3.3. Other third-party link-building tools
A variety of additional third-party link-building tools are also
available. Enquisite Optimizer (http://www.enquisite.com/products/optimizer/), for one,
offers a variety of link-building reports. For example, one of the
best ways to discover when you have received a new link is to monitor
new referrers. Enquisite Optimizer builds this in, and will report to
you links that never sent you traffic in the past. To help evaluate
their importance, the tool provides you with the Alexa Rank, PageRank,
mozRank, and Compete Rank for each link. Enquisite Optimizer offers
many other link-building reports, including those that enable you
to:
See places on the Web where you are referenced, but the
reference is not implemented as a link
See who is linking to your competitors but not to you
See who is linking to sites in your neighborhood but not to
you
Developed by Bruce Clay, Inc., LinkMaps allows you to map the
backlinks of any website, including your competitors’. LinkMaps
gathers the initial data from the search engines and then adds some
advanced filtering, including:
Removing pages that return 404 errors
Removing pages that do not have a link
Limiting results to no more than four pages per
domain
Filtering out guestbooks
Identifying possible link farms
LinkMaps also shows you which search engines found the link and
which did not. In addition, LinkMaps will build pages that contain
links to the pages that link to you. The page is NoIndexed, so it will not show up in the
search engines, but you can use it to help the search engines discover
the links to your site.
Not too long ago, the European link-building agency Cemper.com
launched its link building toolkit LinkResearchTools.com,
which includes a link juice analyzer, common inbound links (between
you and a competitor), common outbound links, and an anchor text
analyzer.
Squid is a tool developed by Searchreturn to help link
builders project manage the link-building process. You let Squid know
the site you are building links for, and tell it to fetch a Yahoo!
link report for that site. Then you give it a list of your
competitors’ sites (or of sites that you want to backlink for some
reason).
Squid then builds a list of people who link to those other sites
but do not link to you. The initial data looks something like Figure 12.
The results are sorted in descending order based on common
links. The number in the Common Links column represents the number of
other sites that the page links to. So, when someone links to five
competitive sites but not to you, that makes for a juicy link
target!
The columns on the right of Figure 9-25
contain the status of the link request process, using the following
definitions:
Another impressive toolset for link building is Raven. One of Raven’s key
features is the Link Manager, which tracks links that you plan on
acquiring, have requested, or have successfully built. Raven includes
conversion and ROI tracking, as well a Firefox toolbar that makes it
easier to add websites to your queue of link acquisition targets.
Raven, like Squid, will go out and automatically check the identified
pages to see whether you have acquired a link on them, and it will
tell you the results—thus automating the process of identifying
targets and tracking the progress of one’s campaign on an ongoing
basis.
3.3.1. Google Blog Search
It is well known that the link: command works poorly in Google Web
Search. For whatever reason, Google has decided to return only a
small sampling of data when people use that command. However,
interestingly enough, you can get more data on your backlinks using
Google Blog Search (and it reports more than just the blog links);
see Figure 13.
3.3.2. Technorati
Technorati
provides a look at the number of blog reactions to a website. For a
site with a major blog such as SEOmoz, this can provide extremely
valuable data. Figure 14
shows an example.
3.3.3. Exalead
Exalead, a
European search engine, offers capabilities that include a link: command. What make Exalead
particularly interesting are the advanced filtering capabilities it
provides, as you can see in Figure 15.
Note the ability to pick language as well as all the other
options, which could be useful for segmenting link data.
3.4. Measuring the value of a link
One of the big questions that people ask is what is the value of
a particular inbound link? There is no simple way to answer that
question, but you can look at some of the metrics that can give you a
feeling for how important a link might be:
Most important elements to determining a link’s value
Where does the linking page rank for the term/phrase
you want to rank for?
If the page is ranking #1 at Google for
sliced bread and you want to be #1 at
Google for sliced bread, guess what?
That’s the #1 most valuable link you can get. Keep going
down the list to about positions 25 to 30 and you’re still
getting solid gold in link value.
Where does the linking page rank for one to two
important, competitive terms in its title tag?
This will give you a very solid idea about how much
overall link juice and respect the search engines are
giving the page. It is also a good way to identify the
global link value that could be provided.
Where does content on the linking domain generally
rank for competitive terms in its pages’ respective title
tags?
As in the preceding list item, we’re trying to
identify how positively the engines view pages on the
domain. If the pages generally rank in the top 20 results,
you can rest assured that search engines think the
domain’s value is pretty high, and that links from that
domain will pass significant value.
Does the linking site carry any brokered sets of
links?
Sites that sell links may lose their ability to pass
link juice. This really applies to any type of
low-quality, manipulative linking. If you can see it,
chances are that Google might see it someday too. In
addition, Google may penalize a site retroactively for
repeated bad behavior, even if that behavior has been
stopped.
What is the relevance of the linking page/site to your
target page?
Answering this question requires you to think
critically about the visitors to both the potential
linking page and the domain. If the relevance of the
subject matter to your site is high, the link will provide
more semantic and topic-specific value.
Elements of secondary value for links
Links to high-ranking competitors
Although this isn’t always an indication of direct
value, it can be a good signal. Your competitors are
obviously ranking based on the strength of their links, so
researching those sources can provide insight into where
they derive that value.
Page strength
SEOmoz offers a free tool that computes a metric
called Page
Strength. Although it is tough to make too much
out of the numerical calculation the tool offers, the
other data returned is convenient and certainly valuable.
If there are a lot of links from Wikipedia and DMOZ and
the site has high PageRank, lots of inbound links, and
blog links, there’s clearly some value to getting a link.
Figure 16 shows a
screen shot of the output of the tool.
PageRank of the domain
There is a notion that the PageRank of a domain
would be the overall PageRank value Google would associate
with the domain. This is not a value you can get at
directly, but you can approximate it by looking at the
PageRank of the website’s home page. Look at this to make
sure it is not penalized and to see the overall link
juice.
A PageRank 6 (or higher) home page clearly has some
link love and respect, a Page Rank 2 obviously has less, a
gray bar can be a good red flag, and seeing a PageRank 0
tells you that the domain is either new or completely
invisible. However, as link-building expert Eric Ward
points out, avoiding lower PageRank domains simply because
they are PageRank 3 or 4 is not necessarily a good thing,
as you could be missing out on very relevant links that,
in volume, contribute to your relevance.
Inlinks to page (via Yahoo!)
Next, look at the links to the specific page you
want to get a link from (or perhaps that already links to
you). You want to know whether the domain links into this
individual page heavily, or whether it is practically an
orphan. See whether it is a page that other sites
reference, both of which can help illuminate potential
value.
Inlinks to domain (via Technorati or Google Blog
Search)
The Technorati and Google Blog Search link data can
show trends—if a site has been picking up many new links
over the past few months, it might be a much better
candidate than the PageRank or other link data might
indicate.
Inlinks to domain (via Yahoo!)
This is a pretty indirect measurement, but it’s not
completely useless. However, since the number often takes
into account lots of links from a single domain, it can be
misleading.
PageRank of page
Since pages that are relatively new (three to four
months old) are shown on the Google Toolbar as having a
PageRank of 0 (at least until Google updates the PageRank
it shows on the Google Toolbar), and since so many
valuable pages may have PageRanks that are only in the 1–3
range, it seems unwise to get caught up in the PageRank of
a specific page. It is better to look at the domain and
the attention it gives your page. However, this can be
valuable if the page has been around for a while.
Number of external links on the page
Pages generally pass some of their link juice to
each page they link to. Therefore, if you have a link from
a page with 10 outbound links, it is far better than
having a link from an equivalent page with 100 outbound
links, so this is a parameter worth knowing about.
