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
-
Weird 404 errors in Webmaster Tools
Hi, In a regular check with Webmaster Tools, I have noticed some weird 404 errors, for example, my domain URL is something like http://domainname.com/, the 404 error points to some weird URLs like http://domainname.com/james-bond&page=2/ and http://domainname.com/juegos-de&page=3/, at first I have tried to block them by robots.txt, but now I am getting these kind of 404 errors a lot, and don't think blocking them all is a perfect solution. Can anyone help me out with the issue? Thank you in advance.
Technical SEO | | nishthaj
cheers.0 -
Helping finding a link
Hi So Ive done a crawl of the site using screaming frog. There are a few old category and sub category pages which don't exist any more but somehow the crawler is finding them. An example is below: http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Home-Appliances/cat/Health-&-Beauty/subcat/Male-Grooming Just wondering if anybody had any ideas about how I could go and find these urls and remove them off the site. Any ideas would be really appreciated. Thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Referencing links in Articles and Blogs
Hi I am wondering if the <sup>tag in html is picked up by google as a reference point?</sup> I.e when you put a superscript in word it puts a small number next to your sentence. Then you have a list of reference at the end of the blog/article does google recognise this?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
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 -
OUTGOING LINK ISSUES
NO LINK TO HOME MY WEBSIDE PROFITIOK.COM FOR EXAMPLE YOU SEE THE PAGE I HAVE CHANGE TWO DAYS BACK PREVIOUS
Technical SEO | | Luckykhullar
ABOUT US - Profitok.com 2 DAYS BACK I CHANGED THE TITLE title>Commodity tips | Mcx TIPS | Mcx Daily Tips |Mcx Good tips Provider BUT WHEN I CHECKING IT IS NOT UPDATED THIS TITLE DEAR SIR CAN Y GIVE ME THE CORRECT ANSWER0 -
Are my Canonical Links set up correctly?
I have Enable Canonical Links (recommended) on my web site. However, I also have THIS checked: Enable full URL for Home Page Canonical Link (include /default.asp) Is it hurting me??? Keep getting dinged on our report card. We are using the Volusion shopping cart software/platform.
Technical SEO | | GreenFarmParts0 -
Developing a link profile.....
So we are a brand new site looking to establish a link profile of earned links vs. manipulative link building practices and have received some conflicting information. Our goal is to provide users and webmasters of relevant websites with useful content about the areas and topics we cover and let them decide to link to us. We have been advised by some parties that in order to develop a base set of links we should enter our website into directories. Now I understand entering it into some of the main directories such as BOTW and Yahoo etc, but please offer your thoughts on smaller less official directories. Thanks in advance. Scott
Technical SEO | | jackaveli0 -
4XX Broken Links
I am attempting to fix the issues SEOmoz found when crawling my site. I have a list of 4XX errors that I am attempting to fix. Basically I know one option is to redirect them to another page, but I would like to have the option to remove the links completely. The only problem is I can not find where the links are located. Does SEOmoz provide where on my site these broken links are? Or do they only provide the url that is linked to?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0