Linking Analysis – Making Sense of the Mess

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Given the remarkable amount of emphasis placed on link building over the past five or so years, it’s not surprising that third-party linking analytics tools have proliferated as well. In fact, I’d call it a linking analysis frenzy that goes far beyond the simple link. Most of us have used results from Google Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html) and the Yahoo! Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/) to find information about aspects of our site’s linking-related data. It’s fascinating to spend time clicking through the information, and commendable that both companies offer this data completely free of charge.

There are also many fee-based software programs you can purchase to learn more about your links. There are scripts and extensions available for download to augment search results, as well as tools that take search results and overlay additional linking-related data on top of them. There are even web-based tools that can tell you everything from the age of a link to the IP block of the site on which the link exists. To get a sense of the variety of link analysis tools available, just Google “backlink analysis software” and have fun …

But how useful is all this information about your site’s links, and what can you do with this mountain of linking-related data? The quick answer is that it depends on what your goal is. If you just want to check your own site’s links to see if any are broken, a free tool like Xenu’s Link Sleuth does that perfectly.

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