Link Tools Roundup by Search Engine Land

Another Big Roundup of Link Tools

by Debra Mastaler

One of my previous columns here on Link Week showcased a number of tools commonly used in link building. Since that post, a large number of new tools and services have come online, so I thought an update would be helpful. Not all of the sites listed will be traditional linking tools, I’ve also included a number of social media and general informational sites which can be used to find link partners.

Before we move on, the obligatory disclaimer. I have no financial involvement with any of these tools, they are presented as source options only. Some are free, others are not, always read their fine print.

This looks like a great list.It's from Search Engine Land. Thanks!

Standard link building tools



When you hear the term “link building tools”, the type of tools listed below are usually what comes to mind. Most of the tools here are anything but standard, they all come with multiple options (except Yahoo SE) and share one point of commonality… they list out backlink results.



Here’s a handful in alphabetical order:



•Analyze Backlinks

•BackLink Watch

•BuzzStream

•Link Diagnosis

•Light Insight

•Link Manager

•LinkScape

•Majestic SEO

•OpenSite Explorer

•Raven Tools

•SEOBook Tools

•SEO Spyglass

•BackLink Summary

•Who Links To Me

•Yahoo Site Explorer

•Yoast Link Analysis

Using backlink data to create a strategy and determine tactics is important when building links, so find a tool (or three) you’re comfortable with and start checking out who’s linking to whom. Most of the paid tools have free trial offers. Take note of the sites your competitors are linking to and any media mentions they’re getting. Start a database with the journalists you find and include them in future press release submissions.



Non-standard, outside of the box link tools



One of the biggest challenges in link building is finding quality sites to partner with. Competition for link real estate is keen, so be aware of opportunities popping up in your niche. Since you can’t spend 24/7 in research mode, having leads and opportunities sent to you goes a long way in securing good links. Here’s a handful of tools to help identify trends and uncover link potential.



Backtype is a “real-time conversational search engine” which indexes blogs and social media networks. While it’s helpful for finding hot trends/ideas to write about, the real link building juice lies in their Connect and Backtweet services.



Connect is an email alert service which monitors blog comments for keywords while Backtweets searches Twitter for URL’s. Both tools are great for finding sources/enthusiasts talking up your industry. Often, I find links in comments are better resources than those in the feature post! Go after those sources and find a way to secure them as a link partner.



Xmarks is a bookmark sync service with multiple options, but their Smarter Search feature is a great way to find pages being bookmarked in quantity. Why? People tend to bookmark sites with good content which means the source sites have potential to be good link partners. Find out what’s being bookmarked and work to get your link-filled content on those sites.



Over on the Spiced2 blog, there is a great article on How To Check To See If Your Email Has Been Blacklisted. If you send email link requests and aren’t seeing the response rates you’d like, this might be a good one to read.



Two Twitter tools we can’t live without are Twitter Feed, which adds your RSS to Twitter and Facebook automatically and Twilert which tracks specific keywords being used in tweets. When the alerts come back from Twilert, we use the information to look for potential host sites and for quality people to follow. Hopefully, they’ll follow in return which broadens the base of people seeing the links to our blogs and/or other web properties.



Widget marketing is all the rage and with good reason, it’s a great way to take a link campaign viral while building brand and driving traffic. If you’re not a programmer, no worries, sites like Widgetbox and the Widgipedia Forum are around to help. Spend some time there and on StickiWidgets looking at popular widgets and see if you can create something similar for your niche. Once your widget is done and launched, announce it’s creation via press release, to your customer base and on the forums you frequent.



Lastly, check out Dapper.net and Feed For All, both applications create RSS for static pages. Keep in mind you can create a feed for pages on your site as well as link embedded content you’ve placed on other sites. (Think article directories.) Submit the feeds you’ve created to the RSS directories as another way to drive link popularity.



Link building may be hard, but it’s not impossible if you consider the opportunities behind each of these tools. Look beyond the basics and find unique sites to host content and pull links from. Broaden your reach and the links will come.

Google juice question...

I just got this in an email from a lady who I do a blog with....

"I wanted to ask if you know anything about Google Juice for the blog? I know that both you and John mentioned it before but didn't know if that was something that needed to be set up? I haven't had any experience with it, we didn't use it on my husband's blog."

Woops, I wonder which of my comments confused her....

Unsubscribing and Can-Spam

Is this compliant?

A company sends me an email. There's no unsubscribe button but it says, "forward this to remove@domainname.com" to unsubscribe.   But it doesn't work.  Are they compliant or not?

Here's the next level of detail. I have my mail forwarded from one email box to another.  If their bot is only reading the "sent from" account, it cannot connect it back to the original email in their database.  But if their bot reads the "reply to" or looks at the attached email and who it was sent to, they could remove me from their database.  They do neither.

Instead, they send me the basic: "you now need to login to your account or email from the original account message:.  Here it is, the name of the company in question, Audible.com, is included:

customer_service@pobox.audible.com  to me

show details 9:16 AM (14 minutes ago)

This is an automated response.

We were unable to locate an audible.com account with the email address provided.

Please choose one of the methods listed below to change your email opt-out status with us:

1.      Reply to this email and let us know your full name, Audible username and/or
   an alternate email address that may be listed in your account. The email
   address in your account should be shown at the bottom of emails that we send
   to you.

2.      If you can send email from the address listed in your account preferences
   (this address should be shown at the bottom of emails that we send to you),
   resend your request to remove@audible.com from that address.

3.      If you know your audible.com Username and Password, go to
   http://www.audible.com/mypreferences to remove the check from "Please
   include me in audible.com's email updates."

   If you have forgotten your password you can go to
   http://www.audible.com/passwordreminder

The New Online Better Business Bureau

Am I the only one who noticed that the BBB, the Better Business Bureau, has just made a dramatic shift in online policy?

Previously, the BBB has a BBBOnline logo that looked good and helped us look credible. 

I recently got a call from the BBB that they were obsoleting the old logo and I had to switch to a new one.  Oddly, although it's an important trademark and logo, it comes with no guidance on its usage such as whether  we can change the size or color to make it work better on the page. 

More interesting, I just clicked on it and it turns out that there is an entire review program built into the system. A sort of Angie's-list-or-Ebay-rating&review-the-site program with all sorts of opportunities for competitors to do damage and for people on my side to generate positive reviews.  So they are a late-comer to the user-generated content party.

Is this well done? Anybody have experience with it? Do they have any idea what they're doing? I  wasn't told anything about this new review system that I was putting a link up to from my website by them but in terms of truth in advertising, it's a pathetic effort. I've noticed that the BBB has cycled through several online programs in the five years that I've been in business. They had a kid safe program and logo and a privacy seal and logo both of which were obsoleted two years ago. When I joined, I had to first join a local group which cost a few hundred dollars just so I could then join the online group which cost another few hundred dollars. Now, that program is being obsoleted for this new one called Trustlink.

The BBB  told me it was a different logo, they didn't say that it was a different program with reviews that anyone could post which were now linked to from my site!  I'd like to see them off the web since they just don't seem to have any idea how to behave or what to do.

Anyone know a good alternative for online use with decent credibility?Maybe I'll drop them.

del.icio.us

My Online Identity - Windows Live

I'm following up on my previous post about my online identity by tracking my experience with Windows Live.  As background, everytime I have booted my computer for the last few years, the Windows Messenger software has asked to get updated. Until this past week, I've always said no.  And in my office computer, everytime I start a Microsoft Windows application, it asks me to participate in Windows Live. In neither case did I have any idea what would happen if I said yes.

This past week, I accepted the Messenger update which was a long update. Near the end, I unchecked a bunch of boxes so that my search engine (Google) would stay the same, my home page would stay the same, and that my computer would not be tracked to help Microsoft for their debugging or marketing.  I note that the choices were clear and visible in plain English so no complaints there. There was one pop-up which I dislike both from websites and software installation. This one asked me if I would install some of their software on my computer "as a thank-you."  Being very suspicious of such things, I declined.

Urchin vs Googl Analytics: Score One for the Old School

Query - Name a very useful feature of old Urchin (analytical tool) that newfangled Analytics doesn't do?

Answer - Track downloads.

Urchin was bought by Google a number of years ago and their software was upgraded and repurposed to Analytics which we all use.  But many of our hosting companies still provide for free the old Urchin software. Recently, when I wanted to track the PDF downloads from my site, I found that Analytics somehow doesn't have this feature (or I just couldn't find it) so I fired up old Urchin and found how many people had downloaded my handy-dandy ebook, Learning about Homeschooling.  It's free, take a gander.

Feng Shui for Websites

Feng Shui can guide designers, architects, builders, and planners towards a harmony that provides health, peace, and prosperity for the residents and visitors.  It is increasingly popular in modern American culture.  Great strides are being made to understand the balance with nature and what can be done to protect it or recreate it within our structures.

There is also an art of Feng Shui for designing websites. I have dwelved in the ancient mysteries and science and commissioned some new translations so that I can work with the most traditional principles of the art.  Soon, I will reveal and publish:

The Feng Shui Guide to Web Design.

I cannot at this time announce my collaborators but I have had some very significant luck in finding authoritative collaborators.  Soon, the net will know a new harmony.

My Online Identity

It used to be that when I surfed the net, I was anonymous. If I wanted to comment on a forum or blog or group, I could use my name or create a new one. I was an unknown.

I'm now often astonished to be linking at some random website and see that there is a list of recent visitors that includes me.  Amazing and scary. I think they do it through my blog catalog identity.In fact, if you look to the right side of this column, you'll see a recent visitors box put there by blogcatalog which tracks visitors.

I also have been amazed to visit some groups on the web and find that I have another persistent identity which has announced me. My Ning ID.

Of course, once we get started on this, I realize that my blogger ID appears everytime I try to comment on a blogger-based  blog.  On the other hand, I have a number of wordpress blogs and my identity does not seem to travel with me.  Does anyone know what Wordpress identity is used around the web? Wordpress.org?  .com?  Or any wordpress blog that I've installed and it's just a question of activating something.

I'm thinking about this since of course, the big one, is my Facebook and LinkedIn IDs which I've noticed a number of sites asking about recently.  Lastly, I just accepted to update my Windows Messenger software (whatever that is) and in the notice, it talked about my Windows Live ID which I think is their effort to be the central internet passport office.

The future sure is going to be fun....

MMO Affiliates - Very Aggressive These Days

I run the advertising on a very large educational games sites which is a great advertising location. I thought I'd share this correspondence with you. I've removed the names for discretion.

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: "Jonathan ***>
>> Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 11:33am
>> To: spellingcity.com
>> Subject: SpellingCity.com: Business Proposal: Other
>>
>> This is an enquiry e-mail via http://www.spellingcity.com/ from:
>> Jonathan  l<jonathan@***.com>
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> My name is Jonathan ....from .....
>>
>> I would like to buy some traffic from your site. I have a very
>> interesting Business Proposal for you.
>>
>> Please contact me back ASAP. I want to close a deal with you.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Kind regards
>> --
>>
>> Jonathan 

>> Jonathan,
>>
>> Thanks for your inquiry.
>> You can site-target SpellingCity.com in Google AdWords by using their
>> placement tool.
>> Alternatively, if you prefer, you can advertise directly with us.
>> The cost for 300 x 250s is $2CPM. Minimum purchase is $1,000.
>> Other information is available on the site.
>> http://www.spellingcity.com/General/advertising.html
>>
>> If you have other ideas, please email them along.
>>
>>
>> john
>>

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 5:31 AM, Jonathan Eshel <jonathan@adotomi.com> wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> Hope you have had a great weekend and thanks for your response... :-)
>
> We would like you to place reviews (which we can provide)  for our MMO games
> on your site with a link to join the game. Every user that then joins the
> game will earn you a commission in addition to your display advertising.
>
> Please can you let me know:
>
> 1) What countries does most of your traffic come from?
> 2) With what companies are you monetising reviews for?
> 3) How many MMO players are you having visiting you each month?
>
> I am looking forward to your answers and to progressing forward...
>
> Best regards
>
> Jonathan
>
> On 17/02/2010 22:54, Mayor, SpellingCity.com wrote:
>>

You are about the fifth MMO world vendor to contact us this month with the
promise of riches based on performance. The answer is no.

If you'd like to advertise, you have the info.  I think at least one
of them is currently advertising on the site.  Good luck.

john 

BTW, the MMO vendors targetting SpellingCity:

FreeRealms
JumpStarts 3DOnline World

Adotomi - This seems to be an affiliate network focused on games.

SecretBuilders
and some others whose names I've forgotten....

Hardest Unsubscribe Evers - What are yours?

The CAN SPAM law has helped but there are emailing lists that it is hard to get off.  What's your worst experience in trying to unsubscribe?  I had two this morning. I'm tired of getting so much email that I don't read so I'm trying to get off lists.

Here's one from Home School Enrichment, Inc. When you click unsubscribe, you get to a screen that requires you to fill in a captcha and enter your email address. Seems like a lot.  But then, you still have to click on another email that they say that they'll send you to get off the list.  Of course, I clicked on it twenty minutes ago and so far, no unsubscribe email has arrived (surprised?).  Probably, they make sure that their marketing emails are not labelled as SPAM and filtered out. Is it too cynical of me to wonder if they make the same effort for their unsubscribe confirmations? Of course, to be clear, I think the idea of adding an email to confirm your unsubscribe on top of the two manual steps of correctly typing in your email and filling in a captcha (type these hard-to-read letters into that box correctly) is an aggressive antisocial way to maintain their mailing list designed to make it difficult to get off their lists.  Is that compliant with the Can-SPAM?
PS - I just rechecked my email and their email confirmation did arrive. I clicked on it and got a pleasant: "Sorry to see you go" message. I still think that last step is one step too many but it did appear to work.

The Lowe's Hardward store list unsubscribe button generates an email back to them automatically to unsubscribe.  Nice concept but not if you are me trying to get off their lists.  Here's the gotyas. 

- Unless you are  in the email system that has the email on the list, it won't work (to explain, I forward my home email to my work email so since I was in my work email system, they'll get an unsubscribe email from an address that they don't recognize so I won't be unsubscribed)

-  Unless you are on a system in which they can call up Outlook, it won't  unsubscribe. This is where it gets funny. My home email system is a web email and when I hit the link, it tries to open a mail handler on my system (Outlook Express) which I have never connected.  And of course, while my office has Outlook, it's got a different "return-to" email address. So as far as I know, there's no way for me to get off their mailing list. 



del.icio.us

Press Releases in 2010

I'm interviewing for a new head of marketing in my little company and I've heard all sorts of people talk about their marketing expertise.  So far, I'm not all that impressed. I've met some very self-assured people who talk broadly about their expertise and accomplishments in SEO, PPC, social media, affiliate, PR, and so on. But, when I get specific about these areas, I find that there tends to be less solid expertise than just routine experience.  One exception was when I asked one lady about her approach to press releases.

She explained that in addition to having them get picked up by automated aggregators, you need to write them a certain way for them to be used by publications with human editors.  She explained that in the old days, press releases were supposed to provide the fodder for human writers to build an article around. Today, they need to be republishable pretty much with zero editing. So she writes like a journalist, not like she's writing a press release.




del.icio.us

Google leaves China - What does this mean?

In todays news and discussion about Google leaving China, nobody seems to have dug into what that actually means.  Does that mean closing a physical office and laying off some employees? Yes. I saw that in was estimated that $300M in revenue, roughly 1% of Google's revenues, would be lost.  How?

I googled Google China and found, in addition to an official statement by Google, that there is a google.cn which means a Google search engine for China.  I suppose they spider all the .cn domains and provide them as preferred results on searches conducted from .cn sites.

But, if a person in the US using Google.com googles using Chinese characters or another search which is best served by providing a web page in China, will Google still provide them in their results? Or are they going to completely stop spidering anything with the .cn suffix.  Now what about searches that originate inside China but go to Google.com, will they be completed or will they be shut down too?






del.icio.us

Run of site links - Google poison or juice?

It is natural to think that many links would be better than one. But, lets think about that for a second. If you were Google, would you consider a single link from within an article on a website to a site to be a more authoritative vote of confidence than a link to that same site but which is repeated on every page of the site in the same place?

Put differently, from an SEO point of view, what is more valuable, a single link from within a paragraph of text or a run of site link on the bottom of every page.

I feel that Google would prefer the single natural appearing link over the apparently paid-for run-of-site link. But, I also think it's pretty gray.

For instance, think about a blog. Aren't my listing of "blogs I like" on the sidebar, which are run of site links, a significant statement of endorsement?



del.icio.us

So many violations in one paragraph!

I have removed the names to protect the guilty but there are two major legal and ethical problems in this paragraph that I received from a big-name educational website!

BLANK.com December 2009/January2010 Educational Newsletter

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to all you participants! BLANK.com has NO FEES. This site offers 2500 pages of interactive word puzzle activities that focus on learning Latin/Greek roots. XXXX and YYYY appreciate your sharing information about its content with colleagues and friends. YYYY[at]BLANK.com will send copies of the newsletter directly to them if you provide their email address. Participants may also use the Monthly Newsletter button (green box on the left side of the home page) to sign up. Thanks for clicking on ads as your efforts help defray some of the expenses of this voluntary effort.-----------------------------

Did you catch them?
1. A CAN-SPAM violation in which they solicity third party names and say that they will email them!
2. Asking people to click on ads. If anyone at Google gets wind of that, you forfeit your adsense account and lose your position in their search engine.
A third possible problem is that they say that the site is run by volunteers. My estimate is that the couple running it pull in a nice six figure income.

Should I tell them?

Free Business Advice for Facebook

Dear Facebook,

I read the business advice given to you recently by Time magazine and Wired. Don't be dumb, don't listen to them, listen to me.

My guidance is good, my insights profound, and I'm a sage business advisor. Here we go. A corporate strategy for your success in a few hundred words. Here's the summary:

1. Give me multiple Faces and categories for friends and contacts.
2. Provide me for a fee a digital archive or vault service. I'd happily pay.
3. Allow me to use Facebook as my single place for discussions, groups, clubs, and forums. Right now, I use way too many phpbbs, yahoo groups, ning groups, and so on and so forth, It's only because your groups and discussions are so weak.

Facebook's great two challenges are:

1. Lock in your users. Otherwise, you risk being a Myspace or Friendster. You need something more than just being the best place to be. We've seen that people are willing to abandon years of building their sites and links and friends for a better "scene". Don't be complacent. It's not enough. Imagine the horror of other really good entries into the social networking space which are really well combined with other popular areas such as music and games or mobile computing. I can imagine some Apple initiatives where they combine the Iphone, their music business, a partnership with say Electronic Arts, and a social media system which would be a very major threat to you. I can scare you with other scenarios. Your apps are good but you need to keep making Facebook indispensible to us.

2. Business model. Recurring cost-effective revenue. Ongoing growth in revenue per user. These are your challenges. Right now, your business model....is... nascent...a hope and prayer....in development. In short, you don't have one and you take some comfort from the fact that Google figured one out before they got to a real crisis. Of course, others sites (think YouTube and Twitter and MySpace) have not.

Here's the good news. The solution is not difficult. You can complete your emergence as a company by offering a few more features and services that resolve these two challenges. It's easy to implement, no real tough technology. Here's what you should do. As a package, it's coherent and will work. It still allows you to a lot of other things.

Facebook Strategic Plan

1. Allow individuals to have multiple Faces and categories of friends/contacts. One set of my friends might be my family. Another might be my old college friends. A third could be friends from karate. And another big set of contacts could be my business contacts. For each of them, I have a slightly different Face. So family gets to see lots of pictures of my kids but they don't have to suffer through my posting of information about my business. So each time I post a picture or post, I'll need to check which Face it shows on. This allows Facebook to become really useful for business and avoid some of the awkwardness that currently impinges its use.

2. Archiving my digital assets. Right now, all computer users seem to have the same problem of managing our digital assets. We have lots of pictures and contacts and files. We're getting use to the fact that we have home computers, office computers, a portable in the trunk of our car for when we have time to stop at Starbucks, and our Iphone with all of it's pictures. The storing and archiving of all of this digital stuff is a problem. The best solution that I've found is Carbonite.com but there are others. Essentially, it's a centralized archive place where you can store stuff for some small amount. Why not allow us 10 MB of free storage forever with each Facebook account? That way, we have our pictures and videos in Facebook and it's easier to check which ones are public (and for which Face) and which ones are private. And, if we need more storage, we just pay a simple $4 for 100 MB per month. I'd probably trust Facebook to keep it safe and would like the convenience of having a single storage place. I'd like to have a direct link between Facebook and the original. And I'd like that my Iphone and camera already deal with Facebook so I could imagine it would be easy to get my photos automatically archived there. Would I pay $4 a month? In fact, being a packrat, I'd probably be paying $8 or $12 month and since it takes several days to get everything uploaded the first time, I'd probably stay forever. Soon, I'm paying maybe $12/month, $144 per year to Facebook and it's the center of my digital assets world. And I'm happy for the convenience.

3. Make groups and subgroups and clubs work. Right now, if I want to start a community, I use Ning. You should fix your discussions and groups and fan pages so that there's no need for others to create specialized communities with endless different identities and logins and passwords.

This post sponsored by:

Time4Learning.com - Online learning for homeschool, afterschool, and summer study, PreK-8th grade.

Time4Writing.com - Eight Week Online Writing Tutorials to Build Writing Skills & Confidence

SpellingCity.com - The fastest-growing educational website.

del.icio.us