Deep Link Ratio For Effective SEO Of Your Site

If you haven’t read the post “Deep Linking To Boost Search Engine Rankings”, then it is recommended to go back to our homepage and read that post fully. Deep linking ratio can simply be explained as the percentage (%) of incoming links that point to all pages of your site/blog except your homepage. So what’s the easiest way to find the deep link ratio of your site ? The easiest way to do it is by using the Yahoo BackLink Tool.

Here’s how to find the Deep Link Ratio of a site. In this example we will calculate the Deep Link Ratio of a popular tattoo site called tattoojohnny.com.

1)      First find the total number of back links to this site (links pointing at the home page and links pointing at internal pages). So just goto yahoo.com and in the web search box type the following

linkdomain: tattoojohnny.com

It showed 52,119 results for me. Now this is the total number of links (both internal links and links from other sites) to all pages of this website.

2)      Now we must find the number of links from internal pages, in other words we should find out the number of links within this domain that point to other pages that are also within this domain (internal links). So again we go back to yahoo.com and in the web search box type the following

site:tattoojohnny.com

It showed 459 results for me. Now this is the number of internal links. It means there are 459 links within tattoojohnny.com that link to different pages of tattoojonnhy.com.

3)      Now we subtract these two figures.

52,119 – 459  = 51,660

So 51,660 is the total number of external links or links pointing at this site from other sites (This number includes the links that point at the homepage as well as internal pages of this site).

4)      Now we should find the number of links pointing at the home page of tattoojohnny.com. And in this step we should find the number of links pointing at both “www.” version and the non “www.” version.

So again in the yahoo.com web search box just type

link:http://www.tattoojohnny.com/

This gave me 43,766 results. Which means there are 43,766 links pointing at 

Now we should find the number of links pointing at the non “www.” version of tattoojohnny.com. So in the yahoo web search box just type

link:http://tattoojohnny.com/

This gave me 947 results. Which means there are 947 links pointing 

5)      Now to the final calculation. We got 51,660 as the number of links from other sites (Number Of External Links) to tattoojohnny.com. So we subtract this number from the number of links that point at the home page (both at the www. version and the non www. version) of tattoojohnny.com to get the number of Deep Links to this site.

find out how many external links point at the internal pages of this site.

51,660  – 43,766 – 947 = 6947

Now 6947 is the number external links or the number of deep links to tattoojohnny.com.

So finally its time to calculate the deep link ratio of tattoojohnny.com

       Deep Link Ratio = (6947 / 51,660) * 100 = 13.4 %

So finally we have found the deep link ratio of tattoojohnny.com as 13.4%.

A deep link ratio of 30% - 60% can be called a good deep link ratio. But there doesn’t appear to be a downside of a too high deep link ratio. But then again the deep link ratio depends on the website. Some sites with great content in internal pages can have a very high deep link ratio.

Ex –   http://www.digitalpoint.com/ has a deep link ratio of 94%. This is mainly due  to the forum at digitalpoint.com. The digital point forum has lots of great content because of this so many blogs and sites have linked to their forum (and all these links to the forum count as deep links to sky rocket the deep link ratio).

Deep link ratio is one important factor that affects the rank of a site in the search engines. The key to increasing your deep link ratio is to create good content that people will link to. But even without a very high deep link ratio a site can still rank high, since there are several other factors that affect a sites rank such as keywords, age of the site, the quality of the back links (as SEO experts always say the quality of back links is more important than quantity) and more.