Reporting Link Popularity

Why is there so much variance?

[justdave]

I'm having problems explaining to a client why link popularity varies so much. We provide monthly reports and it appears to bounce up and down, which the client doesn't understand. We are acquiring links for them constantly using various methods, so they feel the link popularity should be constantly increasing. However I try to explain it, they still come back with "I don't understand." Any ideas how to explain it clearly to someone who doesn't understand Internet and search engines? Thanks.

[martinibuster]

Hmm... I don't understand. :o

What do you mean that their link popularity bounces from month to month? Their backlink counts are in flux from month to month?

[justdave]

Yeah. see...I can't even explain the problem correctly. I think I need to take a speech class again...

[sugarrae]

Some of the reasons I've seen is natural flux, link rot, large networks linking to you from thousands of pages getting killed off, moving links (aka you did a story that was picked up by a lot of sites and then fell off their "latest news" page or what have you)... there are a ton of reasons for movement in the link numbers. I'd tell them to focus more on their ranks... when they stop dropping, then there's a problem.

[digitalghost]

First, how are you finding the link pop numbers? Which engines? Using APIs? Commercial tool(s)?

[justdave]

I'm not using any APIs. Just doing a simple manual search on Google, MSN, and Yahoo to get basic numbers.

Thanks for the advice. These are things I have said before, although I am going through another member of the team who is then explaning it to the client. I will be directly involved in the next discussion, so maybe I will be able to explain it better than the other (non-SEO) team member.

[econman]

If you are using data from the 3 SE's, you are likely having the same links counted more than once; even if you are cleaning that up, you can get some "noise" because the link data reported by the SE's isn't always accurate; generally they don't report all of the links that exist (this is extremely true for G, not as true for the others), but the degree of underreporting can vary from time to time.