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
-
Internal Linking issue
So i am working with a review company and I am having a hard time with something. We have created a category which lists and categorizes every one of our properties. For example a specific property in the category "restaurant" would be as seen below: /restaurant/mcdonalds /restaurant/panda-express And so on and so on. What I am noticing however is that our more obscure properties are not being linked to by any page. If I were to visit the page myurl.com/restaurant I would see 100+ pages of properties, however it seems like only the properties on the first few pages are being counted as having links. So far the only way I have been able to work around this issue is by creating a page and hiding it in our footer called "all restaurants". This page lists and links to every one of our properties. However it isn't exactly user friendly and I would prefer scrapers not to be able to scrape all properties at once! Anyway, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Value of internal links like this
Hello I have a question for internal links build in the pattern below does google value these kinds of pattern of internal links... For example i have 3 pages on website A, B and C, The page A is homepage, B is cateogory page and C is product page and I am on page C, where I build internal links like this Home > Catogory > product page
Technical SEO | | tanveerayakhan0 -
Link building with AddThis URL
We've begun using AddThis for tracking our social sharing. AddThis has been adding the snippet to the end of the URLs on our pages and we've been finding that people linking to us are linking to the URL with the snippet. AddThis says this isn't a problem for SEO. Is this correct? Here is an example: https://www.harborcompliance.com/information/how-to-start-a-non-profit-organization-in-colorado.php#.UunCfPldVig I want to make sure this is not affecting our SEO in any way, particularly that Google would see this as an affiliate or paid link since it has the "#". I may be crazy but I just want to make sure!
Technical SEO | | Harbor_Compliance0 -
Too many links?
Hello! I've just started with SEOmoz, and am getting an error about too many links on a few of my blog posts - it's pages with high numbers of comments, and the links are coming from each commenter's profile (hopefully that makes sense they're not just random stuffed links). Is there a way to help this not cause a problem? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | PaulineMagnusson0 -
Sitemap Generator Tool
We have developed a very large domain with well over 500 pages that need to be indexed. The tool we usually use to create a sitemap has a limit of 500 pages. Does anyone know of good tool we can use to create a sitemap text and xml that doesn't have a limit of pages? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TracSoft0 -
About google Disavow tool
My website is attacked by spammed link method, so should i use Goolge disavow tool to remove that links? And i have an question that when i use google Disavow to remove backlinks, but i still not remove it on the webpage that placed my links. Does Google index that backlink again? or never?
Technical SEO | | magician0 -
How much effect does number of outbound links have on link juice?
I am interested in your thoughts on the effect of number of outbound links (obls) on link juice passed? ie If a page linking to you has a high number of obls, how do you compute the effect of these obls and relative negative effect on linkjuice. In the event that there are three sites on which you have been offered the opportunity of a link Site A PA 30 DA50 Obls on page 10 Site B PA 40 DA50 Obls on page 15 Site C PA 50 DA50 Obls on page 20 How would you appraise each of these prospective page links (ignoring anchor text, relevancy, etc which will be constant) Is there a rule of thumb on how to compare the linkjuice passed from a site relative to its PA and the number of obls? Is it as simple as page with 10 obls passes 10x juice of page with 100 obls?
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
External Sitewide Links and SEO
I have one big question about the potential SEO value -- and possibly also dangers? -- of "followed" external sitewide links. Examples of these would be: a link to your site from another site's footer a blogroll link a link to your site from another site's global navigation Aside from the link's position in the HTML file (the higher the better, presumably), are these links essentially the same from an SEO point of view or different (and how)? There used to be an influential view out there that the link juice value of a sitewide link was the same as that of a single link (presumably from the linking site's home page), even though a sitewide link may in fact result a huge number individual links. Is this true or false? What is the math here? Should one worry about having "too many" sitewide links, in the sense that this may raise red flags by way of the algo? I talked to someone a few months ago (before the recent algo updates) who believed that he had got a minus 10 penalty or whatever it was for getting too many sitewide links We offer website design and development as well as SEO, and we put a keyworded link to ourselves in the footer. I think this is a fairly common practice. Is this a good or bad idea SEO-wise? One opinion is that for external sitewide footer links, you should best have a dofollow link on the home page, but nofollow it on all other pages. What is your opinion about that? Is there anything else that is distinct, interesting or important about sitewide links' SEO value and pitfalls? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Philip-SEO1