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?

Phishing and Evaluation

We all get them.

Marketing emails intent on getting your personal information: phishing. One showed up in my inbox today that actually interested me. I might have even signed up, except for a few "phishy" details that made me suspicious.

Investigative searching is always a good (safe) idea before acting on:

1. information you want to use in a report
2. anything online that costs you money
3. anything unsolicited that requires you to reveal personal information

Here's a copy of the email that sought to wrangle personal information from me. [Note from the URL that I saved a copy of the email; this is one "phish" I didn't want to let get away.]

At first glance, logos from Cisco and eSchool News make it all seem believable and benign. But problems lurk beneath the surface.

The first red flag for me was the date of the event. There isn't one. My email browser routinely blocks images and I clicked on load images a little too soon to notice that there is a date associated with the header. However, the source code contains very important date information: the alt text for the header images indicates the event is May 20, 2009. Today is Sept 1, 2009. I might not have caught that unless a colleague to whom I forwarded the email noticed the alt text (he didn't load the images). There's one good reason NOT to load blocked images.

The second odd bit of information is the alt text for the Elluminate logo. It's misspelled. Again it was my colleague Jim Gerry who caught this irregularity. I don't think an organization advertising a session about video would misspell the video tool being used.

Even though I had missed these big clues, the lack of a date was a critical omission. Who would go to the trouble of advertising this event without a date?

Then there's the issue of the links. Roll over the REGISTER TODAY button and look at the URL: www.weic11.com/. I expected something pointing to Cisco. But this is a valuable clue. Who or what is weic11.com? Using whois.net, I located the owner: Worldata, Inc., 3000 N Military Trail
Boca Raton, FL 33431. The URL weic11.com leads to worldata.com, so that is consistent.

What is Worldata? According to its website, it is a group of companies in the direct/interactive marketing service field. Now I know this is more about marketing than learning about the use of video.

This is where I stopped searching. I could have researched Worldata to see about phishing complaints, but my purpose was served and I stopped short of registering for an expired event and giving a marketing company reasons to send me more spam.

Can you find any other suspicious clues? Or have you received interesting "phishing" emails? They can make good search challenges. Let kids investigate them--it may help prevent them from giving away personal information that should be kept confidential.

P.S. As of this writing, the links on my saved "phishing" file still work; don't make the mistake of filling out the forms.

------
Here's an answer to the previous challenge: Toto makes a toilet that analyzes urine samples.

Link To Evaluation

Knowing who links to a site can be very revealing.

If trustworthy people link to a site and say positive things about it, does that site gain in credibility? I think most people would say yes.

What if they just link to the site and say nothing about it? That's harder to evaluate.

Using the link: command by itself is not an evaluation shortcut. For example, pages that link to http://golfcross.com/ present ambiguous results. Google returns 4 pages: two of them are about hoax sites, another is an account of someone playing golfcross and the fourth is the 21cif website. Since three fourths of the pages seem to indicate there is some suspicious about golfcross, one might be tempted to conclude the sport is really a hoax. But that's not an accurate conclusion.

One of the problems is that Google no longer returns all the pages that link to a page. Within the last year, only a sample of the pages is returned. Try the link: search in Yahoo and you get
lots more (over 400), if you select the option for picking pages from the entire site, not just the home page. That's a good reason to try more than one database when searching.

Hoax-related pages still show up in Yahoo results, but now there are others: travel sites, blogs, wikipedia, and so on. Now it isn't so easy to conclude that the sport is a hoax.

It still requires reading and interpreting the pages that have a link to golfcross to figure out why there's a link there. Always ask: why did this author include the link?

Among the Yahoo results is a blog by Bernie DeKoven. The context of the page is all about fun and games, including wallyball, slamball and this game played with egg-shaped balls. A link to Bernie DeKoven leaves the impression that he is educated, was a teacher, is an author and has pursued game-playing as a serious pastime for years. He seems to be an expert in games. So does his testimony convince you that golfcross is real?

Maybe you know Bernie and maybe you don't. If you do, does his testimony persuade you that golfcross is legitimate? Does he say strong enough things about the sport?

If you could get to know Bernie and ask him why he thinks golfcross is legitimate, that might help. That's where Web 2.0 becomes very valuable. You can ask questions, join personal networks and get a lot more information than if you were just observing from a distance. Of course this takes a little more time than lurking, but it yields better information.

So, what do you think about golfcross?

An opportunity to learn more about Web 2.0 tools and evaluate will start on Feb 9. Consider joining our 4 week course on Power Searching in a Web 2.0 World. Here's a link to look at the course.