DLR & Jazar

Let's stop talking about content management, and back to search engine optimisation or how to get free advertising space.

PageRank here, google PR there - everybody is concerned about it - not really search engine optimisers anymore, but "marketing" people who have decided to find out recently what the heck is all google about - you can then easily associate the IPO (the coup, the media recognition), search engines (new platform visited by millions of people), search engine optimisation (way to get free advertising space ), and eventually PageRank which seems to be the measure of how much free traffic you can get from search engines.

If you dig a bit more, you will understand that PageRank is just a parameter used in the google search algorithm to weight on links, and influence the popularity of your pages according the nature of the links linking to it. This is not a metric.

Search engine optimisers don't really use metrics yet since just a few of them can combine both technical skills to understand what search engines algorithms are, and marketing skills to apply marketing methodology to it.

Some of them have started to do so though, and one of the metric they have come up with is : Deep Link Ratio (for Yahoo)

Let's define it and make the calculation for Jazar.net (let's then do the calculation for jazar.co.uk once we have officially launched the site, and properly optimised the site (January 2005 - be ready). We query Yahoo for this.

1) We first calculate number of external inbound links linking to the site except the home page :
linkdomain:www.jazar.net -link:http://jazar.net.co.uk -link:http://www.jazar.net -site:www.jazar.net => 2 external links
2) We then calculate the total number of external inbound links :
linkdomain:jazar.net -site:www.jazar.net => 4

=> this gives us a 50% DLR. Hey quite god isn't it :-). This doesn't mean anything really given the small numbers. But do this with sites like microsoft, epinions, etc ... and this will become more meaningfull.