Site Monitoring

External Web Site Links are important

Getting quality links (Tip 16)

If you work on the basis that a web designer will stoop to any mean trick to get a high ranking position then you need to use some sort of independent adjudication. It's just not possible for humans to do an evaluation of each web page on the Internet - there are far too many and they continually change.

Fortunately designers of other sites are sometimes prepared to do this task themselves, they find a good site and then add it to the set of links on their web site. If this linking site has a good ranking (and therefore reputation) then that adds much weight to the ranking of your site too. So a link to your site from 'microsoft.com' is very good news, it is hard for you to 'fiddle' this for prestigious link sources like Microsoft®.

Unfortunately web designers don't do this manual evaluation as much these days and it is subject to the 'link farm' and 'site cluster' subterfuge described previously. It's almost impossible to get Microsoft® to add a link to a site these days. Another disadvantage is that it does not permit new sites to get a high ranking even though they may provide the ideal content for a user.

Sophisticated Search Engine monitoring

Site Vigil can't easily find incoming links to a web site. However, Google along with many other search engines are able to give a list of links to a web site. You can do this on Google by putting in 'link:' and then the domain name into the Google search box.