We all know that links are good for search engine optimization and good links are even better, but what does a "good" link profile really look alike? It’s easy for even an average website to have hundreds of back-links, and sorting finished them to get a sense of the overall quality is often more art than science. It is also easy to get involved in the outliers. Will 1 great link or 1 spammy link tip the balance? Probably not, simply it’s easy to get distracted by those exceptions when you're filtering through hundreds or thousands of links.

We have tried to purify .the idea of link visibility quality into metrics like Domain Authority and Page Authority. These are incredibly useful concepts, but now we are on the other extreme – just one number to represent something very complex. The problem is, we really do not have much in between, a way to understand the quality of our link profile at a peek.

Link Profiling: The Experiment

This blog post really began when I wondered whether it would be possible to take our active Moz metrics and chart what a link visibility looks like. I went through a number of variations until I finally landed on a process using Open Site Explorer.The basic process looks something like this:

1. Enter a site into Open Site Explorer (OSE)

2. Select "Show [Followed + 301]"

3. Select "from [External Pages Only]"

4. Select "to [All Pages on the Root Domain]"

5. Export results to CSV/Excel

6. Calculate the max Page Authority (PA) for each domain

7. Sort max PA into buckets: 1-10, 11-20, etc.

8. Graph the buckets

The result is a distribution of complete of your linking domains by the highest-authority pages in those domains. This sounds many more complicated than it really is, so let’s see it in action.

Profile

1: High Quality

Let's start with what a high caliber domain might look like – I'll make it easy. Since Open Site Explorer exports a maximum of 10,000 links, I've restricted this profile to just the home-page:

Link Profile - High Quality

You may be amazed to realize that, even for a high-authority site, most of the Page Authority is still on the lower-half of the spectrum. The simple fact is that even on a strong site, most of the actual pages that link up to it are much weaker than their rear domains.

Profile 2: Medium Quality

Now, let's compare that with a solid but less authoritative internet site, my own blog. I've got solid back-links from some pretty good sources,.

Link Profile - Medium Quality

Here, you see that most of my back-linking pages are sitting in the 0-10 bucket, a clear sign of my inferiority (sniff, whiff), but the curve still levels away gradually and I have got some solid representation up the PA chain.

Profile 3: Low Quality

Finally, let’s clean on a site that came to us in Q&A with a few trouble (we’ll keep it anonymous, of course). This isn’t a web site that was heinously blackhat, just one that suffered from enough low-quality links that we suspected a problem:

Link visibility - Low Quality

Look closely, and you'll see a pronounced 0-10 bucket followed by a rapid drop-off, with little or no superiority pages to take up the slack. It may seem like a subtle distinction at first, but look in the P.A. range of 20-70, and you'll see the difference.

You can download the spreadsheet (1.9 megabyte) and try it for yourself. Just export your personal data from Open Site Explorer (as described above) and paste it into the first worksheet ("OSE data point"). The second sheet ("Domains") will automatically strip out the subdomains, and the third sheet ("Max P.A.") is a pivot table that calculates the maximum Page Authority for each subdomain and then breaks that into the 10 buckets.

One trick: You'll need to refresh the Pivot Table (how to do this varies a little bit with your version of Excel). The other pages and the final graph should refresh themselves automatically. I have not tested this on a Mac, so feel free to comment with helpful corrections.

This technique is a work in progress, and more than a way to search your link profile than a hard analytical tactic at this point. If you try this out and find something worrying, please let us know in the comments.

Update - DA Profiles

A few people asked in the comments about what the Domain Authority (DA) profiles looked like. Since the SEOmoz team re-normalized some of the DA data point last week, these curves are very similar in shape