3. Link Building, Link Tracking, and Link-Based Metrics (Including
Anchor Text Analysis)
Measurement of link-building campaigns is another must for the
expert SEO practitioner. This can help you refine your campaigns to
bring better results, compare link growth to your search rankings, and
perform analysis to see how your campaigns are faring compared to the
efforts of your competitors.
3.1. Search-engine-supplied tools
There are three basic tools for checking backlinks:
Google Webmaster Tools is a powerful start. With Google
Webmaster Tools, publishers can easily download a spreadsheet of
all the links Google has in its database (note that Google might
not include some links that it does not consider significant).
With this tool publishers can see only the links to their own
site. Figure 6 shows
what the spreadsheet looks like.
Bing Webmaster Tools is also a great asset. It offers a
similar capability for downloading a spreadsheet of the links that
Bing has in its database for a site. Once again, publishers can
use this tool only to see the links to their own site. Figure 7 shows what the report
looks like.
Bing Webmaster Tools is limited in its export, however.
Publishers can extract only up to 1,000 of their backlinks due to
a limitation in the Bing API (as of July 2009). Bing does provide
some cool filtering capabilities to help publishers work around
that limitation, however.
Yahoo! Site Explorer allows publishers to see all of their
backlinks. However, only 1,000 of these can be exported into a
spreadsheet. Seeing more than 1,000 requires you to step through
the web results pages showing 100 linking pages at a time. Site
Explorer will also allow publishers to see the backlinks for any
website, not just their own. This is particularly interesting in
evaluating the competition. Figure 8 shows what the
backlinks report looks like.
For quick and dirty link totals, it is handy to use a Firefox
plug-in known as SearchStatus.
This provides basic link data on the fly with just a couple of mouse
clicks. Figure 9 shows the menu you’ll
see with regard to backlinks.
Notice also in Figure 9 that the
SearchStatus plug-in offers an option for highlighting NoFollow links, as well as many other
capabilities. It is a great tool to help pull numbers such as these
much more quickly than would otherwise be possible.
3.2. Third-party link-measuring tools
Advanced third-party tools exist for gathering link data. Here
is a look at some of the most well-known ones.
3.2.1. Linkscape
Linkscape
was developed based on crawl data obtained by SEOmoz, plus a variety
of parties engaged by SEOmoz. You can see a complete list of
Linkscape’s sources at http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape/help/sources.
Linkscape is designed to be the tool for SEO practitioners to
use when mapping links across the Web. It gets around the 1,000-URL
limit imposed by Yahoo! and lets you get as many links as it can
find and then extract them all into a spreadsheet.
Figure 10 shows a sample
report.
Included with this report are mozRank and mozTrust scores for
each URL listed, and each domain. The tool also flags redirects so
that you can see them. In addition, you can easily obtain additional
data, such as the Google PageRank scores for the linking page and
its domain.
The beauty of this tool is that it allows SEO practitioners
and publishers to collect competitive intelligence on other people’s
domains, much like they do with Yahoo! Site Explorer today, but
escape the 1,000-result limit and automatically get Google PageRank
values as well as SEOmoz’s proprietary mozRank and mozTrust
scores.
We cannot underestimate the importance of mozRank and
mozTrust. The PageRank score Google publishes through its toolbar is
known not to be a reasonable approximation of the value of a given
page, and is not the same as the actual PageRank Google uses in its
ranking algorithms. The Google algorithm has simply evolved far
beyond the original simplistic concept of PageRank that Google used
in its early days.
Also of great value is Domain mozRank
(DmR). This is the concept of assessing the overall trust level of a
domain instead of a specific page. PageRank values published on the
Google Toolbar are a measure for a particular page, not the domain,
and there is no way to get that data from Google.
DmR uses the same mozRank algorithm but applies it to the
“domain-level link graph.” Doing so offers additional insight about
the general authority of the domain. Just as pages can endorse other
pages, a link that crosses domain boundaries (e.g., from some page
on http://searchengineland.com to a page on
http://www.seomoz.org) can be seen as an
endorsement by one domain for another.
Many other factors are taken into account, such as trust
level, relevance, and other types of references across the Web.
MozRank and mozTrust attempt to incorporate these parameters and
provide SEOs and publishers with a truly relevant measure of the
importance of a page. In addition, all the data is extractable in a
spreadsheet to allow for easy offline processing.
3.2.2. Link Diagnosis
Link Diagnosis can show you important information about your
competitors’ links, including page rank, anchor text, NoFollow links, and more. Figure 11 shows an example of the basic
Link Diagnosis output for one site.
You can download each subsection of this report into a CSV
file, for later examination in Excel. Pulling the basic backlinks
report (shown at the top left of Figure 9-24) into a spreadsheet provides data
that looks like Table 1.
Table 1. Link Diagnosis link report export
| url | pagerank | anchor | linktype | Obl |
|---|
| http://searche | 7 | Null | 0 | 288 |
| http://blog.se | 6 | Google’s S | 1 | 906 |
| http://www.c | 6 | How do I | 1 | 31 |
| http://www.s | 6 | Eric Enge | 1 | 171 |
| http://blog.se | 6 | spoken w | 1 | 1060 |
| http://en.wik | 6 | Eric Enge | 2 | 265 |
| http://blog.se | 6 | StoneTem | 1 | 412 |
| http://stonete | 6 | web mark | 1 | 176 |
| http://glinder | 5 | Posted | 1 | 324 |
| http://blog.se | 5 | Andrew T | 1 | 99 |
| http://www.n | 5 | Stone Tem | 1 | 181 |
| http://kn.thei | 5 | Null | 0 | 86 |
| http://www.g | 5 | http://ww | 2 | 33 |
| http://stonete | 5 | Ramblings | 1 | 210 |
