Barack Obama’s www.barackobama.com website has hopped into the early lead in our tracking of backlinks for the 2008 Presidential Candidates. Close behind in 2nd is the Dennis Kucinich website kucinich.com and 3rd, Hillary Clinton’s www.hillaryclinton.com.

Notable moves since our first measurement on January 26th is Sam Brownback’s www.brownback.com jumping over 34 times the January total, Mitt Romney’s www.mittromney.com jumping over 18 times, and Rudy Giuliani’s www.joinrudy2008.com total jumping over 16 times. Joe Biden, Bill Richardson, Christopher Dodd, Duncan Hunter, and Mike Gravel all show a decrease in their backlinks.

The backlink measurement is an easy and fun one to track and can be a crude indicator of a website’s relative popularity but by no means is it one you can measure a website’s ultimate success by. Hindering the backlinks measurement can be thousands of links coming from one domain alone or coming from poor websites that provide next to nothing in traffic or relevant value. Yes, search engine rankings are largely determined by backlinks, but it is the quality backlinks that count by being trusted and relevant. The mass links from untrusted sites in “bad neighborhoods” and having content that is not relevant will do no good for improving a site’s rankings for preferred search phrases and keywords.

I am using Yahoo’s Site Explorer to get the backlink counts. I chose to measure incoming links to the entire domain and excluded the internal links from within the sites that link to themselves. The links below will take you to Yahoo’s Site Explorer where you can see what Yahoo has for a current count and see the list of linking sites. The actual backlink counts will fluctuate and are never right on the nose but they do give a great snapshot for comparison purposes.

Since counting backlinks alone is a crude measurement and not one you can measure ultimate success by, in future posts covering the 2008 Presidential Candidate websites I will explore other factors including keyword research, search engine results page (SERP) rankings for preferred search terms, social presence and valuable inbound links. But for now I hope you have some fun digging in to these numbers and yes, I will continue to track these backlink counts throughout the campaign season. If you have any suggestions, comments, or questions I would love to hear them.