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
-
Linking to a Resource from a multi-language Page
I have a multi-language page where the content is available in several versions (translated). I want to link to a resource that is only available in one English. Is it a good idea to link to this resource from all language versions or should I better include the link only in the English version of my page? In the first scenario for example a Spanisch and a German language version would link to a page in English. Is this ok or could it be considered spam?
Technical SEO | | ConverterApp0 -
Tool to Generate All the URLs on a Domain
Hi all, I've been using xml-sitemaps.com for a while to generate a list of all the URLs that exist on a domain. However, this tool only works for websites with under 500 URLs on a domain. The paid tool doesn't offer what we are looking for either. I'm hoping someone can help with a recommendation. We're looking for a tool that can: Crawl, and list, all the indexed URLs on a domain, including .pdf and .doc files (ideally in a .xls or .txt file) Crawl multiple domains with unlimited URLs (we have 5 websites with 500+ URLs on them) Seems pretty simple, but we haven't been able to find something that isn't tailored toward management of a single domain or that can crawl a huge volume of content.
Technical SEO | | timfrick0 -
Too many navigational links
Hi there, I have an issue with the amount of internal links on my webpages. Moz campaign manager gives a lot of 'too many on page links' issues. Over 7000.
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
I know the importance of a good internal linking structure. 1. Not too many internal links (over approximately 100) is good for flowing through some authority from authoritive pages.
2. Too many internal links can spend all of the 'crawler budget' so the crawlers won't crawl the complete website anymore (right?). This can cause problems with indexing new webpages (right?). This is the situation: The website is a webshop The header contains 6 links, the footer contains 32 links, the homepage contains 42 links, the body content of some category pages contains a variated amount of links from 30 to a maximum of 100 links. Product pages do contain a maximum of 25 links. There is no problem here. Now here's the problem: The website navigation is a dropdown menu that contains 167 links to tier 2. These links are very important for our visitors. They can immediately find the right category/product by it. Removing or shrinking this dropdown is not an option. But the dropdown navigation is causing all of the 'too many on page links' issues. Question: is there a SEO (indexing, PA) problem in this situation which i should solve? What should I solve and how should I solve this? Note: pages have good organic positions and authority. Thanks a lot. Marcel0 -
Broken link
I know SEO Moz has a lot of info about 404 301 302 etc but I am trying to figure out easy way to fix two of the broken links from flash. I am redirecting following links with wordpress redirect plug in http://soobumimphotography.com/gallery.php?GalleryID=126&GalleryName=Wedding&OrderNum=1 http://soobumimphotography.com/gallery.php?GalleryID=126&GalleryName=Wedding&OrderNum=1 What would be the best way to solve this? Is there anyway I can remove those?
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
Mini site links?
Can anyone point me to information about the "mini" site links on the Google search results or tell me how to get them set up? These aren't the full site links that show 3 by 3 under the first listing but small text links that appear for certain results. (See attached image for reference.) Are these something that can controlled/requested? NAj6E.png
Technical SEO | | DVanSchepen0 -
External Links on a Front Page
Does anyone have any links to information about external links on a front page ? I am advising a client that this is not the best idea and that they could be put in a different place but can't find any proof of this.
Technical SEO | | marcelo-2753980 -
Amazon s3 links
Hello, Dose anyone has experience with Amazon s3 ? Hosting images, site elements and static files (pdf etc) on Amazon S3 bucket can influence the link structure / juice ? (by having external links to the amazon s3 bucket / account). If you host all the site images and site resources with Amazon S3 will all those "links" count as outgoing external links ? Is it worst then having everything linking internally ? Dose anyone knows if that can hurt you ? Personally I was not able to test it and I am sure I can't test it in the near future. Hope someone has and I can skip some steps with this. Thanks !
Technical SEO | | eyepaq1 -
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