Link Research Tools - the Good, the Bad and the Pointless

Link Research Tools.

At first glance the package looks quite promising, although any link builder that I’ve ever worked with will probably tell you that they either don’t have the time or don’t need this sort of suite to be able to tell whether a link is good or not (and to some extent I agree), so that pretty much rules them out as a target market, making the name of the product somewhat misleading.

Personally, I thought that whilst this sort of thing is very nice its real purpose lies in either early analysis, reporting or simply to have another tool to say you use to impress clients.

The other issue that I tend to have with these sorts of software is there are a few out there now and routing out which features are helpful is the real challenge. Link research tools certainly has an awful lot of features to play with, so I’m going to give you a quick review and breakdown of the tools that you should look at and those not to bother with. Granted I am not saying that you can’t find these metrics elsewhere. In fact I know that you can and in some cases where there is a much better tool I may just tell you!

The Good

The Backlink Link Profile Tool

This tool is actually my favourite and it’s also something that as an SEO Consultant I have neglected to really dig into in the past, but now more than ever having a good link profile is important and this tool really does display it quite effectively. The anchor text breakdown, the link status, deep link ratio and TLD breakdowns are all nice, but the real winner is the theme breakdown (at least in my eyes). Whilst I don’t expect that this is entirely accurate, it does let you know if you need to diversify or if you need more specialist niche relevant links. This certainly saves inordinate amounts of time. A close second would be the anchor text popularity which again is a huge time saver. The issue I’d have with this tool is that you won’t really need to use it much and if you’re starting a campaign from scratch you could really keep tabs on what is being built at least for the most part. I’d say that it may be something that you want to check once every month or so and adjust your link strategies accordingly. To cut to the point this IS a GOOD tool and well worth a play.

Common Backlinks Tool

Not 100% sure if I like this tool, but I can see how it would be useful. It’s pretty easy to use and pretty self-explanatory in that it matches which backlinks you and your competitors share. Now whilst at first some companies may think great we can steal their links, when I was looking at one of our clients on this I saw that they shared some backlinks with six of their competitors. For me this raised alarm bells that the links would be seen as obviously paid for, now I know what some of you may be thinking, but if it only links out to niche relevant sites it should be fine right? Well maybe, but that is only showing me 10 competitors, so now I have to go a check the site manually to make sure it isn’t a link farm. This tool could be pretty useful in cleaning up a legacy link building mess and also in copying of competitor link building habits, but I’m not completely sold.

Bulk Link Analyzer

Does what it says, uses standard metrics, nothing ground-breaking, but still useful.

Missing Links Tool

Sort of Ok, sort of not. Ok I can see my competitors links, but now I have to be careful not to end up on a site all my competitors will buy links on next month because they’re all doing the same thing. Reasonable tool; speeds up competitor analysis.

The Bad

Link Juice Thief

Ok if you’re in a tiny market then this may work, but if you’re in a large market this is never going to happen. The idea is that it tells you who your main competitors link out to so that you can buy links from them. Now the problem is that most careful website owners link out to authorities such as the BBC, Facebook and Wiki for example. Now as for Facebook and social media sites you should be doing this already, not that you’re going to steal your competitors’ link juice this way, but the point stands. And when we’re talking about places like the BBC if you can get yourself a link on the article they’re linking to then hats off to you. But you knew those links were good anyway.

Link Juice Recovery

Amend: I have to admit I only glanced at this tool quickly and dismissed it as another website crawler, however it does do something different by highlighting only that you’re losing link juice through, however I think that a certain amount of out-linking is only natural. So that is an issue here, as long as you’ve been sensible with who you linked to in the 1st place you shouldn’t need something like this.

SERP Analysis

Get the SEO Quake Plugin and have a look for yourself - it will be quicker and less daunting to look at.

Competitive Landscape Analyzer

Sort of get what they’re going for here, but this is something I personally would rather judge for myself and do manually. Maybe just a personal preference or maybe it’s because this tool doesn’t show me everything I’d like to see to make a judgement call on a keyword to target.

The Pointless

Strongest Sub Pages Tool

This is a something that you can find out in seconds using Google operator codes and also something that doesn’t work all too well either. I tested this on Blueclaw’s website and I highly doubt that a one page subdomain that is just a holding page that the dev. team put up is our second strongest page across the entire site. Check it out for yourselves wwww.blueclaw.co.uk I get the feeling that this may not be the case.

Contact Finder

Ok let’s say that you want to do some mass spamming of webmasters for links; is this the tool you’d use? No. And that isn’t to say it’s bad, it’s not the worst I’ve seen by far, just that there are some more widely used and effective tools *cough* scrapebox *cough* to use. Added to which we certainly don’t advocate this practice, thus it has found itself in the pointless section. And if that wasn’t enough of a reason, the limited amount of credits is nothing short of ridiculous.

Link Alert

Doesn’t work brilliantly, pulls from things you should be checking anyway and seriously, just check your links once a month, and don’t obsess about it.

The Conclusion

Whilst there was a fair bit I wasn’t happy with and quite a lot of things that I didn’t think were of much use in this suite the parts that were good were very good. And after having a chat with Christoph and knowing that he is looking to take on board the criticisms of people like me (the customer) I really think the tool should get better in coming months. I still think that this suites real strength lies in the early campaign stages and some of the tools feel like bolt-ons. But, that isn’t to say that the core tools aren’t good, because simply put they are.