The homepage was actually a basic hierarchical URL.

[kexej28769@nongnue]

The particular client example I'm mentioning in this post had two things that once again bring extraordinary clarity to these effects:


It was struggling to make its way to page 1 for many reasonable target terms.
Both of these should make it an ideal candidate for clear-cut benefits from high-quality link building. (This is not to say that link building can’t work if these criteria aren’t met—just that it will be difficult to analyze the results!)

1st order results
Obviously due to the difficulty in analysis outlined bulgaria number data above, we find that clients generally prefer to evaluate the performance of link building campaigns in terms of first-order benefits – by which I mean the performance of the actual creative piece rather than their commercial landing pages.

The specific segment highlighted in these link acquisition graphs above achieves the following 1st order benefits (and I've included graphs from my internal tracking platform so you can get a sense of the acquisition momentum):

A peak of 228 LRDs (204 "fresh" index shown below), of which ~145 within a month of launch:


Facebook has 2,140 shares up, ~1,750 of which within a month of launch:


82,584 landings in Google Analytics, of which ~67,000 within a month of launch:


I mentioned above that not all links are to the piece itself, with journalists often referring to the home page instead. 145 (domain-unique) links were directed to the piece as of mid-April, but you’ll notice that March beat the average month by ~200 LRDs, and April also outperformed by ~100. By my back-of-the-envelope math, you’d be looking to claim a maximum of 300 LRDs driven by the entire domain via this piece, but your opinion may differ!