Is Your Website’s Link Profile Natural?

With Google constantly updating it’s algorithm to return the best possible results for web searchers, it is becoming increasingly important to regularly analyze your website’s link profile. Since linkbuilding is a constantly evolving and changing process, based on the current search engine algorithms, it is important that you regularly update and adjust your linkbuilding techniques. There was a time, not too long ago, where if you had a site that you wanted to rank for the keyword term “Search Engine Optimization” you would simply point a bunch of links to your website using that exact anchor text as the link. If you are still using this practice in 2009 (and unfortunately many people still are) it is only a matter of time before you will face a huge penalty from Google or possiblyeven be removed from their search results all together. With anchor text being just one piece of the puzzle, there are a variety of components you need to look into when analyzing your website’s link profile. Free Backlink Analysis Tools: I have tested quite a few free backlink analysis tools and ended up finding major flaws with most of them. Many of these free tools are ridiculously slow, don’t provide the necessary information, or are just plane buggy and don’t work correctly. Out of all the free tools available, here are five free backlink tools that should be able to give you a great idea of your website’s link profile (don’t forget to keep tabs your competitor’s link profiles as well). *. SeoPro Backlink Checker : This is probably my favorite tool for analyzing a site’s backlinks as it seems to provide the most complete analysis available (for free that is). This tool lists anchor text, Pagerank, no-follow, link count, and a few other important factors. You are also given the ability to sort the list based on different variables which is quite helpful. Most importantly, it has a very simple layout and is easy to use. *. Link Diagnosis Backlink Checker : This is another great tool for analyzing your site’s backlinks. It provides much of the same information as the SeoPro tool, but adds a few unique features. It provides you with an inbound link’s“strength” to give you an idea of the link’s effectiveness; it is hard to say how accurate this number actually is though. Additionally, youare provided with two graphs displaying “Pagerank Distribution” and “Link Types.” *. Google Webmaster Tools : While most people put their focus on the inbound links to their site, it is also important to analyze the internal linking profile of your website. For this, I like to use Google Webmaster Tools. This tool has an internal link section that is able to keep track of how many links you have going to each page and where each is linked from. One drawback is not being able to easily see the anchor text for each internal link, but I still feel this tool is very helpful none-the-less. *. Yahoo Site Explorer : This tool provides a very easy way to view the number of inbound links to any given site and shows which external sites the links are coming from. As a bonus, if you have SEO Quake (discussed below) installed and the Site Explorer function enabled, you will see additional information when using Site Explorer including Pagerank, links, etc. *. SEO Quake Toolbar : I thought this was worth including as it is a tool I use all day, everyday. This toolbar shows a variety of useful SEO information, but pertaining to backlinks in particular, it will show you the Yahoo Site Explorer link count right in your browser. This is useful for getting a quick idea of the link count for a site, or even a specific page, without having to navigate to another website. I believe that is also important to note that while many of these free tools can get the basic job done, there are a variety of paid services and tools that are simply able provide users with a more complete set of backlink data for analysis. The primary difference of the paid vs. free tools is that the paid tools use their own index of your site rather than basing the data on one of the big three search engine’s index. Two paid services that are worth mentioning are Linkscape by SEOmoz.org and the backlink tool by MajesticSEO.com . Red Flags in Your Link Profile: When using these SEO tools , here area few things to keep in mind when analyzing your website’s inbound links. *. Do many of your links have the same precise anchor text? If so, this is a very easy thing for Google, and other search engines, to pick up on. If your site has 1000 links and 900 of them simply use the anchor text “SEO” you can be sure a penalty is coming your way. These days, you need to vary your anchor text and think like a regular user rather thanan Internet marketer. *. Do you have all do-follow links? While do-follow links flow the link juice to your site, it is important to incorporate some no-follow links into your link profile. While this number varies greatly, a natural link profile will usually contain at least 3-5% no-follow links. *. Where are your inbound links placed? Links are naturally placed in blogposts and embedded in content. Simply put, links placed in the footer and even in the blogroll of a site are just not very effective anymore. Moreover, I’m not a big fan of site-wide links and tend to think they can often lead to penalties. *. How authoritative are the site’s linking to you? This has become a major factor in determining the quality of a link. It is no longer the quantity of links alone that will get your site ranking for desirable keyword phrases, but rather the quality of the links pointing towards your site. *. Are you buying links? Buying links is generally not a great idea these days and can easily lead to penalties for your site. Sites that sell links tend to stick out like a sore thumb and are becoming increasingly easy for search engines to detect. If you are still buying links, it is time to look elsewhere. *. Are the site’s linking to you relevant? This is by far one of the most important factors these days. Look to build in-context links around highly relevant and high quality content as opposed to just looking at Pagerank or the number of inbound links. I also want to mention very quickly that the with the recent news of Bingeventually powering Yahoo’s search results , some of these free tools I mentioned may be directly affected. Yahoo’s Site Explorer is really the onetool provided by the big three search engines that allows users to reverse engineer the links of a given site; something that Google and Microsoft simply do not want to enable the public to do for obvious reasons. If Site Explorer gets the axe as a result of this new merger between the two companies, it may force people to turn towards some paid alternatives, such as the two I mentioned earlier. With many of the free backlink analysis tools basing their reports on the information from Site Explorer, these tools could potentially not be available if Yahoo decides to stop offering this free service. Please feel free to leave me some feedback or suggest a few more resources or tips that I may have missed!