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
-
Does reciprocal linking carry any value?
No matter how much I research this one, there's no definite answer and there's a lot of contradictions. Basically we're looking to launch an article on 24 expert interior design tips for 2015. Each tip is submitted from a different interior designer we have chosen who have a reputable, trusted website. The main goal for this article is to generate various inbound links for our site from the designers and it will help to create engagement on social media. Although if we're giving out links to these designers for their contributions, the inbound links we receive in return will be little or no value as this is reciprocal linking? Some say this is okay as it's completely natural within the blog posts, others say to avoid it as it can be seen as an obsolete practice to deceive Google. Does anyone have any more information on this and how it should be carried out? Would a better process be to link to their social media accounts? Rather than reciprocal linking? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Is there a tool to see all redirects?
I'm thinking this is a silly question, but I've never had to deal with it I thought I'd ask. Ok is there a tool out there that will show all the redirects to a domain. I'm working on a project that I keep stumbling on urls that redirect to the site I'm studying. They don't show up in Open Site or ahrefs as linking domains, but they keep popping up on me. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | BCutrer0 -
No follow links from ban sites
Hello boys and girls. I'm auditing my link profile and came across links pointing to my sites, from a ban site (site: domain.com gives back no result).yet the links are no follow. should i try to remove them all? i know no follow should be enough, yet my links are set in a bad neighborhood. what would you recommend??
Technical SEO | | Tit0 -
Find all old links from a site to 301
We worked on this site a while ago - http://www.electric-heatingsupplies.co.uk/ Whilst we did a big 301 redirect exercise, I wanted to check that we "got" all of them. Is there a historical way I can check all the old indexed links to make sure they correlate to the new links? Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | lauratagdigital0 -
Outbound Links
I have a page on upstrap-pro.com that provides weights of cameras and lenses. The user/buyer of my on-slip camera straps needs to know the weight his camera and lens to determine the proper pad size... large to small. We have put together a long list of the most popular customer cameras. The way it was done (by my daughter) was to also provide a via a link to dpreview.com which is an excellent site for camera information including specifications etc. My personal feeling about this is mixed. I can do it by having it open dpreview.com in a new tab but then the user/customer could still get distracted and go down the rabbit hole. On the other hand dpreview is such a good site that if they are new to photography and don't know about it, they should. I don't get a dime from dpreview. If fact I doubt they would ever link back to me because they do not write about camera straps. I hear mixed things about outbound links. In this file there are quite a few outbound links to dpreview to keep it consistent. I could do a nofollow on all of them but I read that this is the easy way out. Google is jump ball and I have no clue what Cutts and his merry men are going to decide is cool or not cool. I'd like some thoughts or options... Thanks... A small part of the file below. Canon EF 14mm f/2.8L II USM Wideangle prime lens Canon EF 22.8 oz 645 g Canon EF 14mm f/2.8L USM
Technical SEO | | Asteg0 -
Is it a problem to have an image + link in your menu
Hi, My menu has a image with links to some of the main pages on the site and text underneath it explaining what the banner is. Will it be beneficial or harmful to have the text hyperlinked to the same pages the images go to?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
How not to lose link juice when linking to thousands of PDF guides?
Hi All, I run an e-commerce website with thousands of products.
Technical SEO | | BeytzNet
In each product page I have a link to a PDF guide of that product. Currently we link to it with a "nofollow" <a href="">tag.</a> <a href="">Should we change it to window.open in order not to lose link juice? Thanks</a>0 -
Broken Inner Links - Tool Recommendations?
Do you have any recommendations for tools that scan an entire website and report broken inner links? I run several UGC centered websites and broken inner links, and external, is an issue. Being that these websites are several hundred thousand pages large, I am not really all that excited about running software on my desktop (xenu link sleuth for example). Any online solutions you could recommend would be great!
Technical SEO | | uderic0