Let’s take an overall look at Link Prospector plus a couple of cool tips I found when using it and finish with a review of pros and cons.

General Overview

Link Prospector is a link building research tool designed to find and return lists of potential partner sites. Built for speed, the tool can return a huge amount of data link builders can sift through to find link building opportunities. The tool has a clean and simple interface and has the ability to export what it finds.

There are two help videos on the site as well. Before you launch the tool you will need a complete list of keywords and an idea of the type of sites you want to prospect for.

Getting Started Running The Tool

After selecting a name for my campaign, I picked the type of sites I wanted the tool to search for. There are 14 categories to choose from:

I wanted to find pages to host link embedded content and find new directories so I set my search for:  Directories, Reviews, Topical Blogs and Guest Posting.  Each campaign took about 20-30 minutes to generate.

When it was done, my panel looked like this:

As you can see, the tool returned over 2100 URL prospects for me to review under Guest Posting, each page hosts the term “memory foam mattress” and “guest posting” or similar terms. With each test returning at least 2000 results, Link Prospector gives you a lot of link building possibilities to sift through.

You can use the Excluded Domains feature and eliminate certain URL’s from being returned if you feel there is no chance to secure links from these sites or feel they won’t provide any competitive review advantage.

Keywords

Once you pick the type of sites you want to prospect for, the next step is adding the keyword.

For each report generated, I selected up to five keywords and had the option to narrow my search field through additional perimeters such as geographical regions and date range:

In this test (which is Test #2) I looked for UK specific sites hosting the word ”payday” and its variations and asked the tool to search on the first 1000 results. In hindsight, asking the tool to go that deep on a term like “payday” wasn’t an effective use of time, the results were poor past the 150 mark.

This is not a reflection of the tool but of the SERPS for that particular term. In general, after running all my tests I found asking the tool to return 100 – 200 results yielded the best pages.

Cool tip:  I discovered using the tilde character (~) in front of a single term would increase the amount and variety of data returned. I recommend you use this advance search operator with your primary keyword when running terms. In some cases, it returned pages and sites I had never heard of which means there’s a good chance your competitors haven’t either.

When your reports are ready (it takes about 30 minutes for each to run) you are taken to a list of prospects. By default, they are sorted by LTS (Link Target Score) which is a metric created by Link Prospector to help discover pages that give you a “higher likelihood of being a converting prospect”.

You can also sort the pages by PageRank and TLD’s:

Next to each result is a number in parenthesis (I’ve circled it in red in the image above), this represents the number of pages on the domain hosting my keywords.

You can click on the number and drill down to see each page:

Being able to see the pages hosting your terms is extremely helpful; it allows you to see how the sites are using and promoting content. The campaign manager also allows you to export your data to an Excel file which can be saved to your computer and used or downloaded into Buzzstream.

This drill-down option is why I don’t like to exclude domains in the research stage. Even knowing I won’t get a link from a site returned in the report doesn’t mean there is a marketing angle to ignore, because someone already got a link from them or the page wouldn’t be listed!

This does add to your review time so again, if you know for a fact there is nothing to be gained from certain sites, exclude them and save yourself some time.

Cool tip:  In every search I ran, Link Prospector returned YouTube pages hosting my keywords. With video being a huge part of Universal Search results on both Bing and Google, having an instant library of topical videos is helpful.

Bookmark the videos returned and start running a competitive analysis on them. Who’s linking to them? Who’s commenting on them? Where else are they being shown? Here is where searching on the top 150 results can be helpful, you’ll get the cream of the crop video’s in one handy location.

Education & Help

There is a seven minute video on the homepage of Link Prospector that takes you through each step of the tool. There is also a four minute video on the keyword selection page that is a must watch before listing your terms.

You have to listen closely to pick up the tips but basically, Link Prospector recommends you list single keywords in additional to multi-keyword strings for maximum results.

Pick your keywords well and the tool will bring back a lot of good results.  If after watching the video you still have questions, Garrett recommends emailing him directly for support:  garrett AT citationlabs.com.

Pros & Cons

When it comes to link building, there are many ways to acquire links. No matter what you do or which vertical you’re in, in order to rank well you need quality pages hosting your links.

That’s where using a tool like Link Prospector can help, it will research and analyze a large amount of data before listing potential link partners. It cuts your search time down considerably.

While it cuts your search time down, it does little for your review time and you need to know up front you’ll spend a lot of time picking through the results for sites to link with. If you run a lot of terms and go deep, you’ll have a tremendous amount of content to wade through, just look how many prospects came back in my sample tests.

Results past the 150 mark were so-so to lousy, I wouldn’t go deeper but it’s up to you. Again, Link Prospector is not at fault for what is being returned, it brings back what it finds when searching. If the engines have garbage results, so does the tool. If a webpage uses a term conversationally and out of context, it doesn’t “understand” that and returns the page anyway.

You’ll have the same results if you search by hand, it will just take hours longer and won’t come in a neat and exportable package. Here is where using the best keywords and the tilde (~) will help tremendously by returning a wider array of results. Sadly, I had to stumble on this little tidbit to try it out, it was not included in the main help video.

The main help video, which is over seven minutes long and done in one shot, should come with a timed tabled of contents and a transcription accessible from every page and point in the campaign. For now it doesn’t, so if you want to review the main help video while working, you have to log out to see it or pull up a second tab and start over.

The site lacks a FAQ section (this would help with specific points) or a section explaining advanced search operators. It also lacks a detailed explanation for the LTS (Link Target Score), there is one but I had to email Garrett for the information.

Understanding what LTS is and knowing how to use it would be a big help when reviewing results. Even though LTS analyzes pages based on criteria set by Link Prospector, having this information and knowing how sites are scored would go a long way to helping qualify pages during the review process.

Link Prospector is a good research tool for the serious link builder, you will definitely find a lot of potential link partners when using it. Take advantage of the free trial before you begin, it will help you get used to the large amounts of data the tool produces and help you plan a way to use it. I recommend you play both videos several times before launching your first campaign and have Garrett’s email handy as you work.

I conducted some random tests and did notice some of these free web directories not coming up in Google. Later in the day, Terry Van Horne began running larger tests on 500+ web directories and noticed as much as 16% or more are no longer showing up in Google. Based on his initial numbers, there are over a 100 web directories that are not indexed by Google.

I do not know if these directories were ever listed in Google or removed recently due to one of the recent Google updates; i.e. Penguin, Panda refresh, blog link network elimination and unnatural link warnings.

I did ask Google for a comment on this specific case and Google declined.

Have you noticed a recent massive delisting of web directories from Google’s index?

1. Google anounced that they were changing how they view links (nicely recapped here:)
2. Pandamonium!
3. Certain large blog networks were devalued and webmasters started to receive warnings about unnatural links.

Link building can still work well using ways that I wouldn’t personally advise because I don’t think that the techniques are sustainable. However, I fully recognize that not every site is destined to have a long-term link campaign that seeks to win the race by being slow and steady.

Thus, you’ll keep seeing link builders writing about the “best” ways to do something, and you’ll see others arguing and saying that riskier tactics still work. I doubt we’ll ever see the day when risky tactics don’t work in some way, but I do also believe that unless you want to stay terrified of losing your rankings and traffic, you have to recognize that link building is no longer what it once was.

Maximize Each Link

Get a link to your site and make sure you get the most out of it…traffic and conversions. If you get a great link, build some links to that page too!! Don’t think of a link as being just a one-time event.

If a blogger links to you (perhaps in a roundup or reference to an article that you wrote) then by all means, reach out via email, blog commenting, or social media, and say thanks. Maybe you’ll get another link, be asked for an interview, asked to guest post, etc. Honestly, unless the link was done to tell the world that you’re a horrible moron, you have nothing to lose by saying thank you.

Keep Your Content Linkworthy

Encourage comments and social media sharing. I wouldn’t really want to link to an SEO post that seemed good but had zero comments and social media shares, because I would be wondering “what am I missing here?”

If you write an article and people comment, respond. Encourage members of your staff to comment or respond to other comments, and encourage social sharing. This increases the chances of someone coming back to see what’s next.

In the above example, you can see that this post is getting some good social love. As of this writing, it also had over 20 comments. To me, that’s a signal that the content is linkworthy.

Find New Competitors

Look at your referral sources, find the great ones, and see who else they link to. Those are fantastic sites to perform competitive analysis on.

Here we see that a few of the top SEO industry sites are linking to us at the SEO Chicks blog, so I’d do a quick site search of each of those sites in order to see who’s on their blogrolls and use a tool like Get Rank’s Link Extractor to get a list of sites linked to from the original site.

I’d also suggest that, if you have time, you at least look at any site that puts up a link to you, and see what they link to, even if it’s not a site you recognize. You can find some gems this way.

Keep Analyzing Your Profile

Analyze your link profile more than once. Hopefully you’re keeping a constant eye on your link building campaign but at minimum, you need to review your link profile at least every few months (and much, much more often if you’ve recently been penalized) unless you have a very small site and are generating few links a month.

While I don’t recommend chasing the algorithm, I have to admit that I do it occasionally. Considering the frequency of Google updates, it’s wise to review your profile after each major update if you do this too.

Link Out

I know that reciprocal links aren’t a great strategy for the most part (usually because they are so poorly done) but there is nothing wrong with linking to someone who links to you if you don’t abuse it and rely on it. In fact, linking out initially, to a site that you’d love to get a link from, is a great way to get noticed and generate a link of your own.

If you’re checking for new links or mentions of your name/brand and you see something pop up, don’t you usually check it out? I certainly do, and I occasionally find great new sources to keep my eye on. Even if a link out doesn’t get you a reciprocal link immediately, it still has the potential to help you form a connection that can help you down the road.

Familiarize Yourself With On-Page Work

I am lucky to have come from a programming background and my first efforts were all focused on on-page work, but since links are easy to build without having to touch a site, obviously, I’m sure there are people building links who have little idea about much else.

Links can only do so much for a site, and if you’re building links and seeing no good results, you need to be able to look at reasons outside of the links. With the recent chatter about over-optimization issues, analyzing a backlink profile to figure out where the problem lies will just not cut it any longer. You’re going to have to look at the site too.

This is why I love link building though; it’s never stagnant for long. Even if you do everything the “right” way, you’ll end up having to adapt, which keeps us all on our toes.

Home Depot Asks For Links

The link request was sent by Home Depot to providers it recommends for installation projects. It came to light in a Search Engine Watch forum discussion, picked up by Search Engine Roundtable and further by Bill Hartzer, who got a copy of the letter. It read in part:

The Home Depot is in the process improving our online advertising efforts for our installation services. We are using our brand authority and marketing power to increase traffic to our site and convert customers. We would like to extend this benefit to all of our business partners and are requesting that you add a link on your site to relative key words that will aid our related installation page authority. Please note that the hyperlink does not have to be visually indicated.

Linking to The Home Depot website will benefit our business partners by increasing the page authority of your website. Page Authority predicts the likelihood of a single page to rank well in search results. Ranking high in search results will assist with driving more relevant traffic to your website.

The letter went on to request a link to a particular page with recommended anchor text.

Issues With The Request

I’ve bolded the key parts of the letter that should send up red flags to anyone who knows SEO. Saying that links don’t have to be “visually indicated” is a euphemism for hidden links, and having hidden links can get you penalized by Google.

As for saying linking out will give a ranking boost, that’s pretty much a myth. If it were true, you’d see all types of low-quality sites getting immediate gains just by linking to good sites. Rankings don’t work that way.

Google: Monitoring Closely

When I asked Google about the letter yesterday, I was given this statement:

It’s simply untrue to tell vendors that linking to a specific page will automatically increase the vendors’ page authority. Likewise, encouraging websites to make hidden links to a website can lead to violations of our quality guidelines that result in demotion or removal of pages from our index. We will be monitoring this situation closely and taking appropriate action.

Home Depot: Correcting Its Mistake

Will Home Depot face a ban? Unlike situations with JC Penney and Overstock last year, this isn’t a case of buying links, so there’s no violation in that regard. Nor is it a violation to ask a network associated with your business to link back. The hidden link issue is really the tricky part, and that would depend on whether the suppliers actually implemented links in that way.

For its part, Home Depot said the letter should have never gone out. I spoke with Jean Niemi, a Home Depot spokesperson who told me:

We investigated the letter here internally, and it was a truly unfortunate letter that was poorly worded and misleading.

Niemi said that Home Depot “in no way” supported hiding links nor believes that links to its site will help service providers rank better. She said the letter had gone out to its service providers, which she says number nearly 2,000, without being vetted by Home Depot’s communications team, as it should have.

“We have pretty strict SEO standards, and that’s what we expect to be used,” Niemi said.

She added that Home Depot had contacted Google to alert it to the letter and was sending out a follow-up letter to its service providers to correct errors in the original one.

Related Articles

• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• Google Sending Warnings About “Artificial” Or “Unnatural” Links
• Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker

Warnings Issued

Many people have reported getting messages from Google regarding link violations. If you scan the Google Webmaster Help forums, for instance, you will see many examples of these being posted.

Here is how one reads:

Dear site owner or webmaster of ….

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

Links No Longer “Silently Distrusted”

Last month, Google appeared to take action against several blog/link networks. Are the messages going out because of that? Google told us no. Rather, it is that Google’s choosing to report penalties about bad linking issues more now than in the past.

A Google spokesperson emailed this statement:

The majority of the increase in messages to webmasters is not due to messages about links. Rather, Google recently started sending messages to sites even for egregious or “blackhat” violations of our quality guidelines. The vast majority of the increase in messages is thus due to expanding the types of messages we send, not because of more warnings about links.

It is true that actions on link networks have been more visible lately, but there’s an important disclaimer to that. Google has been able to trace and take action on many types of link networks; we recently decided to make that action more visible. In the past, some links might have been silently distrusted or might not have carried as much weight. More recently, we’ve been surfacing the fact that those links aren’t helping to improve ranking or indexing.

Earlier this year, Google said that it significantly increased the number of messages they have sent through Webmaster Tools in 2012.

Related Stories:

• Google Eliminates Another Link Network, BuildMyRank.com – Just One Of Several?
• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• Another Company Outed for Paid Links: Sequoia-Backed Milanoo
• Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome
• New York Times Continues Paid Link Outing Stories, Looks At Online Flowers Industry
• Google Chrome’s Paid Link Penalty Now Lifted
• Google Sent Over 700,000 Messages Via Webmaster Tools In Past Two Months
• Dilbert Cartoon: Caught For Paid Links On Google

For the record, I don’t see networks as being any worse than a lot of other tactics, so I’m writing this to illustrate a point, not to judge in any way.

We work with some clients who also work with other link builders who do other types of link building than we do. We also work with some clients who dictate what we do, and we work with some who leave it all up to us. Because of this, I think we have a fairly good idea of the full picture and of what works and what doesn’t work.

If I had to choose just one thing that our most successful clients have in common, it would be link diversity.

The sites that continue to enjoy good rankings and traffic are the ones that employ a variety of methods, that either have different groups working on different tactics, or that ask for and follow our advice about how to do things so that they aren’t reliant upon something that can crush them if the algorithm changes.

What Is A Diverse Link Campaign All About?

I think it’s much more than making sure that you have some nofollowed links, some image links here and there, and maybe a few good old sitewides. It’s about analyzing all the opportunities available to you and pursuing anything that you find credible. It’s also about ensuring that you’re visible in the latest and greatest places.

Where To Get Links

For a diverse profile, it’s all about getting your content out there through the use of social media, guest posting, reviews, and many other forms of interaction.

It’s about pursuing blog links, directory links, links on sites where your competitors are listed, and possibly links on crappy sites (trust me, it’s extremely rare to find a link profile that doesn’t include something spammy or questionable) and paid links that will send you lots of traffic.

Anchor Text Variation

I did something very cool recently, at a client’s request. I broke down competitors’ anchor text into categories that he gave me, rather than classifying them in my usual way. It gave me a whole new perspective on anchor text variation.

We tend to think of anchor text in broad categories like money terms or longtails, so breaking anchors down further made me see the smaller picture and identify similarities where I hadn’t seen them before.

Top Level Domain & Geo Variation

I know there are certain gold standards for link building (we love those .govs and .edus!) but I like to see a variety of links from other TLDs like .info, .net, .biz, among others. I also like to see good CCTLDs (country code top level domains) where it makes sense for your audience, but there are few sites that don’t show some sort of foreign links in their profile.

It’s kind of ethnocentric to think that you shouldn’t have those. If you’re doing link outreach and you’re finding targets by searching in Google, run some searches that will only generate results from a specific TLD or CCTLD.

Types Of Links

Permanent, sitewide, footer, sidebar, directories, links that roll off a blog’s homepage, links to your homepage, links to your subpages, profile links, forum and blog comment links, links on sites that show nothing but press releases or articles, links that fade away from a site after a certain amount of time, image links, and yes, even flashing banner links are all part of most profiles that I have analyzed.

I don’t deliberately pursue certain types of links at all times, for various reasons, but in analyzing profiles, it’s apparent that variety is definitely there. Many links that I wouldn’t necessarily pursue (like at the moment I’m not feeling the love for sitewides) are part of a natural profile and can give you great traffic if they’re well placed on the right site.

I’ve had to work on sites that had too high of a reliance upon sitewides, and that’s why I don’t usually seek them out, but I’d take a blogroll link on a great, high-profile blog relevant to my industry over an in-content one on an old site that gets 50 hits a month.

Real World Examples

Our SEO Chicks blog is approaching its 5th anniversary and I’ve used it before as an example of a very natural link profile.

Here’s what we see:

• A really nice percentage of nofollowed links that are giving us good referrals.
• Text and image links.
• A good homepage to deep page link ratio.
• Links from .com, .uk, .org, .net, .us, and .br.
• Link from the Netherlands, Germany, the US, the UK, and Canada.

A quick look at my company website shows the following:

• Links from the US, the UK, Canada, and France.
• Text links and image links.
• Nofollowed and followed links.
• .com, .net, .org, .uk, and .me links.

That is a very simplistic summary of two link profiles that are at least semi-diverse and completely natural (ie., there are no paid links involved.) There is a heavy reliance upon certain types of links (I think we have too few image links and too high a percentage of .com links for my website, for example) but it’s getting to a better place in my eyes.

We also do a local city blog called Avant Greensboro which is very, very new and shows the following:

• Massively high anchor percentage for the brand.
• No image links.
• Links from only .com and .org sites.
• Only links from the US.

Now, as I said we’re just starting out and we have not yet actively pursued links, but I can immediately devise a plan here. Since I like to create wishlists, here you go:

Now, as I’ve said earlier, this is an extremely simplistic (and initial) method of analyzing your link diversity, as it’s limited to what’s been reported by Link Research Tools in my case. However, it’s a start, and it’s a good way to see your profile in terms of its variety in a few areas.

This type of quick analysis won’t tell you things like whether you have enough blog links or whether you’re too reliant upon certain anchors (there are other tools to help you with that) but the key is to think about diversity and to pursue it.

A Final Word

You may have a rare demographic that isn’t engaged socially (yet) for example. However, as we’ve seen with the recent insane growth of Pinterest, new social networks arise that appeal to people who might not have been previously attracted to them. In fact, the people following me on Pinterest are a truly diverse group that includes an old next door neighbor, high school classmates and their moms, and of course all you SEOs.

Who knows what’s next? We may see another Facebook or Twitter, and you will need to promote your site socially. Getting good links on high-traffic blogs with lots of good social signals is (in my opinion) something that will be one of the key ways to build links moving forward. I wouldn’t have said that three years ago.

Think about this too:  in the event that something bad does happen with your site in the rankings, being able to keep traffic coming is going to be critical. You have to diversify your traffic sources, period.

Well look elsewhere too…because I’m here to tell you that immediately blaming the links and not looking for problems elsewhere won’t always get those rankings back up.

In fact, if you stop a killer link campaign because you’re convinced that the links are the problem, and you go from 60 to 0mph, that can potentially hurt you even further.

Here’s a synopsis of the main 5 non-linky problems that we’ve encountered and troubleshooted over the years whilst dutifully cranking out the links.

1. Check The Redirects

For this, I rely on Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer. For those of you who don’t have familiarity with this, here’s how I use it:

• Enter your URL
• Uncheck the AutoFollow Location box

Now, it’s a good idea to 301 redirect either the www or the non-www version of your site to the other one. We’ve decided that we want our primary URL to be http://www.linkfishmedia.com and, after entering that here, we see this result:

When we enter the non-www version, we see this result:

This is what you want to see on a site. If you don’t have the proper 301 in place, Google can easily think that you’re running two sites and that can cause all sorts of problems from indexation issues to duplicate content to link problems.

Since I’m concerned with links right now, I’ll tell you the main problem I’ve seen with this: a site runs both non-www and www versions with no 301 redirect and links are built to each version. Once someone realizes that a 301 isn’t in place and slaps it in there, you’ve possibly sent half your links through a 301, losing some juice. We’ve seen many situations where a 301, or lack of one, has been a serious link problem.

People build links for years without having it set up, read that they should have a 301 in place, slap it in there, and wonder why their links don’t seem as powerful now. Occasionally, 301s get removed by accident (hard to imagine, but it’s happened) when the webmaster decides to get drunk and dive into the control panel. Splitting link juice will not make a link builder happy.

2. Check The Robots.txt File

Is the whole site blocked for some reason? That has been the problem so many times, I cannot even tell you how many.

It’s particularly common after a recent round of site testing or updates. The robots.txt file is always found at URL/robots.txt and it should be easy enough to decipher, but there are robots check tools for those of you who encounter complicated files.

You don’t want to see this on your site if you’re hoping it’s going to get crawled and indexed:

The good news is that if you have inadvertently blocked engines from the site, it’s a very easy problem to fix.

3. Duplicate Content

Do a Copyscape check if you suspect that this is a problem. As we saw with Panda, tons of sites that have stolen your content can indeed outrank you.

If you do find blatant examples of content theft, how you handle that is your personal decision but no matter what, I would indeed try and get that fixed asap. In the spirit of courtesy, I would advise first contacting the webmaster but sadly, I haven’t seen that actually be the easiest way to get the stolen property taken down.

You can have duplicate content on your site as well of course, but from what I’ve seen, having a minor internal dupe content issue like the same small text blurb on every page won’t hurt you.

4. DNS Issues

if your site has a DNS issue, when a crawler comes through and encounters an error, it can’t crawl your site. You can use an online DNS checker to see whether you’re ok. If you check and get an unsuccessful code/error, I’d look into this asap or contact your host for help.

5.  Check In At Google Webmaster Tools

If you don’t use Google Webmaster Tools, let me tell you that it can be a fantastic resource when things aren’t going well. The most recent issue I’ve seen with this is an erroneous geotarget.

In general though, this is an excellent place to get information about how Google is dealing with your site (the Fetch as Googlebot is particularly handy for me.) You can also check for duplicate internal meta tags and titles here. If you’re not a technical person, this tool might just be your best friend and first resource when something goes wrong.

But How Can You Tell If It Is The Links?

I have never seen a backlink profile that did not contain links that, if I were charged with ferreting out the bad seeds, would not raise a flag to me. Certain link tactics are wildly popular and successful, then they’re not, but they aren’t always cleaned up.

It’s rare for me to see a backlink profile that doesn’t contain at least a few footer links on totally irrelevant sites full of broken English. That doesn’t at all mean that these are hurting you though. They probably are sending you zero traffic and are on such low-value sites that any boost from those links is negligible, but that’s very different from hurting you.

For example, let’s say that you’ve been ranking well on the basis of having links come from major shopping sites, and those sites get devalued in a Pandaesque algorithm change. Those links were helping you, now they aren’t, but I still don’t know if I would say that they’re hurting you, especially if they were well-known sites that continued to get good traffic themselves and send you conversions.

However, if you no longer got any traffic from sites that previously accounted for a major proportion of your visits, you’ll obviously need to pursue new links elsewhere. Still, that doesn’t mean those links are hurting you does it?

Honestly, the safest way I know to determine if links are hurting you is to identify a few and remove one at a time, watching the rankings and traffic to see if anything falls further. If you are still getting traffic from links that are poor, I’d keep them. If you previously got traffic and now get nothing, you could remove them and see what happens.

There are definitely times in which cleaning up a link profile seems to magically fix things, but the why of that is up in the air for each case I think. Maybe your percentage of brand/URL anchors is now much more in keeping with the standard for your niche after you removed the anchors used in most of your spammy links.

For another example, If 75% of your links come from devalued or low value sites and you remove links, causing that percentage to fall to 25%, I would expect to see some positive results. Maybe it’s all about manipulating those numbers. Maybe it’s such a unique thing, individual to each site, that it’s impossible to issue blanketed directives.

My objective in using these tools is, of course, building links, so I’ll go over the tools that I use and show you how I’d use them. And hey, they’re all free!!

For the record, I’m not interested in competitive analysis, analyzing sites, using social media (with one notable exception, and my exclusion here is only because that topic has been well covered both on this site and elsewhere) or examining existing backlinks. I’m interested in using these tools to help with finding new link sources and creating new content.

Also note, we don’t automate anything that we do. I know that we could (and probably should) but these are all tools that we use having that mindset. When we send out link requests, they’re usually pretty targeted so we spend lots of time upfront finding those sites. We aren’t interested in copying anyone’s link profile.

Our main timesuck is definitely discovery so any time I can find a cool tool to help with that, I love it. If you’re lucky enough to get things done through lots of automation, then I’m jealous, but if not, hopefully some of these tools can help you a bit.

For Link Outreach Generation

As much as I would love to totally streamline how we build contacts, I have not yet found a method that works for my link builders due to the way that we build links (it’s a bit old-school.) However, Buzzstream’s Blogroll List Builder is the closest thing I’ve found to being something that will work well for us.

It’s a very cool little tool that accepts a list of blog URLs and returns a downloadable list of blogroll links on those sites. If you have a good, relevant list of blogs to start with, this could definitely lead you to some cool sites and save time.

You still have to do your homework or you’ll be inundated with irrelevant sites, but this one is seriously promising.

For Search Term Discovery & Content Ideas

We have multiple clients and around 20 link builders/content team members so when it comes to discovery, we use many different methods. Some link builders prefer to just crawl around in the SERPs. Some like to sit down with a group and brainstorm.

However, the following tools are ones that we have found to be very useful in triggering new ideas for Google searches, anchor texts, guest posts, and new content for the sites we work on.

I’ve been using Wordtracker for a decade it seems. The Keyword Questions tool is really nice because once you enter your search phrase, it gives you a list of the questions people are asking about that topic and tells you how many times the questions were asked. This is great for helping you figure out what people want to know so that you can write about it.

After you do one search, you are asked to register but hey, it’s for a free account! You get 20 searches for the month so choose them carefully.

The Solo SEO Link Search Tool remains one of my favorites, as when you’re building links all day and you’re just dead tired, this tool makes more searches so easy. Just enter a phrase and it generates a list of more advanced search terms that link straight to the results in the engine that you select.

Pinterest: yes, it’s the latest fad and it can be a massive time waster, but if you use it correctly, you can get tons of great ideas for content. For those of us who like visuals, this has serious potential. If you choose to see what Everyone is pinning, you can drill down into more relevant categories.

Let’s say that I’m building links for a gardening site, so I’ll see what’s being pinned in Gardening. I see a ton of pins about seed bombs, which have interested me for awhile but we haven’t (theoretically) yet written about them on this imaginary gardening blog. Since 5 pins are different seed bomb photos that I see above the fold, this is a pretty good bet for me for my next post that will hopefully generate some links. I might also do some discovery for seed bombs to see if I can find good link targets.

Uber Suggest is powered by Google Suggest. You can select the language you want, whether you want to search the Web, news, or products, and get a downloadable text file. If you click on a result, you get deeper results and it’s all nicely alphabetized. This is great for discovery ideas for both pursuing link targets and generating ideas for guest posts and content.

Touch Graph allows you to visualize related topics. You put in a topic and it returns all kinds of related data such as phrases used for related searches and domains that are related. I think it’s especially good for tangential relevance (where something is related to something else in an indirect manner.) You can click on a graphed result and get related information for it, so the potential for drilling down here is fantastic.

Google’s BlogSearch can be particularly good for finding blogs so you can keep an eye on the homepage in case a new and relevant post pops up where you could get a link. If you’re using Google alerts, you might even set some up for the blogs that you see there.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool is great for finding new keywords to use in search. I always come back to this one because I also do a bit of PPC for a client.

Soovle is getting a lot of attention and it should. You can get search results from Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Yahoo, Youtube, and Bing. Each result is linkable to the original source.

There’s also a link to the top daily internet keywords that’s alphabetized. This is fantastic for giving you ideas for popular searches you can use for discovery or writing content. There are also some “secrets” that are too numerous to include here but if you use this, check them out and see if they help. You can also choose different engines/sites to use for your search and customize this tool further for your needs, which is really nice.

In order to not rehash all I’ve said about free alerts I’ll suggest that you read an earlier post about that as it’s something that I highly recommend for keeping abreast on new potential link targets. It’s also a great way to see what your competitors are doing in case you’re missing a great opportunity.

Just for the record, this is a very small list of tools (that we’ve tested and like) that could work for you (for a bigger one look here). If you have something that you love that is free and useful for discovery, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

In 2010, they added Link Builder in response to consumer demand and to help their keyword customers with their link building efforts. Based in London, the Wordtracker staff is an international bunch, hailing from England, France, Italy, India, Australia and Ireland. To prove this,  CMO Ken McGaffin jokingly pointed out:

I’m an Irishman, living in Scotland, working in London for an English company that does most of its business in the US.

In addition to its tools, Wordtracker has a popular SEO blog and a number of free instructional videos. Let’s take a look at some of the key elements behind Link Builder.

Getting Started

If you’ve read my previous link building tool reviews, you’ll know I am a stickler for detailed “how-to” instructions. I think it’s important these resources be well written and available in multiple formats so webmasters spend minimal time learning and more time linking.

In this regard, Wordtracker gets an A+. The video and written tutorials are the best I’ve seen so far and do an outstanding job explaining how each part of the tool works. I spent a total of 30 minutes watching the videos and reading tutorials, I found I only had to refer back to them one time during my test run, they are very well done.

Another plus for Wordtracker is the way it returns everything in real-time. You don’t have to wait days for data to accumulate or set up a profile manager, results come back almost immediately and in great depth. You have multiple choices in the way you can filter and categorize the data and there is a spreadsheet export function.

Like all linking tools I’ve reviewed, the key to this tool’s success is in the number and scope of keywords and competitive URL’s you use. The more, the better — so don’t skimp or overlook any of your keyword terms.

Start With A Keyword

You can begin your data collection by asking the tool to search on keywords or the URL’s of competitors. I picked the keywords “memory foam mattress” to begin my project.

I inserted my keyword phrase (1.) “memory foam mattress”, selected the country I wanted to target my results from (2.), added the name of my site so the report would show who was linking to my domain (3.) and set up a new file (4.)

Here’s what came back after a 90 second wait:

Over 20,000 results were returned as potential prospects, what you see highlighted in pink are links using the nofollow attribute. The results were seperated by “Strategies” (left column) or link type, this helps categorize the large amount of information returned and allows for further filtering.

I decided to select “News media” since it had the largest number of potential prospects (2774) and is one of my favorite categories to work in. I set the Filter option to return links using the term “mattress” in the anchor so I’d have a more focused set of results to work with.

In the first ten results returned for “News Media”, only one was a news outlet reporting on mattresses. Eight of the results were directories (see image above) and one result was comment spam using the term “mattresses” as a username.

The downside here is a lack of true media results, but on the other hand, I knew there were some solid directory leads returned in the run.

Still, I wasn’t thrilled with the listings and wondered if this was more a result of my keyword term being “non-newsy” or if the tool had a bug. So I ran a second phrase, “political candidates” which is definitely a more news worthy term and let the tool go.

I was right, the mattress term just doesn’t generate media mentions while the second politcal term does.

While the features and operations of this tool are solid, the fact it can only run a single term at a time makes it time consuming to use. If you’re running hundreds of terms or have multiple sites, I’m not sure this tool is for you.

On the other hand, if you’re a small business or have a dedicated linking staff and break your terms and/or sites out by single phrase, only being able to run one term at a time might not be an issue. The laser focus this tool forces you to have will help you run a targeted linking campaign and become well aquainted with your search engine results.

Contact View

Hands down, the best feature in this toolset is the Contacts View option, it pulls contact information off a webpage and organizes it in one spot.

After you’ve run your keywords and collected a list of prospects, save them to a “Targeted” list and engage the “Find contact data” option for each link.

The Link Builder tool then spiders each of the saved prospects by visiting the “About Us” and “Contact” pages on each site and pulling email, telephone, plus any Twitter and Facebook links it finds.

Once you’ve made contact with the site, you can record your actions in the Status box and have a record of what you’ve done and how the webmaster has responded.

If for some reason the Wordtracker spider can’t pull information off the About and Contact pages, there are live links in the account box you can click and pull the information from.

There is a little quirk with this option I would not have known about had I not read the tutorials. The Contact View option takes some time, while it runs you see a busy signal as the data loads. If it goes on too long, refresh the page and the results will display.

Again, if I hadn’t read the help section I could have become frustrated and wasted time contacting Support about this issue. Even worse, if I was using the tool in the trial or first 30 days, I may have cancelled my subscription thinking the tool had a bug. Take the time to read the tutorials carefully before you begin, they really do help.

Strategies

Link Builder offers a detailed written outline of tactics you can consider using, they correspond with the Strategy categories the tool pulls data to:

The strategy guide offers step-by-step instructions how to use the tool’s special features to build links. If you’re stumped for tactics or just want to venture into a new area to build links, this guide will help you get there. In addition to the Strategy guide, Link Builder has a library of link building articles you can peruse for ideas and insights.

Closing Comments

Like a lot of link building tools, Link Builder has its pluses and minuses. I like how the tool automatically highlights links using the nofollow attribute and I love the organization and functionality of Contacts View.

Link Builder is aesthetically pleasing, easy to use and has links to the help section on every page.

For many, this simple tool would be all they need to build links, a contact database and monitor competitors. While the simplicity is good for some, I can see the lack of programming, social media information and analyzing factors a hindrance for others.

The tool does not analyze quality, display PageRank or any other type of authority measure outside of ranking. Granted, knowing where a page ranks is the ultimate authority measure but having additional factors to look at is helpful. Ditto for having social media signals included, with these signals (supposedly) being written into the algorithms this SEO information is crucial for all webmasters large and small.

Link Builder does not offer the option to search on a term and utility phrase because of the way it sorts data.

For example, if I wanted to build a list of sites using the term “running shoes” and “add URL”, I would need to purchase a seperate tool as this function is not included in Link Builder. Having pages returned hosting the term “running shoes” is good, and separating those pages by topical category is helpful, but I still have to wade through thousands of results to determine how I can use them. If I know a page has a submission area on it, my search time is cut in half.

Another drawback as I see it pertains to its lack of programmability. Each time you want to use Link Builder you have to manually run it, there are no scheduling options or presets. Having instant results is great, but being able to generate a list of prospects in my sleep would be better.

If time is not an issue, you are new to SEO or you are a single site/small business owner with minimal social media interactions, Link Builder is an affordable tool option. I recommend signing up for the seven day trial and using all the features before buying a membership.

What will happen if your site gets penalized, banned, hacked, or is cursed with loads of downtime? Sure, PPC is great for this, but what about everything else?

“Ranking” well in other arenas can be a key way of soldiering on until your problem has been fixed. It can also open up some great avenues that lead to new conversions.

Before you build links to all these non-main-site properties though, you need to actually do the same thing you’d do for your site: build up a great presence that’s actually worthy of generating links. Link to these “others” from your main site, and link to your main site from them.

Rank Without Your Site

Does your Facebook page show up in the SERPs when a search for your brand is conducted? If you have one, it probably does, but let’s take that idea and extrapolate it to something a bit more complex. Facebook pages rank well, as we know, so just the act of having one usually means it’s going to show up for your brand. What about for keywords though?

Just so we all remember that there are more great sites than Facebook, let’s take a look at another example. For a search on “Greensboro tree service” I see relevant local results from the following sites listed:

• Yellow Pages
• Google Places
• Google Maps
• Better Business Bureau
• Service Magic (a directory site)

In fact, in the top 10 for this search, if you ignore the local results that show, 3 out of 10 results are from sites that are not actual tree service sites. That equates to 3 out of 10 chances to rank without your site, in other words.

Write Something Somewhere Else (Like I’m Doing Here!)

My agency doesn’t have a work blog because I write for other sites and don’t honestly think that I have all that much to say without repeating myself on my own site. When we started the SEO Chicks blog, several people expressed concern that I was building visibility for something that wasn’t only my own, but then that led to other opportunities.

It led to links, to personal rankings, and to the chance to connect with a wider audience. If you can only have a few listings ranking for your site, why not try and rank other pieces of your work and fill up the SERPs? If you do this properly, you can get great results for your personal brand, your company brand, or your target keywords.

Let’s take the lovely Debra Mastaler as an example here, since she writes for this site and has some great other authority rankings in the top 10 for her name:

In a name search for Debra, you get her sites (new and old), her Twitter profile, author and speaker profiles, and an interview with an industry site. In this case, 6 out of 10 results are from sites that don’t specifically belong to her.

These sites contain links to Debra’s company sites of course, so they’ve been great for link building for traffic most importantly. Debra’s company ranks number 1 for her name, but mine does not, as you can see here:

In fact, most of my business does not come from my actual website (and since it’s an outdated and somewhat crappy site, I’m not complaining.) Most of it comes through referrals from other SEOs, the articles that I write, or interviews that I’ve done.

My site doesn’t rank well for a lot of key terms for my industry but my name pops up as the author of several articles written about link building. Those articles drive quality traffic to me, whether it’s through an author contact form or my actual website.

Brand Yourself Through Non-Site Channels

My cousin has a tire shop that has a website. He also has an awesome Facebook page for it where citizens of my tiny town actually interact. Now, if you are from such a small place, you’ll understand that being wished Happy Holidays by your tire shop employees fosters goodwill and makes you go there when you need new tires. It’s quite simple.

They promote their latest specials, they give out tips about tire pressure, etc, and they give you the info that’s usually annoyingly hard to find on regular websites (store hours, for a prime example.)

Quiksilver has an awesome YouTube brand channel. From road trips to surfing videos, they promote seriously cool content here. As of this time, they have 20,781 subscribers with 11,302,038 video views.

What I like about this is that they use YouTube for things other than selling their clothes. You may see a cool surfing video where the surfer is wearing a suit that you like so since it’s on the Quiksilver brand channel, you’ll go to the site and try to find it. It’s a great way to keep branding.

Figure Out Where Your Users Are & Be There (When They Are There!)

There are a few “when to tweet” services out there but I usually rely on Crowdbooster for this. You have to keep a few things in mind when you’re promoting content of course, with regards to when to do it.

I personally respond very, very well to Papa John’s emails about whatever special happens to be running that day, as they usually hit my inbox at the perfect time (for me with this, that is usually mid-morning when I’m starting to wonder about lunch or around 3pm when I’m struggling to figure out what the kids will eat for dinner.)

If those emails hit my inbox at 10pm, they wouldn’t be effective for me. You can check your site’s metrics to see where your traffic is coming from and make sure that you’re addressing users when they’re likely to be online.

Find out where else your target market hangs out. Competitive analyses can be very good for this so see if your competitors have a Facebook page that’s full of interaction. Are people commenting about your restaurant on Yelp? Then monitor what they say and respond.

Setting up Google alerts, Twitter alerts, and Facebook alerts should cover the majority of what’s said about you online but obviously something like a mention on a private forum that is offlimits to search engines isn’t going to find its way to you. That’s why you might need to do a bit of digging in order to unearth potentially “hidden” communities.

Rank In the Real World, Not Just The Engines

There are plenty of chances for this…conferences, smaller industry events, etc. Do people know your name, do they associate you or your brand with quality, do they reference you when someone asks “who can you recommend to do X for me?”

I live in the South in an old wooden house, so I am quite well acquainted with a local pest control company. If someone mentions seeing a spider the size of his head crawling under the bed, I’ll recommend this company. They’re always on time, the employee who comes out is able to ignore my killer bloodhound, and he’s extremely polite and efficient. Every single time. They rank in my world, so to speak.

A personal recommendation, many times, trumps what you find in the SERPs.

Remember: everyone has a preference for interaction. Some people love Facebook pages, some people can’t live without Twitter, some just want to go to your site. Some people want to read reactions from your customers and a Facebook page is usually perfect for this.

No matter what you do, your actual website isn’t going to be number one all the time. People look elsewhere for what they need so why not be there?