This week we have been playing with Adgooroo’s Link Insight tool which helps you go into great detail about the links to and from your website as well as up to 9 other competitors.

What I like about Link Insight is the really simple graphs for link quantity but more importantly, the quality. You also get to see your site and how it fares against your competitors, shown here in different colours. Link quality is judged on links from ‘Trust‘ websites compared to ‘Spam‘ websites. The ideal situation is a bell curve that leans towards ‘High quality’ links. More on this later on.

In the walk-through demo of Link Insight, we were given the analogy of a bow tie for the two types of  links available for your site, where your site is the knot in the bow tie.

On one loop of the bow tie are “Origin Sites“. These are defined as sites that are a bit niche and obscure but have been made through a ‘Labour of Love‘. These are sites that hold a lot of link juice and are usually low trafficked. Links from these sites are defined as a ‘Trust‘ link.On other loop of the bow tie, you have “Termination Sites“. These are those that are commercial or retail with many links in, but very few links out to any sites. Links from these sites are sometimes defined as ‘Spam‘  links.