Link Analysis tool update

If you ever see me at conferences, I tend to give away short term access to our in-house link analysis tool (Password below). We like the feedback, but we can’t give everyone the tool forever as it’s part of our “secret sauce” (or “secret source”). Maybe one day we’ll give people the chance to sign up, but for now, we are still playing with it.

It just got better – so here’s a free login for a few weeks…

• Link Location: https://labs.receptional.com/links/
• Username: may08
• Password: may08

What is it and what has got better?

The tool takes two web domains and compares the relative backlink quality of each site. Not only does it look at the number of backlinks, but it tries to extract links that may have a quality signal and record these “quality links” separately from any old spam.

In this release we have:

• Added the ability to add a list of your own “trusted domains” to fit your industry
• Allowed you to restrict results to back-links from pages containing a specific keyword
• Added the ability to download the results into a spreadsheet
• We added a metric: “backlinks per page” (see below)
• Improved the retrieval speed

I analyzed two of my colleagues, Mike and David (hope you don’t mind, guys) who both were on the front page of Google just now for the phrase “search engine marketing”. Now – they are BOTH there, so I’m not going to argue with either result. I asked it to analyse the following:

“Analyse links to www.weboptimiser.com vs www.search-engine-book.co.uk from pages containing the phrase “search engine marketing”

Now – Mike only has 46 pages, but still gets first page, with only 1,590 inbound links compared to Weboptimiser’s 18,200. Why so different? Well for one reason, Mike actually has a huge number of links to the site (try the search again without the phrase filters).

I also note that over half of Mike’s links are not to the the home page. Now I suspect I know exactly why that is. But I’m not letting on.

I think the calculation to start looking at more and more, though, is the “Backlinks per page” statistic. Here we divide the number of backlinks we see pointing towards a site by the number of pages that we see indexed for a domain. We may do more research on this statistic at a later date.

You are free to use the tool for the rest of the month. Please tell us if you can see a way to improve it – and sign up if you want us to give out passwords to you in the future.

Dixon.