Well happy turkey day everyone! What better way to kick off the holiday season than with some tools to help manage and grow your backlinks. In earlier blog posts, I have gone over some of these tools before but not in that great of detail. This time around I am going to talk a little bit more about them and share some of my experiences with them. I have used all these tools, some more than others, but I do have some experience with all of them. And like always I would love to hear from all of you as far as the tools you find most effective when managing your linking.

Most of these tools are free but a couple in our list will cost money to use.  The ones that do cost you money I have provide you with a little bit more information in regards to pricing.

Anyways on to the list:

    1. Yahoo Site Explorer (cost: Free)– One of the best known backlink tools on out there. This one is no surprise to anyone. The tool is very helpful when looking at competitors’ backlinks. This tool is free for everyone to use and I highly recommend it. It gets the job done quickly and efficiently. Now I know what some people are probably saying, when I use Yahoo Site Explorer I can’t see my anchor text… You are right you cannot see the anchor text via the web. You can however download the .tsv report which will be a text document. Copy all the data and paste it into excel and you will see the link text of your backlinks.
SEO Link Analysis Addon for Yahoo Site Explorer

SEO Link Analysis Addon for Yahoo Site Explorer

While this is a bit more time consuming than looking at it via the web, it will, however, give you more information, and hey, it is free so you should take what you can get right? There is also a nifty little Firefox plug-in that you can download called “SEO link analysis”. What this tool does is it will show you the: anchor text, if the site has a Google PR, or if the link is nofollowed. So for some of us lazy folks, this is a way to go as well. One of the draw backs with Yahoo Site Explorer is that it will only show you your first 1000 links, while this isn’t necessarily bad it can make it a bit more difficult when you are going out looking for link modifications as you can only see so many links.

  • Link Diagnosis (cost: Free) – This is a tool that was brought to my attention a little over a year ago. It is a pretty neat tool that will tell you how many links you have with a particular anchor text as well as some of the top links you have as your back links. This is extremely helpful when looking at what links to get modified. If you have a link from a high authority site but the link text coming from that site is extremely weak you now know you need to contact that site and see if you can get the link changed so you get more benefit from it.

One of the major drawbacks to this tool is that it does not report all your links and there are many that it just seems to not catch. So if you use the tool and only see that you have 40 or so links when you know for a fact that you have more than that, don’t fret – just try one of the other tools I have listed here to find those other missing backlinks.

backlinkanalyzer

Backink Analyzer Options

This is a tool that you will need to download. This tool was developed by SEO Book. This tool is similar to Link Diagnosis except that it is not a web app, it is an application that is on your computer. There are also many extra options you can select when it comes to finding backlinks.

You also have the options of which specific search engines you wish to check or if you wish to check them all. One of the drawbacks to this tool is the amount of links it will report back to you. As of right now it is only reporting 1000 links which is similar to Yahoo Site Explorer but the benefit is that you will be able to see a lot more information about those links.

  • Majestic SEO (cost: $.50 to $5.00 a report) – This is by far the most thorough report you will ever get from any of the backlink tools I have posted. The major drawback is that it does cost money and it seems to depend on how large of a backlink profile you have determines how much it will cost. The benefit to this is that you will receive 90% of your backlinks (some backlinks may have been missed by their bots… it happens).

    • While you get tons and tons of information about your links which is great; the problem is that it is tons and tons of information so it could take you a little while to go through, though it is completely worth it.  This is also extremely helpful when looking at your competitors backlinks and knowing how many of a certain link text they may have and the type of sites that are linking to them.

    • SEOMoz’s Backlink Analysis Tool (cost:$79-$229 a month for pro membership) – This is the most expensive of all the tools and not because of this tool specifically but because of the many tools that you get when signing up for their pro membership. The Backlink Analysis Tool is just one of the great tools that you will gain access to as a Pro Member. While I feel that it is not the best one out there, it can be very helpful for a quick glance at your backlinks. It also saves the reports for you so you can easily check back on it to see any improvements.

    Although I would not buy this membership for this tool alone, SEOMoz has a wide variety of tools for us SEO’s to use.  I do highly recommend that you or your company sign up for those and use them all together.

    I hope some of these tools are new to you and will provide some benefit to you in your quest to gain more solid backlinks. As always I’d love to hear from all of you as far as what tools you use when doing your link building. Until next time… Happy Thanksgiving!!