Linkscape has always been a project with a lot of promise. Building a crawl of the WWW that can expose link data in interesting ways, calculating metrics in the ways search engines do and surfacing potential SEO opportunities are all a part of that, but it's a lot of work and time to get all the potential functionalities into real-life tools. Last week, Linkscape took a giant leap forward in usefulness with Nick's new Competitive Link Finder.
Here's how it works:
- Takes a pair of inputs - your website and the websites of 2-5 competing sites (or sites in the same sector)
- Uses a link graph of 443 Billion Links to find link intersects between those pages (URLs that have links to 2+ of the sites you've entered but may not have links to your site)
- Exposes a list of domains, with each linking page underneath along with metrics about those pages and sites.
Getting started is really simple. Just enter your own site, plus up to 5 competitors and the tool will find pages on the web that point to two or more of those pages, then list those in descending order of importance. The tool currently lives inside our SEOmoz Labs (which houses a ton of our best stuff) at https://moz.com/labs/link-intersect. We don't have fancy graphics or great UI in Labs, but the functionality takes center stage:
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The results look like this:
For each domain that's mentioned, you can see a breakout list of the pages that point to those URLs, a checkmark next to the domains you've already earned a link from and data on the importance of the domains and pages (Domain mozRank and mozRank, respectively) listed. When you click the number of links from any given site, the tool surfaces a list of those exact pages, making it easy to see where and how they've earned those links. The features are just killer:
- The tool ignores nofollow links, so you're only seeing pages that have actual, live links to at least two of your competitors
- As our metrics (DmR, mR, DmT, etc.) have improved over time, the results really do feel like they're ranked in order of importance/potential value
- The data is extremely comprehensive - since Linkscape crawls a dramatic portion of the "important" web, the probability of finding great links is very high
- When SEOs talk about "hubs" from the Hubs & Authorities link model of the web, that's exactly what this tool is finding. Thus, you may see even more benefit from attaining these links than the raw metrics might indicate
- The tool includes pagination, so you can see hundreds, sometimes thousands of potential link sources and every new competitor or site you add is a new opportunity to discover more link resources
- Don't just limit yourself to narrow competitors - plug in any site in your field that's roughly related and you can find the intersection of potential links; the possibilities for finding links with this tool are limited only by your ability to plug in new sites and pages
The Competitive Link Finder is currently available only to PRO members (who have unlimited access for now). However, tonight, we're opening the link finder to all SEOmoz members; just log in to your account and for the next 24 hours (until 11:55pm Pacific, Thursday September 2nd) you can try out the tool yourself.
QUICK WARNING: We haven't exposed this much Linkscape data to so many people in the past, so things may slow down a bit. If you're finding the tool takes a few minutes to run, don't panic - the web is really, really big, so it's a bit complex to run data calculations like this :-)
I'm a fairly tough critic, but I have to say that every time I've used this tool myself or shown it off in the last few weeks, people have been incredibly impressed. Nick, Sarah and I spent the latter half of last week on Sand Hill Road pitching VCs, and I can honestly say that even they were really, really amazed by how high quality and useful the results are. Link building is, according to most SEOs, the hardest task we collectively engage in. I think the work here from Nick (built on the backbone of Linkscape that he and Ben developed) is finally making that process an order of magnitude more do-able.
p.s. I'd like to call out some of the other tools on the web which also leverage the concepts of link intersection. While I'm a personal fan of this one, there are some other good resources for those seeking link co-occurrence. The first tool of this variety used link data from a number of search engines back in the 1990's (I believe it was operated under WebsiteGarage which shut down in 2002). Jim Boykin's WeBuildPages also featured a free tool that used Yahoo! link data (now available under their Ninjas program), as did the software package WebCEO (though it appears to no longer be included). SEOBook (of which I'm a big fan) also released a Hub Finder tool in 2005, which was almost certainly the best iteration to date (note: I'm a paying member at SEOBook). Like Newton, we've been very lucky to see far by standing on the shoulders of giants, and I remain indebted to the terrific community around the SEO world.
p.p.s. Sadly, we've had to turn off access, but more than 30,000 reports have been run just today! If you'd like to try the tool, PRO is the way to go.
BTW - A couple notes:
I don't think you should have edited the title to be less cocky! Here are some marketing slogans that could be considered "cocky"
Gillette says they are "The Best a Man Can Get" (I know the best thing this man can get is NOT a razor) other examples of similiar marketing are....Beanz meanz Heinz. – Heinz Baked Beans - I think, therefore IBM. – IBM, When you care enough to send the very best. – Hallmark, All the news that’s fit to print. – The New York Times
So what if you think it's the best!
Fair points - for us, I think we go back to our core values of transparency, generosity and empathy. Even if we think it's the best thing out there, we owe it to our values to be generous about the fact that others have built good things as well, be empathetic to the desires of competitors or originators to be mentioned when employing similar principles, etc.
Culture is my biggest fear at SEOmoz - we need to stay on the right track there and not get too "salesy." It works for many brands, but it's not who we are (and that's noted in our value about authenticity).
Very nice replies, as they say in the hood "Respect, yo"
SEOMoz will continue to have me support :-)
Very Classy & Professional response, well done!
Very nice tool - and quick!
Any chance of .csv export sometime in the future?
Yes, this tool kicks the cat's bananas.
The mozBot is awesome. Even better than your GoogleBot illustration. I'd like to see a gigantic mozBot and a gigantic GoogleBot battle it out in a Beastie Boys Intergalactic style video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu_moia-oVI
Maybe you could set something up for the next Whiteboard Friday?
As to the talk of a war between SEO BOOK and SEO Moz, I say the more tools and competition the better we are for it. Competition ensures neither stops to smell the roses but always pushes forward.
As I always say it is harder to stay on top then getting there.
Let's be honest here...
Comparing SEOMoz and SEOBook is like comparing 1998 car and 2009 car.
Seomoz runs on data. Seobook runs on 50% philosophy. Don't believe me? Compare the 2 blogs.
Seomoz is about value.
Seobook is 50% ads...look at any of their pages.
At the end, this month seomoz surpassed sebook on compete.com.
This is my own opinion and I'm strongly behind it.
Seomoz and Seobook is like comparing 2009 car with 1998 car.
I keep using this (and previously SEOMoz tools) and all i see is tons of crap paid for directories and link farms with high Mrank etc.
In the fashion and book space I am constantly puzzled by the fact that I can spot that all these sites are low quality spam but they pass high Mrank etc, but search engines seem to reward these links just fine.
Not that this is a fault of the tools on SEOMoz, just that they mirror Google etc, and that is where the underlying problem is.
I keep hearing how spam directories etc are the wrong way to go or dont provide any benefit, but these Tools show me that in fact spam directories and paid links are a GREAT tactic.
I love this tool, even if all its doing is showing me how spammy my competitors backlinks are
Noooo, paid links don't work... Google's really clever at spotting them...
Yes, they work. They don't work forever, but in the time that you're number one, with some good PR, clever traffic and a decent site, you can attract enough good links to swamp the spammy ones, and end up fine.
Not that you heard that from me... And hi Matt (I know you're reading this)
We didn't see you - right?
If on the other hand you give someone an Andriod phone or something for a link that's totally fine...
I'm impressed by this tool but I'm not an advanced SEO guy.
Rand, or anyone else at SeoMoz, would you care answering Aaron Wall's criticism. Does Linkscape really add value in comparison to other similar tools?
I wrote a brief comparison on Aarons site - we'll see if he leaves the comment up.
Basically I got 2x as many results using the SEOMoz tool and with domain mRank and page mRank I know the relative value of each possible link.
Since both tools are free for 24 hours I encourage others to do a comparison and post results here or there.
Good job on the reply Bradley. Your comment is still there.
I will say that the linkbuilding ideas I got from this tool pushed me over the edge in deciding to sign up for a Pro Membership. There may be similar tools, but I have yet to encounter one as powerful.
Great initiative. It would also be great to be able to quick export the results to excel (csv, etc). Just my 2 cents.
I tested out this tool when it was first mentioned on the blog last week and was very impressed. It has already gained me a few links! You don't need many of them to make the pro membership worth it on its own.
Thanks Rand for the free trial.
I found a few links I didn't know about.
One suggestion would be to apply a filter to filter out links from pages that are not cached in Google.
Dave
Can't agree more with this post Rand. It's like doing a college assignment when it comes to link building - you try to do every other task under the sun you can think of before attempting to tame the beast!! Great stuff so thank you from "sunny" England!!
This is a super awesome tool! Thanks you guys. There are so many links out there, where to start first, right? Which ones are worth your time to get? Which ones are your competitors getting and which one of these can you get, too? This tool definitely helps answer these questions.
It'd be cool to see the links listed with their mozTrust rank, too.
And I totally dig the mozBot and the cute - but sad - little site that wishes he was part of the link fun. If only I could give you an extra thumb-up just for that!
Okay, here's what I did. I ran the reports and saved it as webpages.
After that I Xenu'd it, export after that all the links as CSV, and import to an Excell sheet.
I discovered this tool quite late I think, 'cause after running a few reports, it stopped working.
I love that! "I Xenu'd it..." I'm going to start using that. :)
Thanks Rand...
Very generous of SEOMoz. I've been using this tool with mostly great results.
Hope you guys do well and gain a few more pro members as a result!
I would love to see the impact on traffic and signups after the promo has ended in a seomoz Blog.
Been noticing quiet a few campaigns based on a limited life-span running lately. They seem to have all worked well.
:-)
this really is one of the best link building tools we've used so far
awwww the mozbot is adorable.
Thanks for the great post and tool access. I used 4 competitor URLs and got back 5 results. Overall, it is a really good tool, and brilliantly marketed. The free version gives me just enough where I can benefit from it, but I am really wanting more! (Pro Version)
I actually have had an increase in the number of link requests in the last few weeks due in some part to tools like this.
Very nice tool. Definitely worth paying for.
I did notice a couple of bugs:
"You must enter at least 2 competitors, in addition to your own site to use this tool"
As someone else said, maybe the server was just busy, but the error message is still misleading.
Also, the tool was dumping out raw array data intermittently. It was showing it at the very top of the page.
It's an intersection tool, a hub finder. It finds websites that link to at least two other websites but not your own website. Hence, two websites plus your own.
A few people have mentioned this issue. In some of the cases people have left the first box blank, and entered three or four sites in the competitor boxes. You need to fill out the first box (that just says "https://") and at least two more boxes (that say "competitor https://").
If you're still getting issues, PM me with the link you're running.
If there were server load errors it should have said
"OH NOES! There was an error fetching your request. We may be a little busy, please try again later."
I'm sorry if this was confusing.
I was able to use it successfully prior to the errors.
Yea I when I started getting the Oh Noes it also displayed the error message that said I had to input my site's URL and the two competitors. All the fields were filled out.
I just said it was misleading because it seemed to be wrongly telling me I didn't fill out the fields properly. This only happened when I got the Oh noes message.
I'm aware the program is new, so I expected bugs, just thought I'd let you know of any findings.
I can see what some people are saying about the intensely heated discussion on seobook.com.
The way I see it - I like this tool, and I will also try out hub finder. I'm of the opinion that one should learn from all sources. Take what you like, discard what you don't.
Congrats ! I wish, I would have been able to try it out. But unfortunately not.
I've been considering other SEO tools (sorry!) but this tool cements me as well and truly a SEOmoz girl.
Just the information SEOs need as the SEs (especially G) put more and more emphasis on authority and trust in link building.
Keep them coming!
I would like to pose a question: With tools like this linking building becomes easier; it would seem that more SEOs (even the the newbies) will find ways to achieve good quality links.
Thus if everyone is achieving quality links would this drive down the overall percentage of value of links in the future (say two years from now)? A past example of this maybe the Meta Keywords tag, very useful five years ago, almost pointless now.
Is linkbuilding gettiing easier? Just because you can identify the sources of quality links doesn't mean you can stroll on over and just
The digital industry movesso fast that there are inevitable changes in the value of certain elements of our work - however that's down to the search engine algo's and their indexes, not the tools developed to analyse them.
(edit: my retarded grammar)
I don't think the game will change because people are finding better links more easily.
The game will change (really, it's never stopped)as the search engines continue to refine their algo's.
In the meantime, tools like those found here at SEOmoz (as well as SEOBook, et al)will be beneficial to getting the job done faster and easier.
So great !!! I love it. Now I wait for an other tool from you that made link profile of a page with several things :
- Sort link by domain name (or sub domain)
- Sort link by categories like (clear spam / directory / Editorial content / sidebar link / footer link) Can be useful to find great link !
- A kind of Super yahoo link domain but by seomoz :)
This tool is full of win. Would be a regular user of it. Thanks, Rand.
VERY COOL tool!
hi Rand, Any figures from the campaign you care to disclose? :-)
Great device Rand! I've been using it on a campaign this morning and have already got some sweet links out of it! This has saved me a lot of time and I'm also confident in the quality of the results given the (linkscape) source. Good stuff - thanks guys.
looks like potentially being a very useful tool - I found the original Hub Finder tool from a few years ago queried MSN and ended up returning far too many scraped serp pages to really be useful. Think the functionality of this could be improved with a couple of quick amends, e.g. hyperlinking to link URLs, being able to sort results by any of the columns and/or being able to download reports as a CSV. good work!
Is SEO SpyGlass helps for Hub finder?
This is an awesome tool, I've tried it out and really appreciated your work, SEOmoz.
Ah. Seems the tool is in error state:
"OH NOES! There was an error fetching your request. We may be a little busy, please try again later."
Help!
We got a ton of traffic, way more than we expected actually :)
Things have settled down a lot by now. I do apologize for the issues and I hope that everyone is able to get things running at this point.
Feel free to PM me if you've still got issues and retrying is working.
No worries Nick - all looks good now. Cheers!
I'm not sure why this discussion has to be so heated... but I'll be spending most of my day running free reports on SEO Book's Hub Finder. Then tomorrow I'll go back to using my SEOmoz Pro membership. Can't we just all get along? :)
I want to fly over and kiss you guys for the amount of time you save me and the team at Bloom - but I can't afford to... So instead I will just say THANKS!
This does look excellent Rand (though I'm getting an error at the mo but I'm guessing it's getting a fair bit of use right now). I've (anecdotally) noticed massive imrpovements in the quality of the Linkscape data over the last few months and we really appreciate the work you guys put into your tools :D
And the gloves are off over at seobook as AW comes out fighting...fighting talk
Perhaps they're crying because they know SEOMoz's tool is better.
They use the Y! API? and SEOMoz uses their very own Linkscape. Any newbie with basic programming skills can collect data off the Y! API.
It is however not so easy a feat. to spider the entire web. Store all that vast information, and then extract data of interest from it. The programming skill, computational power and bandwidth required for such a task is monumental.
The idea might be the same, but it's not the idea that matters, it's how you execute it. And I'd give SEOMoz a score of 10/10 for execution.
Most people can create a web spider to... Most people can use cloud computing environments and storage.
Admitidly, not everyone can scale it but don't think for one minute that from a technology perspective Linkscape does anything that is out of reach of the majority of developers.
This takes nothing away for the achievement that is Linkscape, I like it, use it and value it, but from a technology perspective its not ground breaking.
I agree some export features would be great, much easier to compare data from previous reports in excel, with all the filters, graphs etc..
As for how the servers are going to hold up, i dont think its out of line to suggest other Pro Members chill for the next 24 hours and let non-pro play around.
@Rand maybe this could be a new monthly link bait "1st Monday Free Access"
Thanks for making this new link analysis tool available. Looks good.
I did experience an error on first couple of attempts saying I needed to add at least one competitor (four were listed) but guess that was just a blip due to the popularity.
Thanks for a great tool set SEOMoz team, We have already started seeing the links that we never able to find out without using this tool. Great stuff!!
I have already found around 200+ authoritative free links!!
thanks
pretty good
Awesome as always Rand!
Great tool, and there is no much tools over there about link building, or am i wrong?
Thanks SEOMoz to give a try, thinking on become a pro member :)
Great tool, but how do I export the data?
Agreed, definitely needs an export feature -likely will be available out of beta I imagine - which is no good to those, including myself, taking advantage of the free use...
You could try going through all the links, copy/paste all of them onto a spreadsheet, then sort according to mR to figure out what to go for first.
Will do for now :)
Also, a total # of results would be good, so you know how many pages of 'next' you are in for.
Definately a good tool, but is it really original?
Its similar to the link tool available in WebCEO *and others Such as Aaron Walls Hubfinder - however personally i believe this one is superior (but since when do we only ever use just one tool eh!) in that it allows you to differentiate between the links value (+filtering out nofollow), allowing you to approach the most valuable first, and its very user friendly + its powered by linkscape :) It's definitely a top resource!
*edit as got reminded about Hubfinder.
Totally agree with the idea of using multiple tools - I didn't want to rain on the launch parade, I think its valuable to bring such tools to the masses.
I just wanted to point out that similar tools have been publically available for some time, and I would have expected the majority of SEO 'professionals' to have something similar coded for their own toolbox already.
To be fair the concept is pretty basic, its just applied using Linkscape data which is its only major value add and differentiator.
I look forward to seeing more sophisticated tools from seoMOZ in future.
I have to disagree here. It's like saying "yeah linkscape is nice, but is it really original? I mean we have the yahoo link: command?".
You say "the concept is pretty basic" - but how much of SEO is really that hard? Smart SEO isn't about secrets and tricks, it's about efficiency, ease of use and accuracy of results. SEOmoz tools deliver on all three of those things.
Being able to add the layer of mR onto the data enables you to quickly find links that WORK, not just any old links. After all, yahoo data still returns links that have a nofollow around them...
I've played with this tool and I've compared direct results on this tool vs the competitors tools and this one has provided more actionable insights every single time. Therefore, in my opinion, it's better.
Don't underestimate the value of running this off the linkscape data instead of using yahoo data - that's a massive value add. Yes, there were ways of getting this data before (both using yahoo or linkscape) but never with this ease and accuracy.
I know I'm slightly biased due to our relationship with SEOmoz but there's my $0.02.
PS - Also, you might like to consider what could happen when Bing takes over from Yahoo. Will we still have Yahoo link data? I think THEN you might see the value of running these tools on linkscape.
Next time I would recommend to SEOmoz considering following:
What are you comparing accuracy too though? Linkscape is only accurate with regard to its own index. MozRank is a propriety algo and is only relevant in that context. Accuracy with regard to other "search engines" with regard to this does not exist.
I'm hearing a lot of scare mongering regarding what will happen when "Bing takes over Yahoo!" - any evidence to back up the assertion that services will change?
Accuracy is always going to be a subjective measure in this case since we don't have access to what Google thinks are the links to your site.
Yahoo and Linkscape are just two approximations of Google (admittedly Yahoo is perhaps more accurate for ranking in Yahoo but let's ignore that for a second).
Anyway, accuracy is probably a bad word for what I'm talking about (apologies) - what I'm implying is that the moz tool seems to find strong pages that link to multiple competitors that other tools don't find. Therefore in some measure it's more "accurate".
I have zero evidence of what will happen if Bing takes over Yahoo. I'm not trying to scare monger, I'm simply pointing out that if Yahoo stops having a web crawler then their site explorer product is naturally going to become outdated. Bing doesn't have their own version so although it is all guesswork at the moment it doesn't seem that unlikely to think that yahoo siteexplorer might go away at some point in the future.
Apologies, I didn't meant to imply that you were scare mongering - I was speaking generally, and possibly in a mildly exagerated fashion (no more exagerated than all the people claiming death of Yahoo! link data however).
Please don't get me wrong, I don't doubt the value of the tool - its a valuable addition to any armoury I just think that its not worthy of the fan fare.
I feel seoMOZ could be providing so much more with the dataset available, it just serves company purposes not to do so at the moment. Thats indicative of target market nothing else, and is certainly not an indictment.
I look forward to the day that the game is raised, and have no doubt that the "Mozplex" can do it.
I really hope these comments are taken with the positive feedback spirit in which they were intended, I have no problem with people marketing their tool, I was just hoping for more.
Hey DangerMouse, I hope my response didn't come across too harsh either - there's been a lot of nasty comments around recently and it's all too easy to get defensive very quickly.
Friendly discussions like this are part of what makes up the value of the moz and I know that the moz team appreciate all the opinons and feedback of their users.
Perhaps we can agree to disagree :-)
We certainly can Tom :)
Ah you two...
I'm glad to see a gentleman's dispute resolved peacefully for once!
I have to agree with you Tom.
(Sure I'm slightly biased due to my friendship with Tom, but here is my $0.02)
I've been doing exactly what this tool does for years, mostly with Yahoo Site Explorer data and metrics from Google, Alexa and others.
If you sneered when you read Alexa, then you understand how thrilled I am by Linkscape. Here is a superior quality link index with nofollow data plus strength and trust scores. Most important, the team works actively to improve the data, not as a side project but as a big part of the company's foundation!
I quickly adopted Linkscape as the primary data source for identifying competitive link neighborhoods. I even wrote a YOUmoz article about how to do this.
The accurate identification of link neighborhoods is a big task in the smallest markets and a major undertaking in major markets. The ability to automate this task using the most accurate link data available -- and the last time I checked, Google's data was not available -- is brilliant. It's massive.
The only thing I dislike about the link intersection tool is that now all Pro Members can do what I've been doing in the dark recesses of my secret laboratory.
SEO's can be such HATERS and it drives me nuts...this is my biggest Bitch about the industry and it really needs to stop. I posted this on SEOBook and it deserves to be posted here I suppose. The beggining of the comment refers to someone talking about how Rand and SEOmoz are supposedly the "Seo Police" anyway here it is
The indented quote is what I initially replied to on SEOBOOK
WHY would Google offer up an option to report SPAM if they could handle doing their jobs combating all the SPAM out there??
Should we just let the police do "their fuckin jobs" and not call into CRIMESTOPPERS if we have information on a crime or criminal???
SEO and Internet Marketing is an absolutely wonderful industry but the thing that is the biggest turnoff about the entire industry is this high school little girls room gossiping & Whining.
There is a phrase an NFL coach used a few years back that I always think about when SEO's go off on this petty stuff, it's "Shut up and do your job!"
Why even write a post talking about....(This was an SEObook quote)
Yahoo might have said the same thing when Google first emerged....and look at them now.
So what they call their Link Tool the best!?
Gillette says they are "The Best a Man Can Get" (I know the best thing this man can get is NOT a razor) other examples of similiar marketing are....Beanz meanz Heinz. – Heinz Baked Beans - I think, therefore IBM. – IBM, When you care enough to send the very best. – Hallmark, All the news that’s fit to print. – The New York Times
I have a feeling this little "Rivalry" between SEOmoz and SEObook will get out of hand as BOTH sides will continue to whine, defend & gossip. I'm fairly new to the computer/tech/seo industry but there is one thing that I ALWAYS notice about this industry....There are a lot of ego's and a lot of "I am God" complexes going around and it NEEDS TO STOP - I've wasted enough time with this so I am gonna SHUT UP and DO MY JOB
I like the tool. It works nicely!