More Link Building Tool Goodness
About a year ago, I made a selection of a few (in my opinion) indispensable link building tools. Except from a Majestic SEO redesign and some changes to the Link Diagnosis tool, I haven’t seen any big changes in the field of link building tools since then. Well, until this month…
Here’s three great new tools you can use during your link building campaigns.
Link Building Queries
The guys from Ontolo created Link Building Queries, a search query generating tool, mainly based on a massive list with link building queries.
After entering a keyword that’s related to your product or website, you can enter a linkable asset type, an opportunity type, and the type of content you’re after. When you hit ‘Generate link building queries’, Garrett French himself tries to come up with useful queries in the background, and spits them out lightning fast. And the output looks somewhat like this (depending on what you’ve selected, of course);
This tool can be very helpful when you’re looking for specific link targets.
Bulk link checker
Majestic SEO already had a handful of free tools, but they have added a lightning fast Bulk Link Checker to their arsenal this month. This tool will check the amount of linking pages and referring domains to up to 150 (!) URLs in just a split second. It uses Majestic’s own data, and also has the option to download the results in CSV.
I had to edit the results a little bit to make it fit on this page, but you can click it to see the real output. Or you could go and play with the tool…
Open Site Explorer
The third tool in this list was just released yesterday. The Open Site Explorer, an SEOmoz product, provides quite some insights in the link profile of a website. You can check the regular basic link data, but SEOmoz has also added a few very nice features.
One of these features is the opportunity to check which URLs 301-redirect to a certain domain, which makes bait-n-switch pages or redirected domains for SEO purposes easy to find.
(click to see the bigger picture)
Another interesting functionality is the option to compare two different domains. Just enter two URLs, hit enter, and you’ll see some pretty charts, accompanied by very interesting data.
(click the image to see the bigger picture, or click here to see the live data)
The Open Site Explorer is part of SEOmoz’ Pro membership, but you can still try it out for free for about a day or so. After that, the metrics, 10K links and the CSV download will be PRO-only.
All by all three great tools to add to your link building toolbox.
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15 comments on this post
Hey Wiep, another nice post, tnx! I don’t really see the added value to the bulk backlink (amount) checker. I mean, quantity is nice but, as you know, it’s all about quality. I know sites with 3k links that easily outrank sites with 50k+ links.
SEOmoz is really making a move to gain more market share when it comes to linkbuilding (tools) as well. What do you think will happen in linkbuilding land this year?
Thanks for mentioning the new MajestocSEO bulk backlink checker Wiep.
Steve – if you have a list of potentially fundreds of sites in a niche (like all the sites in an ODP directory) then you can almost instantly see their relative backlink counts.
You also see referring domain counts – which is generally a better predictor, but more than this, the domains you are investigating also have ACRank – so you can easily exposrt then all into excel and sort by ACrank if that is preferable to domain links. So there should be plenty of added value there. We may have huge amounts of data compared to other systems – but it’s pretty easy to sort according to preference.
It’s a great place to be – link building land. Gotta love opensiteexplorer too.
@Steven: Plain numbers never tell the whole story, but they can definitely help you to understand it. Besides SEOmoz, there are several others (linkresearchtools.com, searchdna.net) creating link building tools as well, so I guess that shows how important it is. Or how profitable… :)
@Dixon: NP! The AC rank functionality doesn’t seem to work properly btw, as you can see in the example. Or is it just me?
ACRank is working for me. I’m using it remotely as a user (logged in) so give it another try? We may have had a blip when you tried before.
Ah! Wait! …. use http://…. otherwise the ACRank doesn’t work. Will find the bug report list now :)
Thanks for the heads up!
“At a time when an artist finds out what people want and trying to meet demand, he ceases to be an artist and becomes a dull or amusing craftsman, an honest or dishonest dealer. Loses the right to be considered an artist.”
(Oscar Wilde)
Nice summary Wiep!
ACRank in Bulk Checker is only shown for URLs (detected as having http:// or https:// in them) – domains do not have ACRank assigned to them, however since you get referring domains counts for both URLs and domains you can easily rank them with a much better granularity than ACRankever allowed :)
@Dixon, @Alex: ah, that’s what I suspected, AC rank only shows up for exact URLs, not domains. Thanks for clarifying!
The Ontolo tool looks very good, but it has some strange suggestions sometimes. Seems like the toolbox needs expanding again :)
Thnx Wiep, nice article.
The Ontolo is exactly as you say: specific!
Great article! Having link building tools is a great advantage to any SEO strategy. These look like some really great tools. Thanks for passing on and sharing these tools!
quality over quantity. I think sometimes we have a mistake of spending too much time using these tools. Two types of backlinks..natural and forced. Forced being the webmaster working on building links via forums, blogs etc…. natural being a webmaster coming across your site and adding a link…..obviously the natural is better, so just concentrating on pumping out good content and making a presence around the web will help you outrank other competitors….less time checking these tools
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