seo tools

Common Forward Links Tool - get Super-Authority links from sites that have authority back links

Marketing Fan — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:17:26 +0200

What the common forward link tool does

The common forward links tool finds those super authorities that a bunch of other authorities or important sites link to.

And you then just go out and get links from those!

This means if you have a set of valued authority sites (e.g. the top 20 marketing blogs) you just ask the tool where these sites link out to in common and try to get on the linked-to sites… thereby having all the inbound trust from the initially entered authority sites.

How the common forward link tool works

Enter a list of authority sites that you have researchede well, and already believe are authorities in your niche, i.e. the top 20 SEO blogs
Tool looks at all the forward (outgoing) links those sites link to and finds common patterns
Tool lists the commonly linked to urls and domains (along with JUICE, Age, Inbound links, Cache date and other important metrics)

You go out and try to get links from these super-authorities that are linked from what you considered an authoritive site already…

So by using this tool to extract the sites linked FROM all those sites you entered we find a common pattern of sites aka super-authorities that are important to ALL the sites you entered. And obviously Google & co will love the inbound links you get from these super-authorities,but you need some upfront reserch to find the input list.

Nice that after having the idea in October 2006, we finally got to implement this using MSN’s linkfromdomain command

This is another twist to finding common backlinks of your competitors and trying to get on those, but I like it so much better, because it actually makes your competitors link to you – indirectly.

MSN’s linkfromdomain

Almost two years ago MSN introduced their “linkfromdomain” operator and I came up with three great uses for the linkfromdomain command

Today, after reading Gab’s post on Cheaply retargeting I realized that what he was doing was looking for common forward links (i.e. links out of a set of authority sites) and try to buy ads on those sites. Which in effect are authority sites in that niche to improve your brand visibility.

Well, apply this to good ole link building and you come back to the “common forward links” tool that I mentioned 2 years ago.

What do you think about this approach to get on super-authorities?

Please note, this is a post about the methodology,

this tool is not (yet) public

as we only use it for our own work and premium consulting services just like our JUICE tool and Ad Network detector

But with enough people interested (i.e. links, comments) I might let the one or the other guy allow to test it for his own stuff if I get to hear a great reason to do so :-)

PS: You can even even enter all YOUR competitors (hint hint) and make them indirectly link to you !

Let me know your thoughts!

Checking links vs. content vs. rankings

Marketing Fan — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 01:44:55 +0100

When I talked about integrating the keyword ranking with the link list in my SoloSeo Review I was a bit vague about what I actually wanted, and Michael asked me if I could elaborate on that a little more that would help. He didn’t quite see how we would connect those two…

So I’m trying again

As you know, there are 3 things in the SEO equation

Content (with high quality and keywords)

and

Links (with keywords, trust, pagerank, volume, etc.etc.)

Equal

Rankings (of keyword phrase searches for your content)

(bit simplicistic, but you get the idea)

So, when I do link building, I’m not always getting a link saying some high money word like “bad credit loan”, but I might get one that goes “loans for bad credit ratings” or even longer and more obscure… maybe even a completely bizarre phrase that some people wouldn’t want to link with.

BUT, this is not only important to create a natural pattern, but also to target long tails “naturally”

Also I often get up to FIVE different links from a presell page , all five could have such obscur long tail words, but in combination they boil down to the high money word e.g. “bad credit loan” in our example.

Long story short, when I enter my keywords to rank, I enter the “bad credit loan” as main target phrase, but I ALSO want to check rankings for ALL those long tail phrases to

a) SEE that those links I got work in (a good chance your page starts ranking for such long phrases, then you know that link is good)

b) by that keep track of the link purchases and their effect…

If a single link or several links from a presell page cannot rank even a super-obscure phrase, it’s probably crap, a problem with the target site (TOO young?) or the host I got links from is simply blacklisted and cannot pass link juice… so I wanna drop it after 6 or 12 months or so …

Of course I only know for sure if I target some obscure stuff,

because if I target even long tails only, not to speak of my most important keyword, I might have to get TONS and TONS more links to see effects on those highly competitive phrases.

OF COURSE I want SoloSeo to track all those rankings for my links, on a weekly basis…

without ME entering them as extra keywords somewhere in the kw portfolio * without ME starting that batch job all the time…

SoloSEO should schedule that once per week , that’d be fine

I still don’t know how to use that content-tool to upload my stuff, BUT

What I want as a third link in this game is a cross-check between link anchor vs. the content of the target page the link goes to checker…

If the content page my link goes to with “loans for bad credit ratings” contains THAT phrase, you cannot go wrong… if if DOES NOT contain that phrase, well – I might at least get a notification and would think about working that into the copy somehow

By that I would like to have links, content and of course rankings checking cross-over..

and so far there’s no such tool available I know,

and SoloSeo could be the first to offer that.

In fact IF SoloSEO would implement that in their cool interface I would see this even as possible separate product to spin off.

THAT I would like to license and run off my own servers- for the super-secret projects, the big money things where nobody trusts anybody… :-)

What do you think?

SoloSEO - the SEO project management suite

Marketing Fan — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 15:46:38 +0100

I was invited to the beta of SoloSeo already back mid November by Bill Slawski at the WMW in Las Vegas… Since then I worked with it and could even get some issues fixed by the owner Michael Jensen pretty fast… a smooth experience.

So what’s SoloSEO about?

In short, this is an integrated set of tools meant to streamline and organize YOUR SEO process, supporting repetitive tasks like link-building, keyword research and all kinds on-site tweaks by either tools or at least a cool checklist feature.

Interactive Checklist for SEOing your sites

And this checklist feature is actually where the whole approach comes from – it’s meant to deal with (parts) of typical project management issues like planning for a site’s SEO and then executing it … hopefully without forgetting important stuff. There are a ton of tasks and a pretty basic checklist already applied to each new project you start there, but you can customize it the way you want – reordering, adding, deleting stuff.

Keyword research and grouping

The Keyword research tool>http://www.soloseo.com/do-it-yourself-seo/keywords.html is one, that you might find in different implementations all over the web or as standalone programs as well, but I like that AJAXish implementation here and the fact that it makes research keywords really simple… it’s not the Keywordelite type of featurepacked power-tool, but it does it’s job 90% at least … in fact keeping your keyword repository in a central place is a good idea…

What I’m missing today is all sorts of re-uses for that keyword repository when it comes to researching links, competitors, etc… those tools got separate form fields to enter keywords again, but it’d be lovely to have those integrated with the kw researcher and have their results linked and stored to the keywords as well (like a super-granular checklist)

Link Building support

There’s a little tool to help you mark pages that you want to get links from and track the stats of the page as well as your progress with getting a link there… that’s a pretty neat idea… that bookmarklet to mark found pages comes in handy and I think I would do the marking on one of my screens and add comments and that on my 2nd screen here…

However I’m missing some feature to configure my email accounts IN soloseo and let it mail from there as well as have a way to put in some general link asking templates that are pre-populated with the page I want etc… note that I’m not doing link begging very often at all, but I bet that people who mail out 50 mails for links per day definately have some copy/paste templates ready, so they’d better be integrated in the tool as well

Competitor Link research

As you always need to do a research on where your competitors get links from, Soloseo offers that as well, but after getting 50 links for 10 competitors I found a list of link urls with a small checkbox to mark them one by one to have them added to the link manager (explained above, to keep track on when/how you got links there) ...

What I’m missing there is that you don’t really have a good way to “bulk add” domains (like if 9 of 10 competitors got a link from a site, I want to have that too, but that isn’t really supported in the interface (altough read about common links feature)

Also to judge on IF I want to get a link there too I’d need to see the urls’ and domain’s stats as well, which is not supported… obviously this would cause A LOT more load on SoloSEOs server… but again, I’d need that to judge on a site’s strength…

bulk adding ALL of them to the link manager and removed them later might be a good workaround to manage this situation

Ranking Reports

Finally we are tracking SEO results by achieved rankings, so there’s a keyword rank checker built in as well… That’s limited to 50 keywords only and there’s (at least I didn’t find it) a way to corelate the ranking reports with the link manager, which would be a very interesting thing to do…

Like adding a link and track that (linked) keyword’s stats based on the added links… This is again where the integration between these separate tools is missing for me, and SoloSeo would have all the data available

Other neaties

Tools like the “Top Subpages” tool or the “Link Search” generator ( that generators queries for “[keyword] add link” and similars ) come in pretty handy, but are available around the web as well.

The content creation tool is a tool that easily let’s you generate a web page and count the words and keyword density in that article for you… I’m not a “density” believer, but this might be useful for those that do and will create their content in that fashion.

The keyword scanner is another research tool that let’s you extract keywords from your own or even other sites. The popularity of each keyword according to Adwords is shown alongside the keyword.

SoloSeo also displays graphs for basic stats like PageRank, backlink counts and updates them every two weeks I think… I wish that automatic reporting would be done for rank checks as well (after all that’s the most important thing to track)

Overall I found SoloSeo a very nice application and I definately like the approach to have work-templates like the checklists or a common keyword database. This will actually improve SEO work colaboration in teams.

However I would love to have SoloSeo even more options and customization tweaks… All those tools are still not integrated as they could be and I’m definately waiting on some kind of plugin-architecture or at least a customization option to add own tools as bookmarklets (well, my browser has 30 r so of them on top, but SoloSeo has the data to pass to them)

Final concern is of course that you have to trust SoloSeo your urls, your way or working (if you maintain the checklists) and all the golden spots you found for linking (in the link manager)... and a lot of high-money sites won’t just be used with SoloSeo because of that.

In any case SoloSeo is a perfect tool to start your SEO efforts if you don’t have the tool arsenal that I accumulated over the last years.

And IF you got that many tools like me I suggest you shoot the SoloSeo team an email asking for improvements – I found them VERY responsive to my suggestions so far!

A more detailled overview can be found here as well as a nice review by Michael Gray here

In a year from now SoloSeo could look a whole lot different if they manage to improve their overall integration and implement some more suggestions… I guess I’ll give it a look in February 2008 again to find out it got even cooler.

3 great uses for the MSN LinkFromDomain command

Marketing Fan — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 11:43:18 +0200

The new linkfromdomain command available from MSN Live search for some days now is what I have been waiting for for YEARS now… why?

With this command you can easily extract linkage data the search engines got that you cannot get easily in another way (unless of course you spider websites with your own robots, which some existing scripts and tools have to do … :-)

First some thanks to Todd Marcus Aaron and Graywolf via the Threadwatch Community for pointing me to this feature some days ago – I definately forgot about posting about my ideas the last 2 days…

So – MSN LinkFromDomain – is this fancy new rocket science technology as one reader stated?

NO WAY ... Search engines got the web index spidered already since their first introduction of link based algorithms… the novel thing is that MSN is revealing this additional information (in addition to the backlinks) to the public.

Now what’s that new command useful for?

Just some ideas off the top of my head – I found some others having similar ideas and will reference to them

1. Bad neighborhood linkage analysis

everybody’s talking bad neighborhood linking – but how can YOU really find out where-to a site is linking to? Spider all of the site’s pages and even take a look at all those small

footer links and maybe even hidden links that only SEngs see and furthermore check all the domains in Google, Yahoo, MSN ?

No more needed – linkfromdomain:site.com and you see where they link out to … of course in case of Google this can be quite a lot

“Russ Jones of Virante” already launched a quick tool already for finding banned sites – it checks the first 100 links in MSN for your site and tells you if they are indexed or NOT by google (an indication of banning). check it out ..

2. Hub analysis is old – do Authority analysis

SEOs look at common inbound link patters to pages the they suspect to be hubs, e.g. using Aarons Hubfinder (that I need to mirror BTW)

The problem: you first need those hub pages you suspect – and probably find them by looking up existing links to authority sites – which again you suspect them to be authorities

so what the HECK is an authority site

Similar to comparing similarities in inbound link patterns for ONE site, you can now go and compare the OUTBOUND link patterns for a couple of sites… and that tool could very easily list a grade of authority by counting how many top ranking sites link out to that found site

WHY would you do that?

WELL, linking out is crucial to your rankings as mentioned by many others – which means you want to find the authorities to link to – and a GOOD PART of the SEO community already knows, understands and DOES this …

So NOW all you have to do is apply a linkfromdomain command to a site and – well – filter the results… actually every corelation of these results with the results of other top ranking sites should give you a GREAT idea of what to look for… Aarons old tool – the hubfinder should be fairly easy to modify to use that

So if LINKING OUT is crucial to your rankings and finding the sites to link out to can be so easy now by having an “authority finder tool” is required (which still has to be developed, I guess Aaron AND/OR Jim are already working on it, especially as Jim already has a related forward link tool ) then the MSN LinkFromDomain command is the key element to it :-)

Sidenote: Googles RELATED: operator gave you some ideas… until they crippled it some months ago – just like the backlink operator

Then looking at common inbound link patterns AND common outbound link patterns in an even more advanced tool will give you great ideas leading to real web graphs.

I’m amazed MSN is giving out so much info.

But then there are some flaws of missing data and even a suspicion of supplemental outbound link SERPs

3. FAST reciprocal link checker

well obviously recip link checking has become a lot easier – at least for that part of the web that MSN has indexed, spidered and is returning data for

You can use this in TWO ways

a) compare all inbound links vs matching outbound links for a domain

linkfromdomain:marketingfan.com linkdomain:marketingfan.com

b) compare all inbound links vs matching outbound links for a page

linkfrom:marketingfan.com link:marketingfan.com

So this last one only returns pages that marketingfan.com links out to, that are linking back to the homepage … you could do that with any other target page on your site (e.g. your hidden powerfull product selling page)

Russ again launched a reciprocal link percentage tool that calculates the percentage of reciprocating links for a domain… pretty interesting use

Flaws,Problems,Questions with LinkFromDomain

Some further observations of some linkfromdomain command limitations of the last days

definately NOT the whole MSN index is retrievable via this command… I found a lot of sites that are ranking fine in MSN, got link pop data leading to PR4-7 in Google that returned NO single result in MSN

the results seem to be geo-ip based, unless you add some locale-operator… e.g. if I look for Google’s outbound links then I get a ton of austrian sites (.at domain) linked from there… I assume the US guys start with .coms or US based sites

there’s a suspicion of supplemental outbound link SERPs – meaning some filtered links that MSN won’t show you

I am still trying to find out is – does it work with wildcards? – I mean some kind of keyword restrictions in those outbound link results

It would be great to have a command like

linkfromdomain:site.com *gambling*

this would be great to list all gambling sites a target site is linking to unless you are in gamling business you don’t want your link there, do you?

(YES: even if it IS a PR8 – who the heck cares about PR anyway???)

Anyway – Thank you MSN for this cool new operator!

PS: sidenote – MSN also got their new “search MACRO” feature that I missed until now… I think that’s one great thing I’ll have to look into next

SEO for Firefox plugin

Marketing Fan — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 21:17:15 +0200

Aaron Wall just shot me a mail about his new FireFox plugin and I must say – it ROCKS!

It downloads useful market research data right into Google’s and Yahoo!‘s search results, just like site age, .edu, .gov, etc… backlinks and other data directly in your search results….

what a time-saver!

The feature list

PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
.edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
.edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
.gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.

WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

In addition to pulling in this valuable marketing data this tool links to the resources where the data was pulled from, so it makes it easy for you to verify the data and further analyze it by citing the source. You can click on any of the data points to dig deeper.

It also links to some other keyword research tools near the top of the search results…

The SEO plugin download link

Well – until today only Jim Boykin’s Cool SEO tool had this data combo availabe – albeit a bit prettier and better to read! and they still have the ranking comparison for various query types… so still +1 for Jim & his crew :-)

Now go checkout Aarons new plugin!