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
-
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.0 -
Top hierarchy pages vs footer links vs header links
Hi All, We want to change some of the linking structure on our website. I think we are repeating some non-important pages at footer menu. So I want to move them as second hierarchy level pages and bring some important pages at footer menu. But I have confusion which pages will get more influence: Top menu or bottom menu or normal pages? What is the best place to link non-important pages; so the link juice will not get diluted by passing through these. And what is the right place for "keyword-pages" which must influence our rankings for such keywords? Again one thing to notice here is we cannot highlight pages which are created in keyword perspective in top menu. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Linking to URLs With Hash (#) in Them
How does link juice flow when linking to URLs with the hash tag in them? If I link to this page, which generates a pop-over on my homepage that gives info about my special offer, where will the link juice go to? homepage.com/#specialoffer Will the link juice go to the homepage? Will it go nowhere? Will it go to the hash URL above? I'd like to publish an annual/evergreen sort of offer that will generate lots of links. And instead of driving those links to homepage.com/offer, I was hoping to get that link juice to flow to the homepage, or maybe even a product page, instead. And just updating the pop over information each year as the offer changes. I've seen competitors do it this way but wanted to see what the community here things in terms of linking to URLs with the hash tag in them. Can also be a use case for using hash tags in URLs for tracking purposes maybe?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
How to detect a bad link and remove ?
As per google penguin, all the low quality back links are going to affect the website SERPS hugely. So, we need to find all the bad back links and then remove them one by one. What I would like to know is, what tool do you use to find all the bad back links ? And how do we know which is a bad back link or bad website, where our link should not be there ? Then what service what do you suggest for back links removal. I contacted LinkDelete.com and they quoted me 97$ for a month to remove all links in less than 3 weeks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monali123
Let me know, what you suggest.0 -
Link Research Tools - Detox Links
Hi, I was doing a little research on my link profile and came across a tool called "LinkRessearchTools.com". I bought a subscription and tried them out. Doing the report they advised a low risk but identified 78 Very High Risk to Deadly (are they venomous?) links, around 5% of total and advised removing them. They also advised of many suspicious and low risk links but these seem to be because they have no knowledge of them so default to a negative it seems. So before I do anything rash and start removing my Deadly links, I was wondering if anyone had a). used them and recommend them b). recommend detoxing removing the deadly links c). would there be any cases in which so called Deadly links being removed cause more problems than solve. Such as maintaining a normal looking profile as everyone would be likely to have bad links etc... (although my thinking may be out on that one...). What do you think? Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaescentAdam0 -
Outbound link to PDF vs outbound link to page
If you're trying to create a site which is an information hub, obviously linking out to authoritative sites is a good idea. However, does linking to a PDF have the same effect? e.g Linking to Google's SEO starter guide PDF, as opposed to linking to a google article on SEO. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
One Way Links vs Two Way Links
Hi, Was speaking to a client today and got asked how damaging two way links are. i.e. domaina.com links to domainb.com and domainb.com links back to domaina.com. I need a nice simple layman's explanation of if/how damaging they are compared to one way links. And please don't answer with you lose link juice as I have a job explaining link juice.... I am explaining things to a non techie! Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
How to ping the links
When i do link building for my website, how can i let the search engines know about that. is there any way of pinging?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raybiswa0