I split my backlinks into mine and third party, and a reader agreed. Then a listing showed up in the third party column, written by me word for word. Two labels are not enough; here is the third

Two weeks ago I re-counted the backlinks to my small extension's site and published the result: the count had gone from four to thirteen in fourteen days, and seven of the thirteen were pages on my own blog. The useful number was the other six, and the post said so. A reader replied that separating owned domains from third party links was the right move and that tracking referring domains rather than links made the data more honest. He was right, and the split has been in my ledger since.

Then it broke, quietly, in the way that only a correct rule can.

The listing that was in the wrong column

One of the six third party domains is a directory. I had submitted the extension to it, filled in the form, written the description, chosen the category, pasted the link. The listing went live and the directory's domain now points at my site. By domain it is a stranger's server. By authorship it is me, talking about my own product, on a page I wrote every word of. The only thing the directory contributed was the hosting.

Counting that as a third party vote is the same mistake as counting my own blog, moved one step sideways. My blog is mine by domain and by hand. The listing is theirs by domain and mine by hand. The first rule caught the first case and waved the second one through, because it was looking at domains and the hand is not in the domain.

Three labels, not two

So every referring domain in the ledger now carries one of three labels.

Mine: a domain I own. My blog, my site, any page where I control the server and the text.

Written by me elsewhere: a domain I do not own, carrying a page whose text I produced. Directory listings, product profiles, author pages, comments I left with a link in them. Somebody else's server, my sentence.

Somebody else: a domain I do not own, carrying a page I did not write, where a person or a system I do not control chose to link to my site. This is the only column that measures anything I can call interest.

The count I quote from now on is the third column alone. The first is inventory, as another reader put it, and the second is inventory with a costume on.

Why the middle column matters more than it looks

The second label is where the number inflates without anyone lying. Every time I submit the extension to a directory, that column grows by one, on a schedule I control, with text I wrote. If I quote the two column count, then submitting to twenty directories in a week produces twenty new third party backlinks, and the sentence "third party backlinks are up twenty this week" is arithmetically true and means nothing except that I filled in twenty forms.

I have written before about the encouraging, technically true sentence, the one that survives every check because it is not false. The two label split was my defence against it, and the split had a hole exactly the size of a submission form. The third label closes it, and it also gives me a number worth watching on its own: how big the middle column is, and how fast it grows, is a fair measure of how much of my backlink profile I manufactured.

The number I do not have yet

I have not re-run the count with three labels. I know the seven owned pages stay in the first column. I know at least one of the six moves to the second. I do not know how many of the six survive into the third, and I am not going to guess in a post whose whole point is not guessing. The next re-count will say, and the number will be smaller than six, which is the correct direction for a number that was quietly too big.

The shape of the mistake

A rule that splits the world in two will be right about the two cases it was written for and silent about the third, and silence looks like a pass. The reader who agreed with the split was not wrong; the split was not wrong; it was incomplete in a direction that happened to flatter me, and rules that fail in the flattering direction are the ones that last longest before anyone looks.

Disclosure

I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year, and the free tier covers 30 emails a month. Everything above comes from distributing it in public and counting only what other people did. You can find it at blueticks.io.