitors are getting ranked so highly. Analyze what your competition is doing, and then do it better than them. Use backlinks and the MOB feature to conquer the competition and get those high rankings on Google!