Essential Tools & Tips for the Link Builder

Link building is one of the more difficult tasks a website owner or seo will need to tackle on their way to a high ranking site. Luckily there are a ton of tools out there that make the job quite a bit easier. Let’s take a look.

Link Analysis Tools

Until there are some major changes in the search engine algorithms, looking at a site’s backlinks is going to be one of the best ways of answering some very important questions. How did that site get its rankings? Why was my site penalized? Studying the backlinks of a site can often offer great insights that will help you answer those questions.

Link Analysis – Firefox extension that gives you more link data when using Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Bad Neighborhood – This tool will scan the links on a website, and on the pages that the website is linking to, and flag indicators of linking to possible bad neighborhoods.

Link Diagnosis – Scans a site to give you pagerank, anchor text and no-follow info on its backlinks. Additionally, it uses the data to create Most Popular Anchor, Pagerank Distribution and Link Types reports.

Link Harvester – Web based tool that uses the Yahoo! API to return unique linking domains, IP addresses & unique c block addresses of links, and links from .gov, .mil, .edu, or .ac.uk domains. It will also bold and autocheck domains that link from 5 or more pages.

Backlink Analyzer – Similar to Link Harvester, with the exception that it is downloadable software, does anchor text analysis, and you can grab backlink data from Google and MSN in addition to Yahoo.

Seo Toolbar – A great full featured toolbar for Seo that includes tons of link data, such as links to the domain, links to the page, whether or not the site is in important directories (Dmoz, Yahoo and BOTW) and the number of .edu and .gov links.

Seo for Firefox – Grab the same data as the Seo Toolbar without having to deal with yet another toolbar. Seo for Firefox allows you to use a right click content menu instead.

Usage Examples:

• Find a competitors webpage that’s ranking for a query you are working on and run a backlink analysis on it. You can then contact the sites linking to them and use your linkbuilder charms to convince them to link to you.
• Run a backlink check on your own website and look for anything that has been overdone, such as similar anchor text, and may cause an over optimization penalty.
• Run a blacklink check on your website and make note of any sites that link to you with un-optimized anchor text. You can then email them and try to get them to change the anchor text to the term you are going for. Just make sure you don’t do this with all the links because the over optimization can come back to bite you.

Additional Link Building Goodies

Link Search – A big help when using search operators to find link opportunities.
Roboform – Really speeds things up when filling out forms to request links or submitting to directories.
Nofollow Display – Greasemonkey script that highlights links that are using Nofollow.
HTTP Header Checker – Now that you can use Nofollow in the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, it’s a good idea to check it and make sure that the link actually passes link juice.