Link Detox Price got crazy !!!! Any alternative?

[AutoEurope]

Hi SEO fellas

I have always used Link Detox to regularly analyze my link profile, with plan of around 200 dollars per month.

The tool gave a "representative sample" of my links and I was able to identify and analyze the new links and get a representative summary of how "clean" my domain was.

Today I wanted to run a new analysis, but I found a nasty surprise !!! The tool doesn't do this "partial" analysis anymore and they just offer "full analysis". And of course, I need to change my plan to one that costs me.... 2.500 dollars per month !!!!

Anyone knows an good alternative? I have read that SEMRush and Href are good also for link audit?

Thanks for your help

[AutoEurope]

Hi James

In three weeks they went from first page to not in top 50, all of them gradually... Things started to go a bit worse in terms of rankings and organic traffic in April (Fred update), but I have nothing wrong in search console.

Link profile is "more or less" clean, analyzed in January...

The only thing that comes to my mind could be this sponsored blog articles or some affiliates I just identified with tons of links with commercial anchor text and not good sites (kind of networks). I´m gonna transform all these in nofollow and see what happens...

Thanks for your help

[AutoEurope]

Thank you all for your answers

Marie, really good explanation; I have also read your article in moz blog.

My generic rankings (just the ones where my homepage ranks) have drastically drop and I´m afraid that i got some kind of algorithm penalty. This year I got some sponsor post with follow links in good and not very commercial blogs so I guess this could be the reason. Not many, around 15-20.

If i understand your theory correctly, Google should just ignore those links, right? But I´m afraid that instead I got a bit penalized... I think I´m going to turn these links into nofollow and hopefully rankings will come back to normal.

What are your thoughts? Thanks

[MarieHaynes]

Hi Niall,

Are you sure that you need to be auditing your links each month? It's never a bad idea to go through your links regularly, but in my opinion, most sites do NOT need to be disavowing any more.

For a couple of years, a huge portion of my income came from doing link audits. I saw some amazing Penguin recoveries.

But when Penguin 4.0 came out in September of 2016, everything changed. Google made it so that for the most part, they ignore unnatural links. This means that unnatural links should not be able to penalize a site. If you're disavowing a link, you're asking Google to ignore it. So, if you are spending lots of money and time disavowing, then you're essentially asking Google to ignore links that they are already ignoring. In most cases I think it is a waste of money to do this.

Any time I say that, there will be people who swear that they have been able to take a site down via negative SEO by building links, or there will be people who swear that they saw a nice improvement after disavowing. But I've seen very few cases where someone has given good evidence to support their claims.

I wrote a thorough article on Moz about whether or not we still need to be disavowing in the age of Penguin 4.0:

https://moz.com/blog/do-we-still-need-to-disavow-penguin

If you're dealing with a manual unnatural link penalty then yes, you should be disavowing links. But otherwise, in most cases I recommend not disavowing. I think it's possible to do more harm than good. Also, many of the links that are flagged as "toxic" on automated link auditing tools are just cruft that every site gets.

My point in saying all of this is that I am betting that you probably don't need to spend any money on link auditing tools.

With that said, it's never a bad idea to regularly review your links...not for finding links to disavow, but rather, to see what is working for you. I personally like Ahrefs for monitoring links. I have alerts set up to tell me when I get a new link and I check those regularly. My goal though is to find what kinds of good links I am getting. For example, if a particular type of content has gained a few natural links then I know that that is good content to do outreach on and try to get more links.

If you're a Moz member, open site explorer is good at surfacing good links as well.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Niall,

I don't do much detoxing anymore and wouldn't like to comment on which are good/bad tools. However, I have Tweeted this question out to Marie Haynes and I am sure she will chip in if she can offer any help on this one.

-Andy