Backlinks

Backlinks, or incoming links or "links to" are links to a URL found on other URLs.  They may be internal links, such as 21cif.com/ found on 21cif.com/tutorials/ or external, as in the case of 21cif.com found on coolhub.imsa.edu.


External backlinks may be valuable in researching the credibility of a site.  Backlinks help to answer questions like, Who links to 21cif.com? Why? Do they have any authority?


For years, a good way to find backlinks to a page was to use the link: operator  (e.g., the query:  lilnk:21cif.com). Search engines have made changes to link: so that fewer results are obtained. 
Yahoo.com did away with link: altogether.  Google is probably still the best choice, but they return only a fraction of what they once did.


This is where specialized search engines and databases comes in handy. 


Open Site Explorer (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/) provides more complete backlink results than Google. It's a free service and easy to use. Results can be filtered to eliminate all the internal links.


Using a backlink checker is a step in the investigative search process. But just knowing how many backlinks there are isn't enough. Evaluating the referential credibility of a link target requires looking at the (representative) sites to see if they have authority and why they are a backlink.  Who would you expect to backlink to 21cif.com if it is a reputable site?


Who do you find?

Vampire for President?

During the 2008 presidential election, Susie Flynn, a 10 year old, made a bid for the highest office in the land. Except she wasn't 10. And she wasn't a girl.

Now a vampire is making a bid for a 2012 campaign, supposedly as a republican candidate. He is known as John Sharkey, The Impaler. His campaign site is: http://www.theimpalerformngovernor.us/ You might want to take a look.  He is also interested in being governor of Minnesota.

The challenge: Who is John Sharkey? What evidence is there that the Republican party is actually taking him seriously? Is this campaign a front for some other cause (as was the case with Susie Flynn)? If so, what?

Sample Web 2.0 posts about him and his campaign. Look for clues about the nature of the campaign. Who is taking him seriously? 

TOPSY, a Search Engine for Evaluating Credibility

I came across a new search engine while preparing for a workshop at ICE. Topsy.com retrieves twitter posts and does so in a way that may help to inform the credibility of information being evaluated.

For example, if I wanted to see who is tweeting about 21st Century Information Fluency, I would enter that string in topsy. The results (click here) show me the way in which the search terms were referenced and the number of related tweets. The largest category indicates there are 24 tweets. By clicking that I can see who tweeted about 21cif and what they said, whether good or bad or otherwise. It's who siad what that may information my evaluation of 21cif.  In this case, a typical tweet is:

"a great collection of tutorials, podcasts, wizards etc."

If I didn't know anything about 21cif, this at least would help me see some people's opinions of it. Who those people are is possibly more important. It turns out that the person quoted above describes herself as a knowledge librarian. Sampling the others who tweeted reveals a statewide tech integration mentor, a consultant, an eLearning director and online instructor.

It's a search that takes less than 5 minutes and tells me that people who work in relevant information fields value 21cif enough to write about it and recommend it to others they know.

I suspect if an author or organization was very popular, it would be harder to sift through the results. Nonetheless, it's a novel approach to evaluation. The strength of practioners' comments may help to vet information about which you may have little knowledge.

Try Topsy to find and evaluate the comments of tweeters for the following authors and organizations:

• martinlutherking.org  (check out the descriptions of tweeps who favor the site,  compared to those who oppose it)
• Lyle Zapato

Always pay attention to the person who says the positive or negative thing. Why should that person's opinion count? What picture starts to form about who is for and who is against? What does this say about the subject being evaluated?

Can you think of other searches? Share them here.

The Necessity of Evaluation: The Case of United Airlines Stock

When readers took action on the news last week that United Airlines had filed for bankruptcy, the company's stock literally took a nose dive. Within a period of minutes, the stock fell to 25% of its value. Trading was stopped to prevent further loss. All because of inaccurate information that investors failed to evaluate.

In the fast-paced world of trading, not acting right away may have dire consequences, so taking time to fact check the accuracy of the news might be costly. As it happens, not checking the facts proved costly to those who sold low.

Here's how selling low may have been avoided without taking a lot of time to evaluate. A basic investigatory strategy involves checking the credibility of the source and something significant about the content.

In this case, when the story was picked up by Bloomberg, a source many investors trust, the sell-off began. But Bloomberg was not the original source. That distinction goes to the Florida Sentinel Sun which ran the 6-year old story on the business page of its web site. Going to the source would be the first place to investigate.

Reportedly, the story did not have a time stamp, which would be a red flag. When Google's bot indexed the page early on the morning of Sept. 7, it was given a time stamp which resulted in some of the confusion. It's important to know that the date stamp that appears at the beginning of some Google snippets is triggered by when the page was crawled, not authored. In most cases, the dates agree, but since Google doesn't actually read the stories it crawls, the automatic vs. the actual date of the article were off by six years. So it pays to treat the crawl date with a grain of suspicion, although this may be an example of a rare disconnect.

Fact-checking can be as simple as googling a name, a fact or a claim. This is particularly effective in the case of evaluating the credibility of a site such as the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, which contains many fictitious facts. The Google results often come back empty or only link to the same site. In the United Bankruptcy case, copying some text and using it as a query can be revealing. The results of just googling the title of the article, "United Airlines Files for Bankruptcy" produces only 2,400 results. A quick look at several of them (BBC, PBS, CBC, etc.) reveals the date: Monday, Dec. 9, 2002.

If you need more, it's always wise to consider: "Who would really know the answer to this question?" A couple of authoritative sources come to mind: United Airlines or a bankruptcy filing database (e.g., bankruptcy.com). If neither site can confirm the news, something is amiss: exercise caution.

Even if it takes a couple of minutes, does it pay to check online stories? Ask any of the United investors.

Learn more about Web site evaluation by enrolling in our newest course: WSI, Web Site Investigator. It's only $68 and a good investment!