Analysing Backlinks

Introduction

When you are looking at a site for the first time or you need to see how your SEO campaign is going you can get an idea of the strength of a site to a indeed your competitors site using a backlink analysis program. There are quite a few out there.

The basic information you need to know include: the number of links pointing to the site, the link URL, the anchor text, the number of outbound links, whether the link is followed or not. Additional useful information would include a measure of the link quality. Most use PageRank either from the toolbar or calculated using the number of links as a basis.

Yahoo! Site Explorer

This uses the Yahoo index to see which links point to a particular site.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Results from SiteExplorer

By entering the domain in the site explorer, we can list the internal and external links that Yahoo knows about. To see the external links only we can click the except from this domain in the combo box. This will list the links in Yahoo that point to the URL you entered. If you can the setting in the drop-down box to from  this URL to entire domain you can get an idea of the links that point to the entire domain.

It is important to realise that the result only tell you about the links Yahoo has in its index and cannot be extrapolated to what Google knows about the site.

In Google you can find the number of links pointing to a site using the link: modifier. However, this is notoriously inaccurate and Google will never list all the links that it has in its index. Google Webmaster tools will also give you some information about the links it know about.

BackLinkWatch.com

BacklinkWatch.com

This site uses the Yahoo index and so it will give you the same link information as Yahoo, however it does give you some extra information which may be helpful. It will tell you the number of Out Bound Links (OBL) which is important in determining the quality of the link since the greater the number of links out as the link weight is inversely proportional to the number of links. The anchor text is another important piece of information as your ranking for a particular search term will be partially determined by the number links which contain this term.

LinkDiagnosis

LinkDiagnosis

Running. Takes quite a long time.

Link Results

Link diagnosis is a link analysis program which will run as a Firefox extension or rather there is a link to the site when you right click. It also uses the Yahoo index for its link information. It does display a lot of informatio, although information such as the PageRank are calculated and it is not clear even though the FAQ explains how it is calculated. At the time I looked at the site the formula was writen in a way that didn’t make sense.

LinkDiagnosis gives a lot of useful information in a way that is well presented. It allows you to order the links in terms of PR, as well as a histogram showing the distribution of the PR of the links. Another useful feature is the ability to see the frequency at which different keywords appear so you can check whether your link building strategy is looking ‘natural’. (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink say no more.) It will tell you which pages in the domain that you have linked to are getting the most links and list them in order of link popularity.

Magestic SEO

This is an independent link analysis provider which is an off-shoot of the distributed search engine Majestic 12. The most important question we need to ask of an independent link analysis program is how big is the index it has available?  For majestic, this is around 52 billion pages. The link analysis is also verified by using Yahoo.

Magestic SEO in demo mode

Majestic SEO Results

Majestic SEO uses proprietary metrics calculated from the search engine such as ACRank which is simple method based on the number of links. The link spread give information on the number of links linking to the domain with a particular ACRank. It also provides information on the number of domains sending links to a site, total backlinks, external backlinks, reported backlinks.

Conclusion

These are all very capable link analysis tools. However, with the exception of Majestic SEO, they use Yahoo as a linking database. If you are trying to analysis your results for Google then the links found by Yahoo do not mean that Google also has found these links. It does give you an idea of which links Yahoo has but, as we know, Yahoo places less relevancy on the links and more emphasis on content.

These tools can be useful in finding new links if you are analysising a competitor’s website. By seeing what links they have, you may also be able to get a link on the same site.