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How To Improve At Link Assessment

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With algorithm updates coming faster and faster it is important to be able to quickly analyse a client’s link portfolio and understand whether or not they are at risk, which links work for them and where opportunities are for building new links in future. This session aims to show you how to collect and analyse link data to produce a regular link audit.

100s Of Updates Per Year

Less than one months updates!

Penguin update

Thought Links Could Only Add Value

Now we’re very aware they can be damaging

Apr May Jun Jul Jul Aug

BrightEdge page-level optimisation

On-Site initiatives

On-Site initiatives implementation

Re-use & small scale content marketing

Quarterly content calendar creation

Content initiatives proposed

Content initiatives created & distributed

Backlink Analysis

Report scoping and dashboard setup

Report delivery

Keyword research

Technical SEO audit

Technical implementation

Local SEO audit

Local SEO implementation

Social Audit

Twitter Trend Optimisation

Creation of SEO / social playbook

Rather Than Doing One Backlink Profile Audit

Apr May Jun Jul Jul Aug

BrightEdge page-level optimisation

On-Site initiatives

On-Site initiatives implementation

Re-use & small scale content marketing

Quarterly content calendar creation

Content initiatives proposed

Content initiatives created & distributed

Monthly Backlink Analysis

Report scoping and dashboard setup

Report delivery

Keyword research

Technical SEO audit

Technical implementation

Local SEO audit

Local SEO implementation

Social Audit

Twitter Trend Optimisation

Creation of SEO / social playbook

We Need To Do It Every Month

Getting Started

Selection of Tools

Positives

Free

The links Google have identified

Negatives

Limited to top 1000 – less all encompassing.

Webmaster Tools

Positives

Massive index that is kept very up-to-date

Lots of custom metrics

Negatives

Paid

MajesticSEO

Positives

Utilises a number of different sources

Custom reports that can do some of the analysis for you

Negatives

Paid

LinkResearchTools

Others

Blogroll/sidebar links – Lots of links from single domain

Poor quality links – Links that are built only to pass equity

Overuse of non-brand anchor text

Velocity of links built

Anything unnatural.

We Want To Identify The Following

Things to look at to get a rough idea

Useful Metrics

BBC has 216 links per domain

Volkswagen has 46 links per domain

Toyota has 76 links per domain

Citation Flow & Trust Flow

Citation Flow is similar to PageRank

Trust Flow is more like Hilltop (based around expert documents)

Higher the numbers the better

Relationship between the two is interesting

Very low quality websites will have three/four times higher citation flow than trust flow

Velocity of links

Has the number of backlinks spiked and the number of referring domains stayed static?

Are we gaining additional links incrementally more than we were doing previously?

Anchor text

Do we have lots of exact match anchor text?

How has this changed over time?

Analysing Individual Links

Digging Deeper

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#1 Poor Trust Flow to Citation Flow

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#2 Over-targeted Anchor-text

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Why do we have more “hw moon toyota” links than toyota links?

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#3 Finding Sitewide Links

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#4 Low Quality Backlinks

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Rinse and repeat

Integrating Into Monthly Reporting

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1. Export backlink data each month

2. Create copy of previous months dashboard

3. Paste in new months data

4. Update pivot tables

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Keeping Dashboards Up-to-date

LinkResearchTools allows you to run similar reports to those explained earlier, meaning you don’t have to worry about manually updating data.

These reports can be scheduled to be automatically run and sent to clients if required.

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Alternatively – Use LinkResearchTools

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Two Time-saving Reports

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Competitive Landscape Analyser

Similar metrics and charts to those we created in excel

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Link Detox

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Link Detox

Some nice little quick wins

Added Extras

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SEOTools for Excel

Additional – Linking to 404s

Pages in MajesticSEO shows top 100 linked to URLs

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Surely none of our top 100 pages are wasting link equity?

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3 of our top 100 URLs produce a 404

This accounts for thousands of backlinks

Toyota.co.uk have 199K indexed URLs

Thank you!

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