Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Alternative Link Detox tools?
-
My company is conducting a link detox for a client, and it seems like every tool we utilize is giving us a different answer on how many links we actually have. the numbers range anywhere from 4,000 to 200,000. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what tools will give us an accurate count, and will also email the webmasters on your behalf requesting the links removal? We are trying to have this process be as automated as possible to save time on our end.
-
I just wanted to add to this discussion to say that I created a tool that helps me create really good spreadsheets for link auditing. It aggregates links from a number of sources, reduces the list down to one link from each domain, and marks the nofollows. It also tells you which links are from domains that are on my blacklist of domains that I almost always disavow. The blacklist contains over 14,000 domains at this point and is growing. And, it tells you which links are from domains that I usually ignore such as dmoz scrapers and domain stats pages where we know the link is not one made for SEO purposes.
I'm not a fan of tools that automate the decision making promises because I've seen so many of them mark fantastic links as bad ones and miss a whole bunch of really spammy links. If you're trying to escape Penguin, you have to be way more accurate than this.
It's still in a beta phase right now as I am working on making it as useful as possible, but you can see the details here: http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/manual-link-audits/
-
If you are looking specifically for link analysis tools then a pretty good alternative is http://linkrisk.com/
I have managed to get many penalties overturned based solely on using them as an analysis tool.
-
Agreed - it's not much fun, but every reputable link auditor I know uses multiple available sources. All of the tools (including our own at Moz) have different biases, and when you're trying to get a complete a list as possible, you need to use as many sources as you can.
I would highly recommend against going too automated - the cost "savings" short-term could be lost quickly if you start cutting potentially good links. It really depends on your current risk/reward profile. If you're already hit hard with a penalty, then cutting deep and fast may be a good bet (and automation would be more effective). If you're being proactive to prevent future issues, then relying too much on automation could be very dangerous.
-
Like they said, compile/export everything, combine then remove duplicates and insert to the tool of your choice, like link risk, link detox or even rmoov if you want to contact these webmasters
Be sure to still check the list since it's never 100% right. Some good, natural links can be classified within their calculations of bad urls.
-
I agree with everything that Travis said… the reason why you are witnessing different number of total links is because of the index you are using! GWT will give you limited amount of data where as Open site explorer will show you a bit more links (there index fetch every link that has been shared on twitter) where as the largest link index I know are Ahrefs and Majestic SEO.
My advice would be to get the data from all sources, remove the duplicates and then run link detox. Keep a very close look of what link detox says are bad links because no one other than Google know what exactly is a bad links so all others are just using their own formula.
I am sure if you are going to add the link file on “Link Risk” the results might be different from Link Detox.
Just keep a close eye and decide if you want a particular link to be removed.
Planning to remove links? There is a tool that can help you with that www.rmoov.com just give it a try and remove the links that are bad in your eye!
Hope this helps!
-
The difference between the number of links you see across various sources is because of the resources themselves. Some backlink services only crawl so much. Google can only crawl so much of the internet.
Your best bet is to use multiple sources. I would go with GWT, Majestic SEO and aHrefs, then filter duplicates. You'll have a much better understanding of where the site stands. Once you have that, you can use Cemper Link Detox to upload the data.
Be very careful, Link Detox still throws some false positives. Though I expect it to get better every day. There's a machine learning element to it that's based on human feedback.
Finally, I would be very careful of fully automating anything like a disavow/removal process. Do you really want something so delicate taken out of your hands? It's still very necessary to manually check each link so you know that you're getting rid of the bad and keeping the good.
Link Detox is the closest thing there is, that I'm aware of, that will help 'automate' the process in a safe-ish way. The subject of link removal/disavow is something so sensitive I wouldn't outsource it. Then again, I hate the idea of outsourcing overflow blog writing work to competent people. Call me a control freak.
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
-
If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post. Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website. Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal? Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
H3 Tags - Should I Link to my content Articles- ? And do I have to many H3 tags/ Links as it is ?
Hello All, On my ecommerce landing pages, I currently have links to my products as H3 Tags. I also have useful guides displayed on the page with links useful articles we have written (they currently go to my news section). I am wondering if I should put those article links as additional H3 tags as well for added seo benefit or do I have to many tags as it is ?. A link to my Landing Page I am talking about is - http://goo.gl/h838RW Screenshot of my h1-h6 tags - http://imgur.com/hLtX0n7 I enclose screenshot my guides and also of my H1-H6 tags. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Does Disavowing Links Negate Anchor Text, or Just Negates Link Juice
I'm not so sure that disavowing links also discounts the anchor texts from those links. Because nofollow links absolutely still pass anchor text values. And disavowing links is supposed to be akin to nofollowing the links. I wonder because there's a potential client I'm working on an RFP for and they have tons of spammy directory links all using keyword rich anchor texts and they lost 98% of their traffic in Pengiun 1.0 and haven't recovered. I want to know what I'm getting into. And if I just disavow those links, I'm thinking that it won't help the anchor text ratio issues. Can anyone confirm?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
Tool to bulk check outbound links
Hi. I have a list of 50 domains I need to check for links to three different sites. Does anybody know an easy way to do this? The best solution I have found so far is to crawl each with Screaming Frog and search for the domains, but I can only do one at a time this way. Some way to speed it up would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
URL Value: Menu Links vs Body Content Links
Hi All, I'm a little confused. I have read a number of articles from authority sites that give mixed signals over the importance of menu links vs body content links. It is suggested that whilst all menu links spread link juice equally, Google does not see them as favourably. Inserting a link within the body will add more link juice value to the desired page. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch0 -
Limit on Google Removal Tool?
I'm dealing with thousands of duplicate URL's caused by the CMS... So I am using some automation to get through them - What is the daily limit? weekly? monthly? Any ideas?? thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Link Age as SEO factor?
Hi Guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VividLime
I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspx We will be doing the standard redirects etc However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24s He says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect. Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot' In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space. So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect. -But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about. So the main question:
Is link age factor in rankings ? If I update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?0 -
Switching to masked affiliate links
Hi there, I run a content affiliate website where I introduce products in articles and then link to merchants where the user can buy the respective product. Currently I am using regular affiliate links here with the "nofollow" attribute. With growing size of the site, I would like to switch to masked affiliate links, so instead of a link like "jdoqocy.com/click-123" I want to use "mydomain.com/recommend/123". My question here is: When switching to masked affiliate links, does it makes sense to also convert all the older unmasked affiliate links? If yes, what would be the best way to do that - Convert all old links at once or convert them over time (e.g. over a few month)? Currently about 2/3 of my site's outbound links are unmasked, external affiliate links. So I am afraid that changing this relatively large share of links from unmasked external affiliate links to masked links doenst look natural at all... Thank you for your advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FabRag0