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 highly inbred industries (where the majority of sites in the top are linking to and receiving links from other sites vying for the same keyword rankings), rankings tend to be very stable. This close netting of top sites creates a trust-island of sorts that is very difficult to penetrate. Getting ranking in these industries is much like trying to penetrate the popular click at a high school. It is possible, but not without selling your soul. Keywords that have relatively no interlinking are often highly volatile. My favorite of this bunch happens to be for the keyword “cheap viagra”, where not a single site in the top 36 (run on Friday, December 15th) linked to one another. If anyone knows about this industry, its rankings are fast and furious.
2. Keyword Maturity Similar to keyword volatility, this can also indicate the maturity of the keyword. Keyword maturity is measured by the methods of optimization and their longevity. For industry inbreeding to occur, sites must remain in the cache and rank for a substantial amount of time. If blackhat techniques are responsible for top rankings in that industry, you can expect that there will be little inbreeding as sites move in and out of the rankings before they can mature and receive links from within the industry.
3. Link Islands A fantastic way to find sites that are building off of one another, an inbreeding chart will show sites that are linking with one another and no one else in the top. Rarely does this occur naturally.
4. Scraper Sites It is always wonderful to see the beautiful spider picture that occurs when a site is a scraper site. When a site links to 8 or more of the top sites in the industry (normally sites 1-10), but has no inbound links, you can almost bet on it that it is a scraper site. Always fun to see.
5. Hubs Please dear God stop linking to Wikipedia. Why does everyone link to Wikipedia? Do you realize that you are shooting yourself in the foot? With a cannon?
There is quite a bit more, but enough with the explanations and onto the eye candy. I have taken several examples of Inbreeding Charts that you may want to take a look at…
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So, ready to run an industry inbreeding report on your own keyword? Check out the new tool at Virante: Industry Inbreeding Chart!
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Just letting you know the images on your example page go to 404 pages
Interesting… great way to view linking activity 🙂
If I do a chart for the search [yahoo] (with no brackets) I get a weird result with only huge (1) circles and small (no number) circles and little crosslinking, but Yahoo does a ton of crosslinking, esp from home page (www.yahoo.com), which shows as a teeny blip with links to only a couple of the others.
Are there other filters involved?
Very cool tool. What do the numbers under the domains stand for?
I think your conclusion about what indicates a scraper site is too general. New sites (e.g. blogs) that are legitimate are likely to link to the leaders in their field. Linking to the top sites is the closest new sites can come to validation until they’ve established their own community. If you could throw in a domain age measure then you’d have a better indicator of a scraper site.
I love the little pics you can get from that tool. they help explaining the idea of link hubs and pagerank hoarders better than any slides I’ve used in the past.
cheers