Lesson #1: No Matter How Good Something Is I Want Something Better

Like most people who play in the broken link building space, I was overjoyed when I found the Check My Links extension for Google Chrome. jrcooper did an excellent write up on this extension a few months ago in the ol' Youmoz blog (find it here). It was lightning fast, remarkably simple and it even had a sort of sexy look to it. One thing I've learned throughout my life, however, is that I'm never satisfied, and the more I used this tool I found it lacking a few things that I felt I just had to have:

1. The ability to export to a .csv. Sometimes you're crawling through a bunch of pages and I just want to be able to pull down a list of what's dead without having to do any real manual labor.
2. The ability to see the number of links pointing to a single page and/or the entire domain that the broken link is on.
3. The ability to see if the domains the broken links were on are available and the ability to quickly buy them.

So of course I worked around these issues for a while but it always burned at me when I knew I could be more efficient if I could just get my tools to do what I wanted them to. So I sat down with our neighbors at Nicholas Creative (I am by no means a developer, nor is anyone else at Netvantage) and asked them if they could help build me my perfect backlink checker. They agreed, and after several rounds of iterations and some helpful feedback from beta testers (thanks to Gab from SEOROI, Ben at Ontolo and Garrett at Citation Labs for helping spread the word) we finally finished our first "tool" and have dubbed it Domain Hunter Plus.

Here's the lowdown:

Once installed you'll see the DHP logo in the upper right hand corner of Chrome.

Click on it and you'll have the option to scan your page - click Start Scan and let the magic begin!

Once your page is scanned, DHP will show you all the broken outbound links, tell you if the domain is available and show you the number of links pointing to the individual page and the domain according to the Linkscape API. Even better? Click on the numbers and it will open Open Site Explorer for your page or the whole domain! If you want to buy a domain, leave the check box filled in and click register and the domains will be in your cart in GoDaddy in a new tab. If you want to save the data for later just click export and all the data will be neatly bundled up into a .csv file for your later use.

Interested yet?

We're pretty excited about this tool and it definitely knocks a couple steps out of the typical process for broken link building. If you're interest is piqued, head on over to the Domain Hunter Plus website to try it out for yourself or learn a little more in the walk through video there. The Nicholas Creative Blog and the Netvantage Blog also have write ups, but you're probably better off just downloading it and using it so I won't waste your time with more links. Happy domain hunting and link building!