Industry Inbreeding

One of the more interesting pieces of data, in my opinion, is the relationship between sites that are ranking for a particular term. In some industries, sites do not link together at all – competition is so fierce that webmasters are unwilling to add a backlink for fear of improving a competitor’s rank. In other industries, sites trade links like 1st graders trade valentines cards (sorry if your site is the one without any link love). I like to call these link relationships as industry inbreeding: a unique situation where competitors (deliberately or not), link to one another despite the obvious implications of boosting a competitor’s ranks. Charting this data can be very useful as it can describe several phenomena. 1. Keyword Volatility In...