Tracking Links Tool
-
I think someone may be trying to harm my site by adding spammy links so I want to track the links going to my site on a daily basis.
Any tool suggestions?
Majestic SEO is great for getting an overall picture of my links, but is not updated daily.
Thanks!
-
Thanks for the link Jassy!
Do you use ALM? If so, can you share any feedback based on your experience? Would you recommend the tool?
-
ALM gives you a 30 day free trial - you might need to download their AWR product which includes ALM. It's here http://www.advancedlinkmanager.com/download.html
BTW, I'm linking AWR, not so sure about ALM
-
Note that linkstant works by detecting new referrers so only finds links that people actually click on which is relatively unlikely to include any of the low quality links the OP is worried about.
-
You could also look at cognitiveSEO.
I wouldn't worry about them because they will be impossible to undo.
-
Hi SaraSEO
Have you looked at http://www.linkstant.com/?
Although I've not used it myself, it was recommended at SearchLove Conf last year and can apparently alert you to new links via email/SMS immediately.
Hope it's useful.
-
I took a look at the ALM site and it seems like a helpful tool. I am disappointed they do not offer any form of free trial.
-
+1 For Majestic SEO also. Monitoring links with ALM on a daily basis is good for spotting new link oppurtunities and getting a feel for what your competition is doing though. Perhaps that may be considered a little obsessive however
-
Hi Sara,
Since the loss of Yahoo Site Explorer data, I am not aware of any link profile which is faster then Majestic SEO. Personally I like Open Site Explorer, but it's updates are 4-5 weeks apart and some people prefer faster access to data.
When you are looking for these spammy links there are a couple thoughts you may wish to keep in mind:
-
internet crawlers need to access millions of websites and billions / trillions of web pages. There is a huge amount of resources involved. OSE only tracks the top 25% of web pages and it still takes a solid month to crawl the web then process the data. To do so faster on a consistent basis would require a large amount of expensive resources.
-
you can track links to your site from Google WMT as well. It will not show all the links, but it is a helpful addition to any link tracking process
-
spammy links are often presented on spammy / low quality web sites. If you earn a link from the front page of the New York Times, that link will often be discovered by Google in minutes. If you earn a link from a random page on the site averageseodirectory.com it may take a month for even Google to find the link. Some links are not even found by Google because the web page which offers the link is buried in a site or is otherwise not valued.
I understand your desire to keep a clean backlink profile. There is absolutely no value in monitoring spam links on a daily basis. A once/month check in OSE or Majestic is quite sufficient to maintain your website at a high quality level.
I agree with you that spammy links can potentially harm your site. Even if you locate the bad links immediately, there is relatively little you can do to have them removed. Most sites which allow spammy links are very poorly maintained. The best thing you can do is to earn quality links to offset the spammy links.
One last thought: check your Google Analytics traffic data. If anyone clicks on a link to your site, the data shows in GA.
Best wishes.
-
-
I use Advanced Link Manager for this job. Its pricey, and depending on the size of your project (number of indexed urls) it can take several hours to perform an update. If you pay for some dedicated proxies however you can ramp the update speed up a lot.
This aside, its very detailed and will enable you to keep track on a daily basis. Its also good for keeping track of your competitors links and to identify new link opportunities.
-
I'm of the opinion that anything a competitor can do to your site (within reason) cannot harm. If a competitor were to be able to point bad links at your site to get you banned, then what's stopping me doing that to my competitors, them doing it to me and so on.
At worst, I think Google will just discount the links.
-
If you read the comments in the article you will see dan was told by Goolge that they have not found any cases of this to have actually happned.
If you want somthing that tracks daily, try GWMT or BWMT
-
Sara, you have a real fear of this happening? I don't know what niche you're working in, but it sounds like you have some particularly nasty competitors.
Do you have any evidence that this might be the case or any indication that their SEO activities in general are leaning towards the shady side?
As others have mentioned - I'm not sure it's something you should be overly worried about.
-
Interesting article, however it does not really address my question.
I am concerned competitors will buy a large amount of spammy links in order to get my site penalized so want to closely track my linking pattern on a daily basis.
-
Many people think this but has never found to be true. Dan from SEO Dejan spoke to a Google rep and they said they have never found it to have happened yet. The risk to to ones self and the cost and effort, seem to stop people doing so.
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/why-link-schemes-fail
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal Links issue in webmaster
we implemented our website on the basis of WordPress, then we migrate our website to PHP (YII Framework). after a while, we found out an issue around internal links which they were increasing severely. when we check our landing pages in webmaster (for example Price list), in contains 300 internal links but the reality is that there are no href tags on this page. it seems that webmaster calculate most of our links with the links of a single page and show them to us. is it natural or a mis configuration has been happened? Yh1NzPl
Technical SEO | | jacelyn_wiren0 -
On our site by mistake some wrong links were entered and google crawled them. We have fixed those links. But they still show up in Not Found Errors. Should we just mark them as fixed? Or what is the best way to deal with them?
Some parameter was not sent. So the link was read as : null/city, null/country instead cityname/city
Technical SEO | | Lybrate06060 -
Feefo review links
Hi guys, so we are on feefo and noticed links coming in per review for different anchor text, this will be done on mass due to the amount of reviews we will get - this is all natural but in SEO site-wide links are typically not. How if at all do you think Google will react to this?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Dropped to 45th spot. How to track ?
Hi.. We specialize in CMS Development and all of our keywords were spotted on 1st page always. Most of them were on #1 only. ON a weekly basis, we only post resourceful blog posts on our website . Since 2-3 months, I have seen quite some drop in traffic and today when I tried the rank status, I see the keywords have dropped to 4th or 5th page. Is there a way, I can track, what went wrong ? Where to start with ? The site always ranked good since 2 years of its start already.
Technical SEO | | mageclub0 -
Google is somehow linking my two sites that aren't linked! HELP
Good Morning... In my Google webmaster account it is showing an increase of backlinks between one site i own to the other.... This should not happen, as there are no links from one site to the other. I have thoroughly checked many pages on the new site to see if i can find a backlink, but i can't. Does anyone know why this is showing like this (google now shows 50,000 links from one site to the other).. Can someone please take a look and see if you can find any link from one to the other... original site : http://goo.gl/JgK1e new site : http://goo.gl/Jb4ng Please let me know why you guys think this is happening or if you were actually able to find a link on the new site pointing back to the old site... thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
How do i implement event tracking
Hi, Please excuse me for being too simplistic or dumb. I haven't had any experience in Event tracking so far. So, Please help me out I want to track how many persons have clicked on "subscribe for Newsletter" button on website - http://bit.ly/w7iwdh Pls can anyone paste here the code to implement this ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Adding no follow links on my site
I am getting a warning about having too many links on my page www.accessoriesonline.co.uk (152) but I don't want to remove any links from the site. Its an ecommerce site with categories across the top, featured products and then a further category navigation in the footer. Would it be beneficial if I added a rel="nofollow" to the links in the footer as these are duplicates of the one's in the header or would this harm the links in the header and the destination URL's which I definitely want to be crawled? Also, does anyone know if SEOMOZ considers links with a rel=nofollow as an actually link when they calculate their overview? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | gavinhoman0