I won’t ask you not to cry. You can do that. It’s okay. I did that too.

But, life goes on. Link building goes on.

So, wipe out your tears, pack up your nostalgia and head back to building links

Will this affect how Advanced Link Manager gathers links?

In short, the answer is No. You can continue using Advanced Link Manager for your link building tasks just as before, regardless of whether Yahoo Site Explorer is available or not.

And the reason for that is quite simple. The way Advanced Link Manager works, is to retrieve links from multiple sources, merge the data and verify it, to ensure both completeness and accuracy to the reports it generates.

So, although Yahoo Site Explorer may have been a primary link source for you, there are lots of other alternative link sources you can now use and obtain the same result as before.

Among all these sources, there are definitely a few that stand out for their ability to retrieve a good and fair amount of data:

1. Google – whether we like it or not, Google drives most of the searches online. Therefore it massively crawls the web and has without doubt one of the largest web indexes. This should be good enough to place Google among your top sources of link data. They don’t usually give you the most important links, but deliver some fresh links once in a while.
2. SEOmoz – Linkscape is also a reliable source of link data, providing with both links and anchor text information. There is a free API available that grants you access to 1 000 links for a website, which makes SEOmoz a good substitute for what Yahoo Site Explorer used to be.
3. Blekko – the not so new anymore, Blekko has a growing database and retrieves for each website up to 1 000 links, which also qualifies it as one of the main sources of link data.

So, now what?

Now, there are two steps you must do:

► Be strong and uncheck Yahoo from your Advanced Link Manager list of search engines.
► And make sure you also have in your search engines list Google, SEOmoz and Blekko.

For that, go to the [Project] menu -> [Project Settings] and select the “Search Engines” tab. That is where you can make this selection.

To be able to retrieve data from SEOmoz you must also enter your free API key in Advanced Link Manager. This can be done through the [Options] menu -> [Preferences] -> [Performance] and in the “SEOmoz” tab you are required to enter your SEOmoz access ID and secret key.

What are these, you ask?

Well, as I said before you can get access to the SEOmoz API for free by signing up for a SEOmoz account. Once you have registered, you can find your API information on their website.

Living without Yahoo Site Explorer

The end of Yahoo Site Explorer’s era won’t be the end of link building era too. Things will go on as usual, you will be handling your projects as usual and your clients will be as happy as they usually are.

And Yahoo Site Explorer will remain in all of our memories the great tool that was there for us for a long time.

Why didn’t they provide with the same results? How are you supposed to know which one are the REAL ones?

And if you think of all the hours you’ve spent just to get to this dead end….

And this is not the only inconvenience you have when querying the search engines for link data…

But there are solutions for these problems. Let me break them down for you:

Have certainty over your link data

The reason why the search engines and other link databases (such as OpenSiteExplorer) provide different results is because they are not too frequently updated and links have changed since the last time they were checked. Some new ones may have appeared and others may have been removed.

You cannot know which is your real number of links or exactly which are the links pointing to your website, unless you verify each of them.

This is one of Advanced Link Managers great assets! After it gathers the link data from all the sources, it verifies it. You can be sure that the referrers list it builds, is made of REAL and ACTIVE links.

This does not mean that you will no longer know which links have been moved or deleted. Even if they are not active anymore, old links will still remain in the list but will be marked as deleted. This way you will know the present links, the new added ones and those that have been removed.

Although the search engines provide with uncertain link lists, you might want to know which are the results they retrieve. Therefore Advanced Link Manager builds a separate list (the unverified referrers list) with these links, so you will know exactly which are the results gathered from each of the search engines you have chosen.

Use every piece of information you can get

Search engines usually give a limited number of links (mostly 1000). This means that even if you do have more than 1000 links, search engines (let’s take Yahoo for example) won’t tell you more than 1000 links. This is quite frustrating, right?

Well, maybe in the future time this problem will be solved, as the new arrived Blekko already has taken notice of that and it provides with an unlimited number of links. But in the meantime, if you wish to have a more accurate link profile, you must query for links as many search engines as you can.

This is why Advanced Link Manager gathers data from over 100 search engines (and by that I mean different search engines and not just different local Google Search Engines) and it compiles a huge list of links to cover all of your existing links.

Save and expand your work

With the links displayed as search results, there is not that much you can do. You can’t export them, you can’t sort them, you can’t merge the results from multiple search engines, you can’t put together a unique list of links and you can’t evaluate their quality. The only thing that you can do is to visit the websites that link to you.

Not very insightful right?

This is why you need a tool for link building and monitoring. You need to process the data from search engines and to get actions out of it. Advanced Link Manager gets for each link, lots of useful information such as Page Rank, mozRank, number of backlinks, if the link was added, removed or switched to nofollow.

This way you can switch and twist your data in any way you see as fit for your needs. And of course you can export it in about any format of file you wish (HTML, XML, PDF, Excel, CSV, Text… you name it) so it is not stuck in the application.

Let’s conclude!

So, be clever and don’t rely just on search engines to get your links. You will only come to the conclusion that it is quite time consuming, mostly useless and completely inaccurate.

There are other better ways, don’t you think?

You can express your thoughts in the section below or you can more easily get in touch with us for further discussions, on Twitter!

Photo credit: @boetter

Or if you would have to walk around, carrying a telephone numbers agenda…. That would be awful!

The same way, you should neither deal with enormous lists of emails to be able to contact your link partners!

Or search through your entire pile of messages (and I know you have one ) to find your latest conversation with some partner of yours!

Therefore I’ve put together a small list of features that will make your work easier and will get you addicted to this tool for keeping contact with your link partners.

1. Keep The Contact Info In One Place

You probably have set for yourself the criteria to choose your link partners by. But do you have all that information you need? Where do you get that information from? And if you found it, wouldn’t it be better to have it stored all in one place?

Advanced Link Manager lets you have the details for each link partner, attached to it, right there in the referrers list. This way you will have all the information you need for making decisions available in a single window.

And more than that, Advanced Link Manager also gathers for you, the additional information and the contacting details for your link partners. You don’t have to go search it yourself, because it is already there!

For each domain in the unverified referrers list, it’s enough to click a button and Gather the additional Domain Information: the age of the domain, the categories where it is listed in Dmoz and Yahoo Directories, Contact details and all the other information available from Whois, WebArchive or stored in Google cache.

2. Manage Your Emails

Advanced Link Manager has integrated an email composer. This means that you can send emails to your partners straight from the application. You don’t need to switch to a browser to send an email, you don’t have to export all the time the contacts to your email account and you will ultimately better manage the hundreds of contacts used for link building.

And guess what? You don’t even need to know your partner’s email address because it will be automatically filled in by the application once you have gathered the domain information. You will just write your emails.

And, about that… You can build email templates to use when composing your emails and you can also set a custom personal information to be added automatically to all emails. All that, so you can write and send your emails more rapidly.

Advanced Link Manager also stores all your message history just like any other email client. This means you don’t need to worry about keeping track of your conversations, because you will be able to access, at all times, both sent and received email messages.

3. Set a Status For Your Connections

Each partnership has its own way of progressing and you must remember for each, the stage is in and the terms you have discussed with your partners.

Therefore, Advanced Link Manager lets you set for each of your partners a status: undecided, waiting for answer to link request email, waiting for answer to 2nd link request email, web site doesn’t want to link back, web site is not relevant, and so on. This way you can know in a second, for each of hundreds of link partners you might have, at which point in the link building process is at and what you should do next.

With all that, your link building agenda will be more organized and you will greatly enjoy connecting with your partners. Why miss the fun?

Let’s not stop here, and discuss more of your own methods to keep contacts organized, in the comments section below or faster, on Twitter.

Photo credit: Jared G

Maybe today you have gained a few links but also lost others.

You can never know what changes have been made within your link profile, unless you monitor your links. Of course, there are probably hundreds or thousands of them, but don’t panic.

Monitoring is not as hard as it is to build. All you need to do is to use the right tool.

So, let me resume the main things you should do on a current base to stay on top of your link profile.

1. Get your true number of links

First of all you need to know the real number of links to your website.

There are different sources where you can get the link data for your website (Open Site Explorer, Google, Yahoo! Site Explorer, Blekko) but the results you will get won’t be the same. They will be quite different from one source to another and it is not a question of who’s right or wrong. It’s a matter of data freshness.  Search engines don’t update this kind of information that often and it gets outdated.

But, in the end, who will you trust? Which of them is the right one? You can never know…  That is why I suggest you to use Advanced Link Manager and verify these links. It takes the links search engines give and it verifies each of them to see exactly how many (and which) of them are really linking to you. Thus, it gives you a more accurate number of links for your website.

In the Unverified Referrers report you can see the full list of links gathered from the search engines, regardless of whether they are still active or not. The Referrers report contains only those links that have been verified by Advanced Link Manager and are currently active.

2. Evaluate your progress

It is also very useful to look at the evolution of your links and the trend they have over time. Thus you can evaluate the progress you have made with your link building strategy and make the decisions needed in the future.

Are you loosing to many links from your link profile? Have you made any improvements in link building in the last period of time? Or, are your efforts not paying the results you have hoped?

Advanced Link Manager enables you to see the evolution of both the number of unverified links, provided by search engines (Unverified Referrers)and the number of verified referrers. Using the Search Engine Evolution tab in your Advanced Link Manager copy, you can see, in raw numbers or graphically, the evolution in time of your links, according to each search engine you select. Or, for a more accurate analysis, you can swap to the Backlinks Evolution tab, and take a look at the evolution of your verified links.

3. Track links differently

You can go a little bit further into analyzing the evolution of your links, and group them into relevant categories. What kind of links have you gained and which are lost? Are you loosing some of your best links? Are you gaining only week links, that bring not so much value to your link profile?

Just group your links according to their quality (or decide any other criteria you find relevant for your websites referrers) and use the Referrer Categories tab in Advanced Link Manager to view separately, the evolution of each category.

4. Check reciprocity

If you are building reciprocal links or maybe three or four way link exchanges, then you certainly need to track them separately. You have to make sure the links remain active between all webpages from the chain, so the partnership could be fair.

Without a special tool it would be very difficult to spot the leaks in these linking chains, because you would have to go and verify yourself each link between the webpages from the chain. But, you can use the Reciprocal Linking tab from Advanced Link Manager where you can see, for each reciprocal link you have defined, which of the links from the chain are broken.

Of course, you can always add more tasks to your link building routine and you can also share them with us, in the comments section below or, come join our discussions on Twitter.

Photo credit: Damon Duncan

You already know that!

And you probably already use this source for getting new and valuable link information. But if you do not use it, then you should start looking into it. That is because using your competitors research for links lets you build more links faster and thus, overcome them.

But this is not exactly an easy job to do, right?

Stealing link ideas from your competitors involves a lot of work and is not always that effective. Each of your competitors has hundreds or thousands of links and going through each of them to find those you could also get, means long hours of hard work. Not to mention that you might not even find to many link ideas there and all that work would be for nothing.

But, you shouldn’t give up!

You know that links are extremely important for your rankings and the more you have, the better you rank. Thus the greater the traffic to your website gets, the bigger your revenues will get. So, hang in there!

On the contrary! I suggest you to analyze as many competitors or related websites as you can, so you find as many link ideas as possible and then, get them!

And no, I’m not that evil (although, some people might say that about me ) to suggest you to spend days and days going through endless lists of links and to visit thousand of useless websites, looking for a link to get.

I have a better idea!

What would you say if you could get at once, the list of links from all your competitors? It would be much easier, right? You wouldn’t have tens of list to merge, sort and analyze. It would be just one!

Advanced Link Manager enables you to do just that! You can select as many competitors as you want and it gathers the links from all of them in one single list.

And, what would you say if you wouldn’t have to check each link to see if you have it already or if you have checked it before from another competitor? You could go straight to work and start getting the links!

Good news again! When Advanced Link Manager builds the list of links from your competitors, it automatically removes the links from domains you already have links from. So you can be sure that the links it suggests to you are links you don’t have.

On top of that, you can find what links your competitors have in common! If two of your top competitors have links from the same domain, it means, for one, that is a link you could also get, and secondly, that is a quite reliable source as more than one of your competitors have it. These are long hanging fruits for you! These are both valuable and easy to get links!

Just select the competitors you want to compare and intersect their links. There you have your list of common links! Quite easy, right?

It gets even better!

Now let’s think on the long term! After you’ve done the competitive link analysis, you gathered some nice links from your competitors and you’re all cheerful, what comes next? You’re done with link building for ever?

Of course, not! You will come back for more!

And the good news is that you won’t have to start the research all over again.

Advanced Link Manager will tell you what has changed from the last time you looked at your competitors links and you can analyze only the new links he’s got. You can do that by applying a filter that displays only the new added links. Advanced Link Manager compares the results it gathers with those from the last update, so you can know what links have been added, which have been removed or changed in your competitors link profiles. This way, recurrent competitive link analysis is a piece of cake!

I hope you enjoyed your reading this article and that you found it useful. Tell us what you think in the comments section below and follow us on Twitter for the latest updates.

Photo credit: Rugby Pioneers

Have you ever wondered if your links are good enough or if your link building strategy is paying off?

To answer this you would probably have to:

• Make a list of all pages linking to you and to your competitors and compare them
• Evaluate the quality of these links (by page rank, mozRank etc)
• Get an overall value of your website and your competitors websites based on the previous data you have gathered
• Finally, discover the value of your link profile

Where to start from?

On the web there are several sources of link data you can use, such as OpenSiteExplorer, Yahoo! SiteExplorer, SEMRush. They can help you get the information you need for this type of analysis. But the bad news is that this data has to be manually processed in order to extract some insights out of it.

Furthermore, most of the times this job can be done (and gets done) with Excel spreadsheets. But not all of us are Excel experts! So, you have to get really deep into building formulas and managing pivot tables with Excel to be able to transform the raw data into comprehensive stuff.

Wouldn’t it be great to find a full list of templates to use for processing this data?

It would, but wouldn’t it be greater if you wouldn’t have to use spreadsheets at all? Or not have your data spread in excel files all around your computer, with names you can’t even remember?

Well let’s hope some day this will be possible and link profile analysis will be a lot easier.

Guess what, it is already possible!!! 

Let me tell you how Advanced Link Manager can help you with this task:

1. First, you should create a project in Advanced Link Manager with your website, your competitors websites and then start the data update.
2. This way Advanced Link Manager will acquire all the info (list of pages or domains linking to the website, the number of links from each domain, the number of nofollow links, the number of new or removed links, the mozRank or anchor texts) without having to use other tools.
3. Advanced Link Manager gives you right away, insightful information about your link profile such as the diversity of your links (a percentage of domain uniqueness) or the ratio between unique IPs and your referrers. Additionally, you can see the percentage of links pointing to your home page compared with those pointing to internal pages.
4. But most of all, you can visualize very easy the overall quality of your link profile (just select the Referrers panel and view Summary from the bottom of the page).  Advanced Link Manager sorts your links by PR for you to get a clear image of the overall quality of the pages linking to your website.

You can look at raw numbers or, with just a click you can switch to graphic views and see the value of your websites link profile: high quality, average or not that good.

Now, if you haven’t done it already, don’t waste your time anymore and do it! But if you’ve done it already, share your thoughts with us in the section below.

Photo credit: DuncanHiggitt

Increase Link Popularity

Have you ever asked yourself how to find new ways of getting more backlinks? Everyone does.

Some people enhance search engine optimization campaigns using web stats software, conduct effective keyword research, analyze backlinks or write a better copy of their websites. But you can add extra value to a campaign by conducting a competitive link analysis.

Anyone knows the value of inbound links in a search engine optimization campaign and you bet your competitors already have some good backlinks pointing to them. But what if you could find those websites and get yourself the high quality backlinks they already have?

Sounds good, but let’s see how we can do this using Advanced Link Manager: by analyzing your competitor’s referrers to find you new link partners and find a way to get a link from them.

1. Target your competitors

The first step in conducting competitive analysis is to target the competitors for which you want to analyze referrers. To do this, add your competitors URLs to the existing project of your website. It is important to add them to the same project in order to have access later at the new potential backlinks.

To get a list with your competitor’s referrers and analyze them, update the project by selecting the [Start] option from the [Update] menu.

2. Analyze your competition

Following this, select the [Referrers] report(tab) and switch to the [Referrers Overview] view (third view). This view displays a matrix with all the referrers for your selected website, the page rank and for each website you have in the project, the number of backlinks from a specific referrer.

At this stage you will need to see the referrers that have link to your competitors and don’t have one to you. To do this, select their domains from the [Domains] panel situated on the left side.

Now, head over to the [Summary] panel (the lower panel of the center table). Here you will find two columns: Target domains and Total links. Click on the [Total links] column to sort them by the total number of links each domain has. If the total number of links are greater than for some of the target domains, this means that some referrers link not only to that competitor, but other competitors have backlinks from those referrers.

To find those referrers click on that competitor’s column and check within the report if other competitors have backlinks from a selected referrer. If you will find referrers that link to two or more competitors, then research this, because that website is a potential link partner.

3. Contact potential link partners

Once you have the referrer who links to multiple competitors right click on it and select [View contact details]. This will switch to the [Domain Information] report, from where you can see it’s contact information by selecting [Get Domain Information]. Advanced Link Manager will then use algorithms to get information about that domain for you to use in your link building campaign.

Additionally you can assign them to a referrer category and later select it in the [Domain Information] report.

Using Advanced Link Manager for competitive analysis will not only help you explore your competitor’s link building strategy, but also help you get useful information about your competitor’s backlinks and find new backlinks for your website.

To contact potential link partners you can use the steps outlined in the 3 Easy Steps to Get New Inbound Links article.

Another way of conducting a competitive link analysis is by using the Find new link partners by backlinks feature. The main advantage of this is that the process is automatic.

If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to add them below.

Google Maps Webpages Importer

Following an article we published this week on the Advanced Web Ranking Blog about optimizing for local search, I thought it’s a good idea to speak about one of the Advanced Link Manager’s features which can help you increase your local rankings using citations.

As you already know citations are references of a local listing from websites and they represent an important ranking factor for local search. The citations are displayed in Google Maps under the Web Pages section of a listing and include a link to the reference page, a title and a description. The page where the citation is displayed contains the same information as the listing and the websites which contain citations are most of the times niche directories.

Google Maps Webpages Importer can help you improve your rankings in Google Maps using competitive analysis to get new citations for your listing. It let’s you check the Web Pages of different listings and import them in your project. You can later use those Web Pages to get yourself citations for your listing.

Targeting local listings in Google Maps can secure you an increase in sales and revenue. But similar with the web search, local listings are returned by algorithms which follow ranking guidelines.

Using a targeted keyword and the Web Page’s search depth you can get your competitor’s Web Pages and use them to get yopurself citations. For a better analysis you can also select the option to retrieve the page rank of the found Web Pages.

Google Maps Webpages Importer

For detailed instructions on how to use the Google Maps Webpages Importer, follow the instructions outlined in the Google Maps Webpages Importer section in our User Guide.

If you already used Google Maps Webpages Importer let me know about your experience with this feature. Either way feel free to leave your comments below.

You can access the Analyze Domain Quality from the [Tools] menu. In the new window you can add domains manually, import them from a file or by parsing an URL.

Analyze Domain Quality

Once finished entering your domains, just press the [Analyze domains quality] button and Advanced Link Manager will start gather information about the domains you entered. It lets you see important information about a domain including page rank, meta information, indexed pages average, the average of total links, ranking average, search engine/keywords hits and Compete rank, visits and visitors.

This tool can be also helpful when you are looking to compare the quality of your domains with the quality of your competitor’s domains.

The domains you entered can be, once finished, added as project URLs, as referrer domains or exported to a file.

Hope this article will help you get started with the Analyze Domain Quality feature. Please add your questions and opinions in the comments sections below.

From the time we published this offer we received lots and lots of emails from people who wanted to spread the word about our applications. To thank them for their efforts we rewarded them with a free license.

Since we started, I am managing and keep track of all these reviews. Sometimes this task becomes time consuming, but it’s worth doing it. In this short article I want to share with you the entire process of doing that.

In Advanced Link Manager I keep track of reviews, see if they are still linking back and keep details of the bloggers who wrote the articles.

1. Create a category

First I created a category only for bloggers to help me filter the links I enter in all reports I use.

Create your own category from the [Project] menu, [Manage referrer categories...].

2. Add review links

Each time when we receive a new article I manually enter it in Advanced Link Manager as an “Unverified referrer”.

To manually add referrers, select the [Manually add referrers...] option from the [Update] menu. When the new window opens, select [Type URLs] and add the URLs in the windows. Once finished, select the category and press the [OK] button to add the URLs in the Unverified Referrers report.

3. Update the Unverified Referrers

Once I enter the new URLs, I update them manually, so I don’t need to wait for all project to update (a full update takes time).

To update the URLs, select them, right click on one of them, choose from the menu [Update] > [selected] > [referrers]. This will check if the unverified referrers are linking back to your website.

4. Add info for each blogger

Once the update is done and I can see the links in the Referrers report, I select the category Bloggers Reviews in Domain Information report.

Following this operation, I add the details of the blogger in Domain Information and set the status to [Web site links back].quickly filter the domain name and enter for each domain the name, email address and additional information in the Note section and Address Book, from the [Email Composer tab].

In case anything happens with the links, I can quickly drop an email to that blogger and ask for information.

The process I use for our bloggers reviews can be used for any form of tracking referrers. You can use it to keep track of new websites linking back from a promotion or marketing campaign.

Now, what do you think about this way of managing referrers and what is your way of doing it?