One of the essential and easy way of handling any project can be perfectly done using the tools. These tools play a major role for search engine optimizers as well to perform their tasks in a faster and more effective manner. The most important factor is to achieve higher rank in SERP is the amount of links you gain for your website / web pages. In order to track those inbound links, there are various tools available.
Here are the four online tools for tracking inbound links and these tools have its own individuality in their tracking process.
1. Majestic-SEO
Majestic SEO is still the king of backlink intelligence. With the help of Majestic SEO tool user can access
- Sub domains
- Pages
- Links
- Referring domains
- Indexed Anchor Text
- Images
- NoFollow links
- Redirects
This tool offers a “daily update” feature that provides a daily journal of new inbound links. Once you register, you can avail the service for your website free. This makes the user to track information about any domain, their web site and their competitors.
Drawbacks:
- One of the unfortunate drawbacks of Majestic SEO, as they themselves are quick to point out, there is no ability to sort by keywords.
- This tool is not as simplest form as other tools.
2. Page Inlink Analyzer
This tool combines a left side column listing of indexed pages for the site being researched and the inbound links to the focus URL in the right column. For any URL you provide, you will be offered the valuable data. The page level and domain level inlink counts are reported for each inbound link as well as the number of Delicious bookmarks for each link and the associated keyword tags.
Drawbacks:
- Unlike Google and Yahoo tools, we cannot access these without downloading.
- Loading process is slow in retrieving the data.
3. Google Webmaster Tools:
In order to access Google Webmaster Tools, you will need a Google account to login. It is a free service provided by Google to help new and experienced webmaster check on their indexing and raise the visibility of their website(s). The Links tab shows you where your pages are linked, both externally and internally.
Drawback:
- Webmaster Tools doesn’t distinguish between followed and nofollowed links.
4. Yahoo! Site Explorer
Yahoo! Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. It is a familiar as well as free tool for analyzing and tracking inbound links for users’ own and their competitors’ sites.
- Provides upto 1000 inbound links to any page indexed by Yahoo.
- One can determine the number pages within a domain indexed by SLURP, Yahoo’s search engine crawler.
- Exclude inbound links from the domain and the subdomain.
Drawbacks:
- There is no supply of link attributres such as anchor text or no follow.
- No authority information on the linking site.
As per the recent news, Bing is going to overtake Yahoo search engine part, it is expected that Yahoo will close their site explorer service. Since Yahoo is an extensive backlink tracker tool and it has become the first choice of many, the absence of site explorer might give more burden to SEO‘s. Hope Bing to provide better service than Yahoo Site Explorer.
Using these tracking tools, users can have the better understanding about their backlinks. In future, backlink tracking tools with additional features will help the users to get more beneficial results. Are you aware of any such tools? do share it with us!
Disclaimer: The post is completely based on individual thoughts and SEO Services Group bears no responsibilities for the thoughts reflected in the post.
Good post. I suggest “Open Site Explorer” from SEOmoz. The only disadvantage of the free version is, this only shows you information on the first 5 links. But easy to use tool with cool features.
Yahoo site explorer you have some Greasemonkey script to overcome the first drawback. What do you refer to link authority information on the linking site?
You can see details of the anchor and nofollow/follow using Yoast’s SEO link analysis, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7505
Hope this helps 🙂
I was referring to the YSE link in the previous comment, forgt to mention it
@ Raghavan
I agree with on the Greasemonkey script. In addition to that, there is an other Firefox Plugin called “yoast SEO Link Analysis” which overcomes the first drawback. Regarding the second one, Yahoo site explorer does not provide the sufficient information on the external links such as linking type (Images, Links in frames, Redirects, deleted (old crawl) etc…)
@ Mercy
Thank you for your suggestion.
Good article you’ve posted here, thanks, just to make a quick note to anyone interested in self SEO, that once you’re done submiting your website to the important search engines, you could do a quick check for your website in www dot ministatus dot com and see the exact number of indexed pages or the number of backlinks (according to most important engines) … more you could do a daily check and see the changes or just download your seo score in PDF file and hand it to someone who knows what to make of it 😉
The four tools you provided are definitely part of my daily linkbuilding tool kit.
If I could add one more it would be our own tool, SEO Fox’s Backlink Reports. It is very valuable in the fact that it eliminates potential links that provide no ranking or are “nofollows” which saves A LOT of time for any linkbuilder, letting us concentrate more on results!
nice information thanks
good info thanks!