In a previous post I discussed Link Worth and prior to that a technique called Block Segmentation Analysis, in which I briefly discussed some research done by Microsoft into Visual Page Segmentation where rather then using the DOM they use actual images rendered from a browser to determine what are blocks. While this is overkill for most I was intrigued enough to create our own version with Opera, Imagemagick and some Python but the purpose for my little experiment was not to look for blocks (I had already identified them through the DOM) but the location of individual links on a page.
I have a whole other post dedicated to the subject of how, but quickly each page was grabbed, all block elements (div,span etc) were turned one colour and stripped of all other info to make life easier the block we wish to identify was turned red. Then the page had a grid overlayed (24x24) and each square was checked for colour of it's content.
With a working mechanism we then went and pulled a 100 SEO sites (Sites which advertised services rather then just blogs though many did have a blog as well) backlinks (we removed links that were internal and capped it at 200 per site) and mapped to our grid. The result (17680 backlinks later) is the ability to see popular locations for inbound links to SEO websites, which may or may not interest you.
The following is a pseudo heat map, blue is the limited number of links, orange a reasonable amount red is a lot.
As you can see, the first thing is there is a lot of blue, the red areas are primarily in side bars, footer and inching into what would be comment area on blogs. The orange is a bit more evenly spread out, of interest though is the lack of serious link cluster in page content themselves. The left hand side is interesting there has been a trend away from left hand side bars and so comments in a blog may be counted in that left hand side.
Useless trivia, out of the 100 SEO sites we tested:
- 86 had 1 or more inbound link coming from footer area
- 96 had 1 or more inbound link coming from the right hand side sidebar
- 45 had 1 or more inbound link coming from left hand side
- 15 had no inbound links in content area on any sites
- 36 sites had 1 or more inbound links with only image as an anchor
- 98% of inbound links found in footer to our SEO sites site wide
- 99% of right side bar links found to our SEO sites are site wide
- 40% of left had side links found to our SEO sites are site wide
Wow. not sure if i should be impressed, or ask ‘where do you get the time to do stuff like this?’
careful tim, if you continue doing all this testing you’ll end up being called one of the top SEO’s on the net, and soon us normal will have to pay for valuable info
i’m a left-sidebar man myself. dunno where all this right sidebar madness came from.
The time comes from playing around with things like this, rather then sorting out the membership site so people can pay for even more interesting stuff
Actually in this case the tool was developed for a client to see where links to their site were coming from and to identify best advertising locations.
Really all I did was put in a list of 100 URLs in and make a pretty Picasso-esque picture from the results this has been one of the least worked on posts in ages
Great work Tim.
This seems really valuable.
I wonder how those blue areas correlate with where people look? If, when we’re trying to read content, we sub-consciously filter out distractions such as links etc then perhaps a link placed in one of the blue areas is more likely to get attention than those in the red areas that we’re used to filtering out?
Interesting stuff.
Cheers,
Gregor
hmmm wouldn’t it
Which is why the 24×24 grid was used to allow overlaying of known click heat maps we have, while I’m not planning on releasing the whole study (clients have to get something) basically very few of the SEO sites we tested had inbound links in areas that drew the most clicks.
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