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?

Where We Came From

Some might believe that search engines hate SEOs, hate publishers and have done little over the years to help them. They are mistaken, either choosing to deliberately ignore the gains or, more likely, are simply unaware of how far things have come.

When I first started writing about SEO issues nearly 16 years ago, in 1996, we had little publisher support beyond add URL forms. Today, we have entire toolsets like Google Webmaster Central and Bing Webmaster Tools, along with standalone features and options, which allow and provide:

• Ability to submit & validate XML sitemaps
• Ability to view crawling & indexing errors
• Ability to create “rich” listings & manage sitelinks
• Ability to migrate a domain
• Ability to indicate a canonical URL or preferred domain
• Ability to set crawl rates
• Ability to manage URL parameters
• Ability to view detailed linkage information to your site
• Ability to view keywords used to reach your site
• Notifications of malware or spam issues with your site

There’s even more beyond what I’ve listed above. The support publishers enjoy today was simply unimaginable to many veteran SEOs who were working in the space a decade ago.

The advancement has been welcomed. It has helped publishers better manage their placement in those important venues of the web, the search engines. It has helped search engines with errors and problems that would hurt their usability and relevancy.

That’s why 2011 was so alarming to me. After years of moving forward, the search engines took a big step back.

The Loss Of Link Data

One of the most important ways that search engines determine the relevancy of a web page is through link analysis. This means examining who links to a page and what the text of the link — the anchor text — says about the page.

However, for years Google has deliberately suppressed the ability for outsiders to see what links tell it about any particular page. Want to know why THAT result shows up for Santorum? Why Google was returning THAT result for “define English person” searches? Sorry.

Google won’t help you understand how links have caused these things. It refuses to show all the links to a particular page, or the words used within those links to describe a page, unless you are the page’s owner.

Why? Google’s rationale has been that providing this information would make it harder for it to fight spam. Potentially, bad actors might figure out some killer linking strategy by using Google’s own link reporting against it.

It’s a poor argument. Despite withholding link data, it’s painfully easy to demonstrate how sites can gain good rankings in Google for competitive terms such as “SEO” itself by simply dropping links into forums, onto client pages or into blog templates.

Given this, it’s hard to understand what Google thinks it’s really protecting by concealing the data. But until 2011, there was an easy alternative. Publishers and others could turn to Google-rival Yahoo to discover how people might be linking to a page.

Goodbye Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo launched its “Yahoo Site Explorer” back in September 2005, both as part as a publicity push to win people away from Google and to provide information to publishers. The tool allowed anyone to see what link data Yahoo had about any page in its listings.

Today, Yahoo still supposedly wants to win people away from Google. But because Yahoo’s web search results are now powered by Bing, Yahoo has little reason to provide tools to support publishers. That’s effectively Bing’s problem now.

Yahoo closed Yahoo Site Explorer at the end of last November, saying as it still does on the site now:

Yahoo! Search has merged Site Explorer into Bing Webmaster Tools. Webmasters should now be using the Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure that their websites continue to get high quality organic search traffic from Bing and Yahoo!.

That’s not true. Yahoo Site Explorer was not merged into Bing Webmaster Tools. It was simply closed. Bing Webmaster Tools doesn’t provide the ability to check on the backlinks to any page in the way that Yahoo Site Explorer allowed.

The closure supposedly came after Yahoo “listened to your feedback” about what publishers wanted, as it posted earlier this year. I don’t know what feedback Yahoo was hearing, but what I’ve heard has been people desperately pleading with Yahoo or Bing to maintain the same exact features that Yahoo Site Explorer provided — and pleading for well over a year.

Yahoo-Bing Deal Has Reduced Competition & Features

When the US Department Of Justice granted its approval for Yahoo to partner with Microsoft, that was supposed to ensure that the search space stayed competitive. From what the Department Of Justice said in 2010:

After a thorough review of the evidence, the division has determined that the proposed transaction is not likely to substantially lessen competition in the United States, and therefore is not likely to harm the users of Internet search, paid search advertisers, Internet publishers, or distributors of search and paid search advertising technology.

I’d say dropping Yahoo Site Explorer did harm to both users of internet search and internet publishers. Yahoo Site Explorer was a distinctive tool that only Yahoo offered, allowing both parties named by the DOJ to better understand the inner workings of the search engines they depend on. It also reduced competitive pressure for Google to offer its own tool.

Indeed, things have gotten worse since Yahoo Site Explorer closed. At the end of last December, Bing officially confirmed that it no longer supports the link command in its help forum.

Next To Go, The Link Command?

The link command allows you to enter any page’s web address prefaced by “link:” in order to find links that point at that page. It’s a long-standing command that has worked for many major search engines as far back to late 1995, when AltaVista launched.

Google still supports this command to show some (but not all) of the links it knows about that point at pages. I’d link to Google’s documentation of this, but the company quietly dropped that some time around May 2008. Here’s what it used to say:

Here’s how the command still works at Google. Below, I used it to see what links Google says point to the home page of the official Rick Santorum campaign web site:

The first arrow shows you how the command is being used. The second arrow shows you how Google is reporting there are 111 links pointing to the page. Imagine that. Rick Santorum, currently a major Republican candidate for US president, and Google says only 111 other pages link to his web site’s home page.

The reality is that many more pages probably link over. Google’s counting them but not showing the total number to people who care about what exactly is being considered. I’ll demonstrate this more in a moment, but look at the worse situation on Bing:

One link. That’s all Bing reports that it knows about to those in the general public who may care to discover how many links are pointing to the Rick Santorum web site.

It’s Not Just An SEO Thing

People do care, believe me. I actually started writing this article last Monday and got interrupted when I had to cover how Google might have been involved with a link buying scheme to help its Chrome browser rank better in Google’s own search results.

I doubted that was really the main intent of the marketing campaign that Google authorized (Google did err on the side of caution and punished itself), but the lack of decent link reporting tools from Google itself left me unable to fully assess this as an independent third-party.

As soon as that story was over, renewed attention was focused on why Rick Santorum’s campaign web site wasn’t outranking a long-standing anti-Santorum web site that defines “santorum” as a by-product of anal sex.

Major media outlets were all over that story. My analysis was cited by The Economist, CNN, The Telegraph, The New York Times, MSNBC and Marketplace, to name only some.

But again, I — or anyone who really cared — was unable to see the full links that Google knew about pointing at both sites, much less the crucial anchor text that people were using to describe those sites. Only Google really knew what Google knew.

Third Party Options Good But Not The Solution

If you haven’t heard more complaints over the closure of Yahoo Site Explorer, and the pullback on link data in general, that’s because there are third-party alternatives such as Majestic Site Explorer or the tool I often use, SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer.

These tools highlight just how little the search engines themselves show you. Consider this backlink report from Open Site Explorer for the Rick Santorum campaign’s home page:

The first arrow shows how 3,581 links are seen pointing at the page. Remember Google, reporting only 111? Or Bing, reporting only 1?

The next two arrows show the “external” links pointing at both the Santorum home page and the anti-Santorum home page. These are links from outsiders, pointing at each page. You can see that the anti-Santorum page has four times as many links pointing at it than the Santorum campaign page, a clue as to why it does so much better for a search on “santorum.”

But it’s not just number of links. Using other reports, I can see that thousands of links leading to both sites have the text “santorum” in the links themselves, which is why they both are in the top results for that word.

Because the anti-site has so many more links that say “santorum” and “spreading santorum,” that probably helps it outrank the campaign site on the single word. But because the official site has a healthy number from sources including places like the BBC saying “rick santorum” in the links, that — along with its domain name of ricksantorum.com — might help it rank better for “rick santorum.”

It’s nice that I can use a third party tool to perform this type of analysis, but I shouldn’t have to. It’s simply crazy — and wrong — that both Google and Bing send searchers and publishers away from their own search engines to understand this.

For one, the third party tools don’t actually know exactly what the search engines themselves are counting as links. They’re making their own estimates based on their own crawls of the web, but that doesn’t exactly match what Google and Bing  know (though it can be pretty good).

Not Listing Links Is Like Not Listing Ingredients

For another, the search engines should simply be telling people directly what they count. Links are a core part of the “ingredients” used to create the search engine’s results. If someone wants to know if those search results are healthy eating, then the ingredients should be shared.

Yes, Google and Bing will both report link data about a publisher’s own registered site. But it’s time for both of them to let anyone look up link data about any site.

The Blekko search engine does this, allowing anyone logged in to see the backlinks to a listed page. Heck, Blekko will even give you a badge you can place on your page to show off your links, just as Yahoo used to. But for Google, it’s “normal” for its link command to not show all the links to a page. Seriously, that’s what Google’s help page says.

Google, in particular, has made much of wanting people to report spam found in its search results. If it really wants that type of help, then it needs to ensure SEOs have better tools to diagnose the spam. That means providing link data for any URL, along with anchor text reporting.

Google has also made much about the need for companies to be open, in particular pushing for the idea that social connection should be visible. Google has wanted that, because until Google+ was launched, Google had a tough time seeing the type of social connections that Facebook knew about.

Links are effectively the social connections that Google measures between pages. If social connections should be shared with the world, then Google should be sharing link connections too, rather than coming off as hypocritical.

Finally, it doesn’t matter if only a tiny number of Google or Bing users want to do this type of link analysis. That’s often the pushback when this issue comes up, that so few do these type of requests.

Relatively few people might read the ingredients labels on the food they eat. But for the few that do, or for anyone who suddenly decides they want to know more, that label should be provided. So, too, should Google and Bing provide link data about any site.

Goodbye Keyword Referrer Data

While I’m concerned about the pullback on link data, I’m more concerned about how last October, Google stopped reporting to publishers the keywords people used to find their web sites, for times when those people were logged into Google.

Link data has long been suppressed by Google. Holding back on keyword data is a new encroachment.

Google has said this was done to protect user privacy. I have no doubt many in the company honestly believe this. But it if was really meant to protect privacy, then Google shouldn’t have deliberately left open a giant hole that continues to provide this data to its paid advertisers.

Worse, if Google were really serious about protecting the privacy of search terms, then it would disable the passing of referrers in its Chrome browser. That hasn’t happened.

Unlike the long examination of link data above, I’ll be far more brief about the situation with Google withholding link data. That’s because I’ve already written over 3,000 words looking at the situation in depth last October, and that still holds up. So please see my previous article, Google Puts A Price On Privacy, to understand more.

Google’s Weak Defense

Since my October story, the best defense that Google’s been able to concoct for withholding keyword data from non-advertisers is a convoluted, far-fetched argument that makes its case worse, not better.

Google says that potentially, advertisers might buy ads for so many different keywords that even if referrer data was also blocked for them, the advertisers could still learn what terms were searched for by looking through their AdWords campaign records.

For example, let’s say someone did a search on Google for “Travenor Johannisoon income tax evasion settlement.” I’ve made this up. As I write this, there are no web pages matching a Google search for “Travenor Johannisoon” at all. But…

• If this were a real person, and
• someone did that search, and
• if a page appeared in Google’s results, and
• someone clicked on that page…

then the search terms would be passed along to the web site hosting the page.

Potentially, this could reveal to a publisher looking at their web analytics that there might be a settlement for income tax evasion for involving a “Travenor Johannisoon.” If the publisher starting poking around, perhaps they might uncover this type of information.

Of course, it could be that there is no such settlement at all. Maybe it’s just a rumor. Anyone can search for anything which doesn’t make it into a fact.

More likely, the search terms are so buried in all the web analytics data that the site normally receives that this particular search isn’t noticed at all, much less investigated.

Extra Safe Isn’t Extra Safe

Still, to be extra safe, Google has stopped passing along keyword data when people are signed-in. Stopped, except to its advertisers. Like I said, Google argues that potentially advertisers might still see this information even if they were also blocked.

For instance, say someone runs an ad matching any searches with “income tax evasion” in them. If someone clicked on the ad after doing a search for “Travenor Johannisoon income tax evasion settlement,” those terms would be passed along though the AdWords system to the advertiser, even though the referrer might pass nothing to the advertiser’s web analytics system.

So, why bother blocking?

Yes, this could happen. But if the point is to make things more private, then blocking referrers for both advertisers and non-advertisers would still make things harder. Indeed, Google still has other “holes” where “Travenor Johannisoon” might find his privacy exposed just as happens potentially with AdWords.

For example, if someone did enough searches on the topic of Travenor and tax evasion, that might cause it to appear one of Google Instant’s suggested searches.

So why bother blocking?

Also, while Google blocks search terms from logged-in users in referrer data, those same searches are not blocked from the keyword data it reports to publishers through Google Webmaster Central. That means the Travenor search terms could show up there.

So why bother blocking?

Nothing has changed my view that, despite Google’s good intentions, its policy of blocking referrers only for non-advertisers is incredibly hypocritical. Google purports this is done to protect privacy, but it puts its own needs and advertisers desires above privacy.

Blocking referrers is a completely separate issue from encrypting the search results themselves. That’s good and should be continued. But Google is deliberately breaking how such encryption works to pass along referrer data to its advertisers. Instead, Google should block them for everyone or block them for no one. Don’t play favorites with your advertisers.

What Google & Bing Should Do

Made it this far? Then here’s the recap and action items for moving forward.

Bing should restore its link command, if not create a new Bing Site Explorer. Google should make sure that its link command reports links fully and consider its own version of a Google Site Explorer. With both, the ability for anchor text reports about any site is a must.

If there are concerns about scraping or server load, make these tools you can only use when logged in. But Yahoo managed to provide such a tool. Blekko is providing such statistics. Tiny third-party companies are doing it. The major search engines can handle it.

As for the referrer data, Google needs to immediately expand the amount of data that Google Webmaster Central reports. Currently, up to 10,000 terms (Google says up to 1,000, but we believe that’s wrong) for the past 30 days are shown.

In November, the head of Google’s spam team Matt Cutts — who’s also been involved with the encryption process — said at the Pubcon conference that Google is considering expanding the time period to 60 days or the queries to 2,000 (as said, we think — heck, we can see, they already provide more than this). Slightly more people wanted more time than more keywords shown.

I think Google should do more than 60 days. I think it should be providing continuous reporting and holding that data historically on behalf of sites, if it’s going to block referrers. Google is already destroying historical benchmarks that publishers have maintained. Google’s already allowed data to be lost for those publishers, because they didn’t begin to go in each day and download the latest information.

So far, all Google’s done is provide an Python script to make downloading easier. That’s not enough. Google should provide historical data, covering a big chunk of the terms that a site receives. It’s the right thing to do, and it should have been done already.

What Publishers Can Do

An anti-SOPA-like effort as targeted GoDaddy isn’t going to work with the search engines. That’s because the two biggest things that publishers could “transfer” out of Google and Bing are their ads and their web sites. But there’s no place to transfer these to that wouldn’t hurt the publishers with incredible amounts of lost traffic.

This doesn’t mean that publishers are powerless, however.

Bing is desperate to be seen as the “good” search engine against “evil” Google. Publishers should, whenever relevant, remind Bing that it’s pretty evil not to have maintained its own version of Yahoo Site Explorer much less to have closed the link command.

Mention it in blog posts. Mention it in tweets. Bring it up at conferences. Don’t let it die. Ask Bing why it can’t do what little Blekko can.

As for Google, pressure over link data is probably best expressed in terms of relevancy. Why is Google deliberately preventing this type of information from being studied? Is it more afraid that doing so will reveal weaknesses in its relevancy, rather than potential spam issues? Change the debate to relevancy, and that gets Google’s attention — plus the attention of non-publishers.

There’s also the issue of openness. Google shouldn’t be allowed to preach being “open” selectively, staying closed when it suits Google, without some really good arguments for remaining closed. On withholding link data, those “closed” arguments no longer stand up.

As for the referrer data, Google should be challenged in three ways.

First, the FTC will be talking to publishers as part of its anti-trust investgation into Google’s business practices. Publishers, if asked, should note that by withholding referrer data except for Google’s advertisers, it’s potentially harming competing retargeting services that publishers might prefer to use. Anti-trust allegations seem to really get Google’s attention, so make that wheel squeak.

Second, question why Google is deliberately leaving a privacy hole open for the searchers it’s supposedly trying to protect. If Google’s really worried about what search terms reveal, the company needs a systematic way to scrub potentially revealing queries from everything: suggested searches, reporting in Google Webmaster Central, AdWords reporting as well as referrer data.

Finally, withhold your own data. Are you opted-in to the data sharing on Google Analytics that launched back in 2008? Consider opting-out, if so:

To opt-out, when you log in, select an account, then select “Edit Analytics Account” next to the name of the account in the Overview window, then you’ll see options as shown above and as explained on this help page.

Opting out means you can’t use the benchmarking feature (fair enough, and no loss if you don’t use it) and Conversion Optimizer. If you still want Conversion Optimizer, don’t opt-out or alternatively, tell Google that you should have a choice to share data solely for use with that product but not other Google products.

There might be other drawbacks to not sharing that I’m missing. But we haven’t been sharing here at Search Engine Land since the beginning of the year. So far, we’re not having any problems.

Google loves data. Withholding your own is another way for publishers to register their displeasure about having data withheld from them. And it’s the type of thing that Google just might notice.

Related Articles

• What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?
• Search Engine Land’s Guide To SEO
• The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors
• What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters
• How The “Focus On First” Helps Hide Google’s Relevancy Problems
• Yahoo Completes Global Organic Transition To Bing
• Yahoo Site Explorer Closing Down Monday, November 21st
• The Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal, In Simple Terms
• Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools
• Google Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases
• Yahoo Adds Link Badge In Site Explorer
• Link Building Tool Review: Link Research Tool Set By CEMPER
• Link Building Tool Review: SEOmoz PRO
• Link Building Tool Review: SEO Book
• Link Building Tool Review: Raven Tools
• Link Building Tool Review: Majestic SEO
• Bing Webmaster Tools Launches New Link Reports; Google Webmaster Tools Changes Theirs
• Blekko’s SEO Tools: What Information Do They Provide?
• Blekko Offers New Linkroll Widget & More Publisher Tools
• Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty
• Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?
• How Rick Santorum Is Making His “Google Problem” Worse
• For “Define An English Person,” Google Suggests The C-Word
• Google’s Spam Report Page Gets “Biggest Refresh” In Years
• Google: As Open As It Wants To Be
• Google’s Facebook Competitor, The Google+ Social Network, Finally Arrives
• How Google Instant’s Autocomplete Suggestions Work
• Google Webmaster Tools Adds Page-Level Query Data
• Google Webmaster Tools Search Queries Report Now Less Accurate
• Google Analytics Benchmarking Feature, Data Sharing & Audio Ad Charting
• Guest Opinion: Is Google’s Privacy Move Really An Anti-Competitive Practice?
• Dear Congress: It’s Not OK Not To Know How Search Engines Work, Either
• Googleopoly: The Definitive Guide To Antitrust Investigations Against Google
• Keyword “Not Provided” By Google Spikes, Now 7-14% In Cases
• Google Puts A Price On Privacy

For our purposes here in Link Week, I’ll be reviewing the Site Explorer, Backlink History, Neighbourhood Checker, and Clique Hunter.

Basic Tool Functions

First up is the Site Explorer, which takes your URL and returns tons of information: Summary, Top Backlinks, Referring Domains, and Top Pages. Each section is represented on the results page, but you can click on the tabs and get more in-depth info if you like. You can choose the Fresh Index or the Historic Index and run the report on either the domain, the subdomain, or the page itself.

My favorite tool, the Backlink History, also shows up here in the results page but not in its own tab. Now, a note on the Fresh vs. Historic Index: the Fresh index gives you information from a rolling 30 day period and is more, um, fresh, while the Historic index gives you everything in Majestic’s history for a site.

The Domain Information gives you your Referring Domains and External Backlinks, so you can quickly tell if you have a lot of sitewides (if you have 10k backlinks and 10 referring domains, yes, you have a lot of sitewides.)

Your backlinks and referring domains are broken down into educational and governmental and the following information is displayed: Referring IP Addresses, Class C Subnets, Indexed URLs, Images, Nofollow Links, Redirects, Frames, and Deleted Links. You’ll also see a number called the Majestic Million which is a list of the top one million domains as rated by Majestic SEO.

The Backlink History shows your 2 charts: 1 is your external backlinks discovery over the past 12 months and the other is your referring domains discovery over the past 12 months. You can click on these two charts in order to go directly to the Backlink History tool and get more information.

The Top Backlinks area shows the Source URL, Anchor Text, Target URL, and Last Crawl Date.

The Referring Domains area lists the top domains that link to your URL.

The Top Pages area lists your top pages: Title, URL, AC Rank (which is a measure of how important a page is based on the number of unique referring external root domains), Date, External Backlinks, and Referring Domains.

How To Interpret The Link Data

This is a wealth of information for analyzing a backlink profile. If you’re analyzing your own site, I see numerous uses:

• Identifying the top pages that link to you and making sure these links stay up. It’s tricky to watch all your backlinks if you have a lot of them, but if you’re too overwhelmed, just identify the top ones and track those.

• Identifying your site’s top pages so that you can continue to build good links to these in particular (and go through your site to ensure that your top pages link to other pages that you think are critical but aren’t viewed as top ones just yet.)

• Identifying pages of lower importance so that you can work on their content in hopes of generating more backlinks.

For competitive analysis, this information can easily be used to see where you stand compared to others in your niche.

For potential link partners, use this data to identify the top pages on a site and go after a link on that page. With so much information, there are truly countless ways of using this data to help better your link building efforts.

Note: I’d love to include a screenshot here but the information you get takes up a large amount of space and I don’t think I can do it justice. Since you can see the Site Explorer for free, even if you can’t get all the detailed data, I’d suggest checking it out for yourself.

Next up is the Backlink History, which has been something I have relied upon many times (especially when clients are trying to convince me that they know their competitors aren’t matching/beating their own link building efforts.) You can again use either the fresh or historic index here and you can compare up to five domains. Currently, subdomains are ignored.

This tool shows backlink discovery by month, so let’s get a screenshot of a few SEO sites to compare (Disclaimer: I write for the three sites used here):

What you see here is the default view, which is a set of two graphs: backlinks discovery and referring domains discovery in non-cumulative view.

You can view the charts in Monthly, Cumulative, or Normalized forms, see them as a Spline, Line, Column or Area chart, and choose whether you want to see data from 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, or all time.

Majestic SEO advises that you use the Normalized view and/or compare domains in order to get the most comparable data down at the bottom of the page. In these charts, you’ll see how you compare to your competitors.

It’s interesting to compare the two charts as well because of the difference in referring domains and backlinks discovery (and for those of you who are new to link building concepts, referring domains would show a value of 1 even if there were 150 links to a site on that same site, but it would show a value of 150 if you were looking at backlinks.)

According to the chart in the screenshot, Search Engine Land has traditionally built more backlinks than the other two but the referring domains numbers between SEL and Search Engine Journal are quite close. (Poor SEO Chicks.) This would make me suspect that Search Engine Land is generating more instances of multiple links on the same domain. In any case, this is a seriously great tool to use to see how your backlinks/referring domains compare with others.

Now we’ll turn to the Neighbourhood Checker, which accepts either a domain or an IP address. As usual, you can choose either fresh or historic data. This tool shows you the most backlinked domains hosted on any IP or subnet so that you can get a better idea of potentially dangerous cohosted sites.

When you enter your site or IP, you get two lists: one that shows what is cohosted on your IP, and one that shows what is cohosted on your subnet. Here’s an edited screenshot, as I don’t want to rile anyone up:

The data shown lets you check the site out by visiting it, going to the Site Explorer, or seeing its Backlink History, so checking out what’s cohosted is pretty simple. You’re shown the location of the IP, referring domains, and external backlinks to each domain listed.

I would recommend using this tool in conjunction with others that give you a fuller picture, of course, since with the rise in spammy sites over the past decade, it’s truly difficult to run a report like this and not find something that might seem a bit dangerous at first glance. There are many ways in which this data could be interpreted, so I’ll leave that up to you.

Last but not least is the Clique Hunter which allows you to enter up to ten unique root domains (with a minimum of two) and shows you a representation of the main sites that link to the sites you’ve entered, therefore identifying your cliques.

The thickness of the line indicates that more links come from that domain to the domain it points to, so as you can see in the screenshot below, there are lots of links on blogspots that point to Search Engine Land.

Further down, you can better filter your results by increasing your minimum number of matches, number of results shown, and the depth of analysis. You can then sort the data by about a dozen metrics, ascending or descending, then sort further (like you’d do with a spreadsheet.)

You’ll see a list of domains along with the number of linked domains to those sites, matches, Alexa rank, and numbers for your queried domains. For each domain listed, you can visit the site, view the backlink history, see it in Site Explorer, or create an exportable CSV report. There are also links at the bottom that will allow you to view the queried domains in summary form on the Bulk Backlink Checker and the Backlink History.

Interestingly, this tool was inspired by Aaron Wall’s Hub Finder (my favorite of his set.) Just as with the Site Explorer, there is a multitude of great information here and I can see tons of ways to use it for link building but the main one is simple:

Identify the sites that link to your competitors but not to you, yet. Pursue links on those sites.

It’s worth mentioning that Majestic has a cool plugin that works in either IE (gasp) or Firefox. It lists Majestic SEO as one of your search engines so you can simply choose it and go to the Site Explorer page for a site.

Link Tool Takeaways

So there you have it…another amazing suite of tools that can ramp up your link building efforts, complete with a blog, video tutorials, and a constantly updated index.

Overall, Majestic is extremely easy to use and is quite intuitive, so even for a true beginner, I can’t see these tools being overwhelming. The amount of data could potentially overwhelm someone but honestly, that’s not a bad thing in my opinion. I’d rather have more than less. With the different packages available, even a small or solo operation would be well-advised to use this system.

Majestic also has a great blog that is searchable and contains posts about latest updates, along with tons of training posts and videos. If you can’t figure out how to use one of their tools, it’s not for their lack of trying. I actually found it all quite straightforward and intuitive though, and even for a novice tool user, I don’t think you’ll be stumped.

Finally, there is the API: I did not test this but it’s worth noting as it enables you to access key functions and gives you a development area where you can test applications without affecting your subscription resources (which include set numbers of reports you can run a month, for example.)

While we’re on the subject of reports, there are two types: standard and advanced. All subscription plans provide access to standard reports, which can be run for any website. A standard report gives you what Majestic believes is the key set of information including an overview, backlinks information, and anchor text information. Advanced reports gives you absolutely everything you could possibly want to know about a domain. These reports are also downloadable so that you can further analyze the data.

To sum it up, this is a massively powerful set of tools if you’re interested in link building. It’s intuitive, fast, and due to the different tiers of pricing, there’s an option for everyone. If you need less link-focused tools this may not be the suite for you, because there are no rank checkers or code validators, but for link building, it’s seriously top notch.

 SEO:  “So, I’m concerned that we’re not proactively link-building and that may have a negative impact on our high quality in bound traffic.”

Executive:  “But when I type-in the company’s name, we are number one in Google.”

SEO:  “Yes, well you are getting personalized results AND there’s a lot more to . . .”

Executive:  “Don’t worry, we have a lot of PageRank juice all over our website.” 

SEO:  “But the amount of converting traffic has declined over the past . . .” 

Executive:  “Besides spiders really like our platform.  Robots do too.” 

SEO:  “OK, I’ll go clean up all that PageRank juice.  Where’s the mop and bucket?”  

The purpose of this post is to provide SEO’s with a series of metrics with which to evaluate your link profile as well as a series of visuals with which to scare MBAs into action. (Or at least approving a budget.)

While I’ve written against benchmarking within your own industry; for internal reporting to business executives, comparing your company to competitors can be extremely effective for galvanizing support and loosening pursestrings.

To make your job easier, I’m drawing data entirely from free tools – primarily Blekko, Majestic and SEOmoz. The former offers SEO data after every search; the latter two offer products: Site Explorer and Open Site Explorer, not to be confused with Yahoo’s . . . . errrr . . . Site Explorer.

For demonstration purposes, I’ll compare Urbanspoon to OpenTable, now that both are in the online reservations space. Accessing these tools is pretty easy and there are more than a few browser plug ins that aggregate some reporting. I use SEO for Chrome Extension for a very quick, cursory look.

Of course, the obvious starting point is a simple overall metric.

Google PageRank is an obvious (and simplistic, poor, inadequate, misleading) choice, that many fallaciously believe aggregates all of that delicious Google Juice into a simple number.

Both SEOmoz  and Majestic offer a variety of metrics on a 100 point scale – Domain mozrank (SEOmoz) and Domain Authority (Majestic) are their respective attempts to calibrate Page Rank.

The problem with overall metrics, of course, is that they tell a very, very small part of the picture.

Instead, let me suggest a variety of supplemental metrics that are both actionable and highly scary (read: competitive) to MBA types.

Competitive Domain Diversity Ratios

I prefer to use domain diversity to evaluate the quality of linkbuilding campaigns. It’s not a perfect metric; however, it more accurately reflects genuine linkbuilding initiatives than sheer link volume. Looking at the sheer number of links entirely misses the point.

To wit – a single site with a footer link could generate thousands, even millions of links, all of which are completely useless.

Get domain diversity from Majestic under the Linking Domains tab – be sure to update the pulldown for “pages on this root” (below). In Blekko, just do a search for your site, click, seo underneath the result and then hit “inbound links” under Domain SEO.

On SEOmoz’s OpenSite Explorer, make sure you look at the entire domain by using the drop down “pages on this root” and then running the report.

Note:  you only get three freebies daily with SEOmoz; at some point, Majestic prompted me to create a free account too, which gave me enough reports to write this article in one day.

Compare these three reporting tools and graph:

Cumulative Domain Diversity from Majestic

Graphically depict differences in domain diversity over time with Majestic’s historic reporting.

This requires a free account with Majestic to get access to their cumulative domain report and graphically compare your site with up to 4 competitors.

Non-Homepage Links

The true art of an SEO’s linkbuilding lies in the ability to drive links to interesting content, not your PR team’s ability to drive stories that link to the homepage (although these links are extremely valuable.)

Look at your homepage to non-homepage link ratio. (You are shooting for the lowest percentage of links going to your homepage here.) I can do this easily with Blekko, Majestic or SEOmoz data.  Here’s the reporting from Majestic:

Just run reports for both the Root Domain and the Page and calculate a ratio of homepage:overall on both links and domains. Below is the data from Majestic with 5 different domains:

Again, if you can look at this from a link perspective, it tells a very different story than the domain perspective. My strong bias is that domain comparison is much more reflective of overall organic link strength of a site.

The next three graphs are based on the assumption that overall link strength is reflected in your long tail results.

Ideally, you should see growth in both the number of landing pages and the number of different keywords brining traffic to your site. You can get both of these from Google Analytics (and obviously can’t get them for your competitors).

Number Of Landing Pages

Number Of Keywords

Sitemap:Crawl:Index:Entry Ratio

Finally, the grandaddy of all data wrapped into a single visual. This reviews the effectiveness of all of your pages at driving traffic. This is based on the assumption that the better your link profile, the more pages you’ll get crawled, the more pages will be indexed and the more pages will get traffic.

You can make pretty scary graphs that would make any MBA Strategy 101 class proud by turning these into stacked area graphs in either absolute (to show progress over time) or relative (to show the percentage of your pages that don’t have a chance of getting any traffic).

If you click on the SEO Tools link on the topnav, you’ll see a list of both free and paid tools. However, other pages on the site did lead me to a few other tools not specifically listed there, so I’ll do my best to give you a comprehensive list of what’s out there with regards to link building tools, since that’s the focus of this review.

Listed on the nav bar, we have the following tools that I have reviewed for link building purposes:

• Local Rank
• Hub Finder
• Competitive Research

Other particularly interesting public link tools I found through digging on the site include:

• Link Harvester
• Link Suggestion Tool
• Link Popularity Comparison Tool

There are also free Firefox add-ons (SEO for Firefox is included in this review), keyword tools, analytics tools, PPC tools, a rank checker, a site health check, and more. That’s one thing that makes this suite of tools so valuable; you don’t get tools that are only built for one aspect of marketing.

SEO For Firefox Plugin

First up is the free plugin SEO for Firefox. The SEO for Firefox plugin is truly one of the most indispensable tools out there in my opinion. All of my link builders use it and it’s my go-to quick analysis tool.

PageRank is the only thing that is automatically pulled into the tool, so if you want other metrics, you’ll have to customize it. There is some very helpful advice from Aaron about how to configure the extension to use the least resources so I’d highly recommend reading his instructions.

This extension can easily be turned on and off so that it’s not running nonstop, which I really like. Firefox is slow enough. Obviously, there is a lot of link data here. Metrics are as follows (listed in as small a space as possible since there are so many):

PR, Google Cache Date, Traffic Value, Age, del.icio.us, del.icio.us Page Bookmarks, Diggs, Diggs Popular Stories, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Y! links, Y! edu links, Y! gov links, Y! Page links, Y! edu page links, OSE links to page, OSE links to domain, Blekko domainlinks, Technorati, Alexa, Compete.com rank,, Compete.com uniques, Cached, Dmoz, Bloglines, Page blog links, wikipedia, dir.yahoo.com, BOTW, Business, Majestic SEO linkdomain

You can doubleclick a metric in the popup window and be taken to the source for further digging. I didn’t get data for many of the metrics, however, but issues like this are discussed in the instructions, as some of the data sources might not always be reliably pingable.

You can use SEO for Firefox as an on-demand service, like I do (which means that you can easily just rightclick, go to SEO for Firefox, and look up the page) or you can run it all the time and you’ll see the data at the bottom of the SERPs like this:

Again, the data you see is clickable and leads you to the source for more information.

Another handy part of this tool is that you can highlight nofollow links and external links and see images’ alt attributes through SEO XRay, which is a feature on the extension that gives you even more cool information such as is seen in the following screenshot:

How would you use this to help build links?

For starters, it tells you just about everything you need to know about a site that you’re thinking about getting a link on, and it’s a great way to do some competitive analysis. It’s not a tool to show you where to build links, but it’s a great analysis tool to firm up your decision.

As always though, don’t let metrics alone be the deciding factor in whether or not to pursue a link. Some sites may show low metrics for certain things (like the dreaded PageRank) so use caution when evaluating a site strictly by numbers.

Pros

• I love the on-the-fly capability of this, as I hate running tools that slow down my browser.
• I like that you can either see the desired data by clicking and grabbing it on the page, or by viewing it in the SERPs.
• For a quick overview on a site, I don’t know of anything that I find more useful.

Cons

• If you aren’t using Firefox, you’re out of luck.
• Not all of the data sources return information all the time.

Local Rank

Next we have Local Rank. Local Rank is a Member’s Only tool. The tool runs on the premise that sites that are well linked to from top results might get a rankings boost in Google for certain keywords.

Fields are as follows:

• The Keyword field is where you enter the keyword…pretty self-explanatory.
• The Scan First (x) Results lets you choose from the default 100 to 1000 results. This tells the tool how many results to scan.
• The Find LocalRank links pointing at the top search results field lets you choose from the default 10 to 50 results and tells the tool how many top results to find links to.
• The Region/Country field lets you choose where you want your query to be run, with Google.com as the default. From what I can tell, there are choices for just about every country-specific Google.

When you submit your query, you’ll see results like the following:

The tool lists the URLs found for the initial query along with crawl dates and both Yahoo and Majestic link counts.

It then uses a re-ranking algorithm to identify a list of sites that have are frequently cited from those sites. These are your likely link targets and they’re listed in the matrix below the initial results set. There is also a link to the Competitive Research Tool which is quite handy, and the matrix can be exported.

Here’s a screenshot:

Each URL has associated numbers running across the top, along with checkmarks that indicate that the site to the right of it is linking to the site at the top of the matrix. (Note: I did have to ask Aaron to clarify this one.)

Pros

• The Yahoo and Majestic link count data is pretty cool and takes you to the source in case you want to do any extra digging.

Cons

• While I was able to see the Yahoo data from the links in the results listed above the matrix, all of the non-URL results that I clicked on in the results matrix sent me to a Yahoo site explorer page with no results.

Competitive Research Tool

Now we’ll turn to the Competitive Research module which is a tool that’s only available to members. Enter in a URL or keyword, choose a datacenter, and you’re provided with competitive information including organic and pay per click.

Since I also do PPC work, this is a particularly cool tool for me because I could use it to help make recommendations about where to put the marketing efforts.

If you put in a URL you’ll just get data for that one in particular, and if you input a keyword, you’ll see a list of URLs along with corresponding numbers but the results available are a bit different, so it’s worth playing around with, using both URLs and keywords, in order to get a full picture.

You can either enter a URL or a keyword for this one. For the first example, I’ve entered the keyword “umbrellas” as it’s looking a bit rainy outside today. You need to make sure to hit the Keyword button of course (and obviously the Domain button if you’re entering a URL) and then choose a Google datacenter.

The keyword report shows you CPC, Competition, and Ave. Volume for your keyword and several related ones.

To get even more specific domain-related information, choose the Domain option. For this example I’ll use the New York Times since they are a well-known site and certainly can’t complain about being outed anywhere for anything.

Here you’ll see the following: Domain, Rank, Organic Keywords, Organic Traffic, Organic Cost, Adwords Keywords, Adwords Traffic, and Adwords Costs for the domain summary itself.

Next, you’ll see the following for fields for keyword-specific organic data: Keyword, Pos, Traffic %, Costs %, Costs CPC, Volume, Total Keyword value, Value of #1 Ranking, Current Position Value, Upside Potential, Upside Potential %, and URL. That’s a plethora of great data.

The data doesn’t stop here, however.

We also get tons of Adwords-specific information about the keywords (and quite honestly, I will just bore you if I continue to list all the fields so suffice it to say, you’ll be buried under information here), along with competitors’ information (again in both organic and Adwords-specific formats), then Potential Ads/Traffic Buyers listed in both Organic to Adwords Competition and Potential Ads/Traffic Sellers listed in both Organic to Adwords Competition.

Wow. For all of the sets of data, you have the option to get even more information. This tool alone could take up an entire review and I doubt I’d still cover it all.

So how would you use this for link building?

Tons of ways, I’m sure – but I’ll cover just a few ways I’d use the data.

1.  Just as it’s good to use organic data in conjunction with PPC data in order to maximize your outlay and resources, it’s good to use both of these to help decide where to hit links the hardest. By showing you what your URL ranks for in Google alongside the traffic percent and cost per click of that keyword, you can decide which anchors to go after.

2.  By using a keyword, you can see a list of related competing keywords alongside their cost per click and current value. Depending upon my budget, I’d make decisions on where to spend the most money to get the best results.

3.  Figure out how your competitors are doing in organic and paid search in order to better tailor your link efforts.

Pros

• This data is fantastic and the tool is easy to use. I love that it combines PPC and organic in a way that is applicable to link building. Usually, you don’t get that in one tool.
• The report runs quite quickly which is always nice.
• I like that you can either do this by keyword or by domain, depending upon your needs.

Cons

• Honestly, I can’t think of any, unless you happen to be a person who hates great data.

Hub Finder

The Hub Finder is another member’s only tool that finds instances of co-occurring links. It runs on the premise that a site that links out to several competitors in the same field should have editorial integrity and be willing to link to you as well. You can plug in between two and ten of your competitors in order to identify sites that link to as many of them as you specify.

So let’s get started with the fields and what to do with each one. Straightforward for many of you, but I’m such a literalist that I did have to ask Aaron a few questions in order to understand what to do with two of the fields.

• The Subject can be used to pull a list of relevant sites to query from either Google or Yahoo. You can also just enter your own URLs.
• The Results field is a dropdown list of 1 to a default value of 20 that simply specifies how many results you’d like to see when you run the tool.
• The API field is used to specify whether you want to use the API or Yahoo, Google, or both of them at the same time.
• Min Match tells the tool how many minimum matches to show, meaning that if you want to only see sites that link to all 5 of your competitors, you’d choose 5. If you wanted to see sites that linked to just 2 of your 10 competitors, you’d choose 2. Nice and straightforward stuff, even for me.
• The Depth field is used to specify how many top inbound links you want to search through for each domain, ranging from the default of 50 to 250.
• The optional Include This Site field is one that I did have to ask about, as I wasn’t sure what the purpose was. The answer made perfect sense: this field is used to force the inclusion of one URL in particular. I’ll share Aaron’s example here:

“an example…a site competing against one of my sites rebranded to a new URL. so I found links to them that were on any page that had links to other top sites in that vertical. figuring some of those are resources pages that might be willing to list more sites in the niche, I can then manually contact them & let them know about the updated link or broken link or whatever & then also pitch the link I want promoted as well.”

• The Link Type field is used to select either Domain or Page values.
• The Application field is used to select either Sort By or Must Link. Options are Sort By and Must Link.

So let’s get started, using a nice SEO example with the major SEO sites listed, forcing the include for the SEO Chicks site.

The results are mapped with a number corresponding to each competing URL, along with Xs that denote which sites have co-occuring links. There’s a highlight function that is activated if you click on one of the numbers that denotes a URL so you can more easily see specific instances of co-occurrences.

The results set also contains links to the following:

• Whois (W)
• Archive.org (A)
• Google cache (H)
• DMOZ (D)
• Yahoo Directory (Y)

You’ll see the IP address for each URL and be able to click through to the sites themselves. The report is also downloadable which is always handy.

Pros

• There is a lot of documentation for the Hub Finder, which was helpful.
• I love the results report, which makes it very easy to quickly see which sites link to competing URLs but not your own.
• It uses Yahoo mainly, not Google. Hooray!
• In addition to loving the results report, I love the results, period. Finding co-occuring links is a great way to find new opportunities for your own site.
• The report is downloadable.
• The report runs quickly.

Cons

• Error checking messages are non-existent on this tool. If you do something wrong, you just won’t see results and you may not understand that it is because you have misused the tool. I had to ask a few questions in order to understand how to use this properly, even after reading the instructions. Once you understand how exactly to use it, it makes sense of course, but I do think that error messages would be helpful to users.
• Some functionality just didn’t make sense to me. For example, if you choose the default Sort By in the Application, you will see results that don’t necessarily link to the site that you may have put into the Include This Site field. If you choose the Must Link, you’ll only see results that link to that site at a minimum. To me, this is a bit confusing since I’d assume that including a site would take care of this.
• The example image used in the instructions page had a field in it that was not present in my current version.

Bottom line: I’ve used this tool before (long enough ago that I forgot how it worked, oddly enough) and always been a fan of it. I love the idea behind it and the fact that it’s a great source for new links. Error checking messages are something I seem to need due to being a bit of a clumsy user, but as I said, once you understand what to do, the tool is straightforward.

Wrapup

My favorite tool in this suite was the Hub Finder. It’s straightforward and applicable to the way I build links. I also rely upon the SEO for Firefox plugin but that’s a free tool. I could also use more error messages as I have said, due to being a bit spastic and clicking without reading things carefully.

I would probably not purchase a membership strictly for the tools. However, the forum alone is worth the price. Heck, the monthly wrapup that Aaron does is worth the price! I do keep up on what’s going on but his October wrapup, available only to members, alerted me to tons of articles that I had not seen. If you’re busy and can afford the cost, I’d become a member for that alone as it honestly did cover just about everything that happened. Participants in the forum seem to be extremely open and helpful and just in skimming a few topics, I learned a lot.

There are also training videos, tons of archived articles, downloadable strategy guides, and quick start checklists. If you’re just starting out in SEO, I’d say this program would definitely benefit you. If you’re a seasoned SEO and want to get the same kind of information that you tend to get only at bars after a conference, this is what you’re looking for.

To me, SEO and link building are inextricably linked. However, Rae’s advice was dead on because she pointed out that we were indeed charged with discussing just link building, not SEO, and there was an SEO site clinic as well. The most difficult part of the session, for me, was in staying on task with the links and ignoring all the glaring SEO errors that I saw, and that I see with sites every day.

Link building can definitely help rank a site, provided there’s enough time, money and resources. However, it’s just not enough to sustain a site.

You may be No. 1, but your site is horribly unfriendly to users, thereby losing conversions left and right. You may have been hit by recent algorithmic updates and consequently built links like crazy, only to see no results. It’s just not enough on its own anymore.

Here are the top five issues that have continually come up and affected our link building efforts:

1. Failure to properly institute server redirects

You’d be surprised to see how many websites still don’t 301 one version of their site (whether www or non-www) to the other version. This causes issues with indexation and link juice.

If you run both www and non-www versions without a 301, you’re essentially splitting the link juice, as people will link to you using both non-www and www paths. If you 301 one version and people link to the nonpreferred URL, you’re still getting the link juice benefit through the 301, so make sure you pick one or the other.

2. Internal link structure

From not using good anchors internally to wasting nav space on lower-quality pages, suboptimal internal link structure is one of the most common problems I encounter when reviewing a site. It’s a rare site that actually needs to link to 100 equally important pages from the homepage, but you wouldn’t know it to look at some sites.

I’ve seen that especially with e-commerce sites that sell niche items. It’s great that you have 100 types of products, but there’s a better way to get a user there than by having them all in a leftnav.

Additionally, I see lots of people wasting opportunities for good anchor text internally. If you’re linking to your metal posters page with the anchor “Ripped!” then you’re also potentially confusing users and squandering conversions.

3. Not making additional important features obvious to users

If you have a Twitter account, list it on the home page. The same goes for Facebook. I’ve looked at several sites recently and while they do have social media accounts, you’d never know it unless you happened to search for it.

The same holds true for a company blog, a YouTube channel, or anything else that will flesh out your online presence and give users more content and more opportunities to interact with you in different ways. Let people know where else you hang out.

4. Not using 404s properly

Different people like to handle 404s in different way. My agency just sends any page-not-found request back to the home page. Hey, so does The Onion!!

I thought this was the easiest route to take, but my preference would probably be a custom 404 scenario that did the whole “were you maybe looking for this instead?” list of URLs based on a semantic analysis of what was typed, along with a handy site search box and all old pages/potentially-mistyped-paths 301′d. I can dream can’t I?

Some people use very creative 404 pages. Some people 301 the heck out of every possible error URL you could dream up. The key is, indeed, to handle 404s and not just leave a user hanging.

If you have any links going to pages that are no longer found on your website and you aren’t handling this, that’s obviously a bad user experience — which leads to fewer conversions — so ideally you should make sure you 301 any old URLs that have inbound links.

If you only do a pretty 404 page, make sure that it contains a link to your home page at the very least, so you’ll still provide a better user experience.

Bad!

Good!

For more about how to handle this, last week’s Link Week column on how to capture broken inbound links is a fantastic resource.

5. Robots.txt issues

Some sites have loads of PDFs, Excel files, etc., and they don’t really need to be polluting the SERPs. Before you block those pages though, see if they rank! If they’re driving relevant traffic to your site, I wouldn’t block them. If they don’t rank and aren’t anything you’d like a user to click on without first going through the site, add them to the robots.txt file.

Obviously there are additional instances where you’ll have something else wrong, SEO-wise or user-wise, with your site, causing issues with rankings and conversions, but this is a good start to help you figure out what to look for, as these are definitely the most common problems that I’m seeing with the sites that I analyze.

Just remember this: Any link building campaign that doesn’t take SEO and usability into account is not a link building campaign that will withstand the test of time. You may still rank, but you won’t close the deal.

It’s no wonder that question and answer sites continue to gain in popularity, and while I’ve viewed them as a great free or inexpensive marketing and personal branding tool for awhile now, it’s only recently that I’ve come to see how useful they can be at helping everyone build links and do better SEO.

Think about how you’d search online if you weren’t ultra-familiar with search engines and data. You’d use longer-tailed queries probably, for one thing, and you’d hopefully be better able to hone in on more relevant results in the SERPs. Now think about all the ways questions can help you when you’re marketing online.

Now, there are some amazing tools out there for keyword discovery of course, but look at how different our keywords would be if we used a traditional keyword tool (in this case it’s Google Adwords’ tool) vs. a Q&A site (Quora, in this example):

Google Adwords Tool

Google Adwords data for NYC Restaurants

Quora

Quora questions

As you’ll see, both searches give you some results that aren’t exactly what you’re looking for but are indeed related. (Obviously, if you’re going to be eating cupcakes, you’ll need a nice place to run right?) Using the above example, think about using Q&A sites for the following tasks.

Keyword Research For Content

Let’s say you’re writing new content for your New York restaurants site. Using the above data, you can see both popular phrases used when searching for what you have to offer and you can see other related bits to add in.

Maybe you’d not yet thought about desserts (pie and cupcakes in this case) as being something to work in, yet the Quora data triggers an idea for a separate piece of content about all the great places to buy those in Manhattan.

Key Terms For Use With Social Media

New ideas are always helpful when using social media, as you can better see which phrases to use to attract your targets and interact with them.

I have mentioned Followerwonk before as it’s a fantastic tool to use to see how Twitter users describe themselves in their bios, and having new phrases gleaned from Q&A data means you can expand your search here as well.

Others use Followerwonk in hopes of finding you, too, remember, so if they’re relevant, these new phrases can be added to your bio.

Followerwonk

New Ways Of Discovering Potential Link Targets

If you use manual searches in order to discover link targets, Q&A sites can give you tons of new ways to phrase your queries. I absolutely cannot live without the Solo SEO link search tool for generating queries as it alleviates all that pesky typing and leads you straight to query results.

Instead of just using your typical “New York city restaurants” phrase here, use a few other ones gleaned from what Q&A sites say that people are talking about.

These same new topic ideas will work with advanced search queries, straight up manual discovery in any search engine, and directory searches.

New Ways Of Discovering Potential Sources & Topics For Guest Posts

Similar to what I said regarding keyword research for your own copy, this information can easily help you narrow down your guest post searches (maybe instead of just looking for sites wanting posts about NYC restaurants you’ll now look for sites seeking posts about desserts in the Northeast) and give you ideas on new content.

Quora is my favorite for keeping updated on related questions and can be great for triggering ideas for new posts, with their “Someone adds a related question to a question I’m following” email option. Sometimes creativity strikes when you least expect it in your inbox, so I’m really loving this functionality.

A Few Popular Q&A Platforms

• Yahoo Answers
• Quora
• Answerbag
• Answers

Since there’s always something new popping up, just go and search for Q&A sites and I imagine you’ll find new ones. I’d suggest trying a few out in order to find which ones work best for you, too, as we all have our individual preferences and different marketplaces to work in.

Now to conclude, I’m not at all suggesting that we abandon traditional keyword tools or use Q&A in order to replace anything we use to do a better job with link building.

However, I am suggesting that diversifying your methods is a good idea, and using popular community sites to do that right now can only better your results.

As an SEO and a link builder, I’m tasked with making sure that search engines and users can find and interpret content, but as you can imagine, what works for one group doesn’t necessarily work for another.

With this in mind, I decided to take a couple of my link builders and go visit a few folks at our local Industries of the Blind (which I’ve toured before thanks to my friend and neighbor, Director of Operations Richard Oliver, featured on the homepage), in order to see how fully blind users navigate the Web using a screen reader program called JAWS. (JAWS stands for Jobs Access With Speech.)

As you might have guessed, I’m interested in how these users deal with on-page links and images, with anchors and ALT text. It didn’t hurt that the two men that we met with sounded exactly like Morgan Freeman, either.

“By Federal regulations if you are considered visually impaired, you are not blind. Visual impairment runs between 20/70 and 20/100. Legal blindess is 20/200 in best eye with corrective lens or less than 20% field of view. So if you are blind you are visually impaired, but if you are visually impaired you are not legally blind.” ~ Richard Oliver

(For an idea of how JAWS works on a web page, see this JAWS demo video)

Cliff and Chris Alexander are twins who work with my friend at Industries of the Blind. Both are totally blind and use the computer in their employment. Chris demonstrated the JAWS software for us  and nicely gave me a free little usability consultation when I asked him to see how my agency’s site worked with the system. (It’s good!)

Now, this isn’t a review of the software, but a quick bit of information about it will show you why I’m so interested in it. JAWS reads out content, lists links, and describes images.

While the amount of content the system read out seemed fairly overwhelming to me, Chris was able to process it very easily and figure out what he wanted in about 5 seconds. He’s obviously used to using the software, but it did make me think about cumbersome, irrelevant content.

It also made me realize how poor a practice it is to slap in overly-keywordized ALT tags on images just to improve rankings.

If that image really is a “tiny little orange widget” then by all means, let that be your ALT text, but if it’s a photo of a nice, friendly bumblebee and your ALT is “play poker online” then you’re not only a poor SEO, you’re a misleading one.

Cleaning Out The Clutter In Code & Copy

Content clutter is a nightmare in general, but think about the impact of this on users who use a screen reader.

If you’ve never witnessed a visually impaired user (whether it’s full blindness or partial) having to wade through the audio of a poorly formatted and cluttered page, waiting for relevant information, you may not understand the effect that all this extra junk has on a person.

While Chris truly blew my mind with how quickly he could figure out the information that he needed and act on it, it was still a mess at times.

What if he’d found your site and wanted your product or service, but finally left for your competitor after being subjected to a ton of audio nonsense?

I’m not suggesting that we all stop being wordy, but I am suggesting that when we write, we make sure that it sounds ok when read out loud.

While statistics on how many people use a screen reader aren’t that readily available, it was reported in 2008 that 25.2 million Americans were unable to see even with the aid of lenses of some sort. That’s a lot of potential lost conversions, and a lot of people unfairly forced to work harder to do something that many of us take for granted.

Obviously,there are users with visual impairments who do not need or use screen readers.

My friend Richard, for example, is legally blind and has zero vision in one eye, with limited vision in the other. He is able to use mobile devices and a computer without needing a screen reader, although he does use a really cool magnifier which makes him look a bit like a preppy spy.

His wife is also legally blind and just holds a screen up close and squints at it in order to read it.

If either of them are reading a webpage that has links on it that aren’t coded to look like links which are easily recognizable as gateways to another page or site, they obviously aren’t going to find them and click. Of course, neither am I — most likely, neither are you, even if your vision is 20/20.

That’s a bad practice no matter how good or bad your vision is. Still, I have run across text that I think must be a link even though it doesn’t appear to be, possibly because links are my life and I’m suspicious, but obviously a simple mouseover proves me right or wrong. Someone with a visual impairment probably isn’t going to do that.

More Tips To Make Your Internal Link Building Inclusive

What about colorblind users? We’ve been fortunate enough to see recent posts being written about this so I won’t go into it in detail here, although some of my recommendations for making links accessible to visually impaired users do deal with this. In case you’re interested, Jordan Kasteler wrote a really good post about accessible web design on the Blueglass blog.

Also consider problems with a recommendation that most of us link builders do constantly make to clients: noise anchors. “Click here” doesn’t exactly tell you what type of data you’ll encounter if you do indeed click. Noise anchors are good for fleshing out a link profile because they are a natural way that people have linked in the past, but they aren’t descriptive for a visually impaired user.

If a screen reader reads out “Click here”, will the user ignore the link? I most likely would, especially if I had to listen to a screen reader quickly running through a list of links. This is a good case for brand and URL links, though, providing your company isn’t boringly named something like A Great Company.

The Next Frontier For Web Accessibility

In recent news about assistive technology, the American Council of the Blind announced that they are partnering with Google in order to better assess how blind, visually impaired, and deaf-blind users make use of the Web and access information.

So to conclude, here are a few best practices for optimizing links for visually impaired users:

• Underline your links for users who aren’t using a screen reader but may have visual impairment and not be able to recognize a link otherwise.
• Make your links a different color than the surrounding text, and make that different color a shade that is very different from your regular text so that a colorblind user can determine that it’s a link.
• Make visited links a different color than nonvisited links.
• Use relevant title and ALT text in order to describe an image. Depending upon your browser, you may see one or the other when you mouseover an image. However,  ALT is the standard used in screen readers.
• Be careful when using noise anchors and ALT  text; if a screen reader is being used, something irrelevant or not very descriptive can easily cost you a click.
• Make sure your content (all of it, including your anchors, ALT texts, etc.) makes sense when read out loud.
• When using image links, name the images in a relevant manner. An image named something like “image51.jpg” isn’t likely to generate enough interest for a click. The ALT  text should be read out if a screen reader is being used, but to cover all your bases, consider relevant naming for the images themselves, as if no ALT text is found, some systems will indeed try to determine what the image is based on its file name.
• Be careful when sending links to subpages that aren’t relevant to the anchor or ALT text. This can cause annoyance and loss of time if a visually impaired user has to continue to back out and search for a new link to get to the desired content.

So let’s all try and be more inclusive when we build links. As you may have ascertained, the practices listed above are simply common sense for any user.

By making our content as clutter-free and navigable as possible and our links relevant and descriptive, we all stand the chance to do better business on the Web. If you have any other ideas for ways to help make links more usable for the visually impaired, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Image courtesy of http://www.standards-schmandards.com