Features you would like in the ultimate SEO tool
In developing the link analysis tool I’ve been thinking a lot about the tools I would like to be able to use but haven’t found yet. Some tools offer great features but are full of bugs and are therefore hard to use.
This thread from 2005 discusses the ultimate link analysis tool but 3 years later we don’t seem to have one (as far as I know). There are some excellent ones but ideally they would be combined into one big tool that you can just set going on 10 domains and then come back in 12 hours and see a massive report of all the data.
Here are the features I would like in the idea link tool:
- Ability to analyse up to 20 domains at once
- Tool can analyse 20 domains and find their most common link sources
- The tool should run in the background either via the web or a browser
- Show PR and link data for any page on a site
- Show PR and link data for any page that links to you
- Show anchor text and title tags for these pages
- Option to exclude nofollow links
- Graphs of how all link data changes over time
- Ability to filter links by domain extension
- Ability to filter links by hosting location
- Easy link to whois data for every domain
- Calculation of deep link percentage
- Use of colours to represent one way or reciprocal links
- Ability to exclude certain domains from the reports
- Ability to exclude sitewide links
What would you like to see?
Post category: Link Building Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 14 comments below, or add your own!
Patrick,
Thanks for the post – I was asking myself the same question and wanted to know how to improve Link Diagnosis. In last weeks I got side tracked by developing a feature that checks indexing problems and it seems its a very niche tool. I guess there is a higher demand on link analysis tools so the ideas from this post might be implemented on Link Diagnosis.
To other commenters: Please share your wishes. It would be great to see what tools you would like to use.
Anchor text is the one I am interested in although you already have that as a suggestion.
hmmmm…lemme think.
Ok, you have the link text and page title; for further relevance I would love a primary phrase count or other page theme info (like SEO Digger). Knowing the theme of the page is important IMO
I would also consider link location to take page segmentation into account ie; header link, footer, side panel or editorial link.
Last (but not least…could go on) is Timing; since links degrade , it would be easier to identify valuations by knowing when the link was discovered, when the page was discovered/last updated. This speaks to the temporal value of the page (and link). Possibly also graph the link ages to understand the freshness of the link profile as a whole.
..there’s my 3 :0)
In stead of showing which links point to either the entire domain or a single page, I’d love to see a tool that shows me what links point to any page except for the homepage.
Hope you understand what I mean, explaining stuff isn’t exactly one of my best qualities
Wiep, just do this in Yahoo:
[linkdomain:wiep.net -link:http://wiep.net/]
Patrick, in IE6 your comments are all blank boxes, just so you know.
The main issue with building a tool with all of those features is the number of hits that must be made to the search engines per report is so high that it is prohibitive, at least on a web based tool. Yahoo API allows 5,000 requests per day from a single IP address. The most you can get with a single request is 100 serps… so to do 10 pages of that for 20 domains is 200 hits to the API per report, not counting deep link calculations, which all require separate queries (like the one I showed Wiep. Add in those for each domain and you’ve doubled it to 400 hits. That means that just on the Yahoo API restriction alone you run out of resources after 12 people run a report each day. That’s not to mention that many hosts prohibit running any kind of bot at all on their servers (you need a dedicated server at least).
I am working on some new tools for Bad Neighborhood, and a link analysis tool is one of them, I’m just not sure yet how I am going to maximize the information within the available resources yet. I do have tools that I use to gather links for personal use… but they are all private at the moment.
The best feature of all would be one button called “Number 1″ and when you clicked it your site would rank number 1 in all major search engines
I’ve been grappling with a the Yahoo API issue, and I’d like to see the ability to use proxy IP’s (does that even work? muhaha) to not max out the queries on Yahoo and Google.
I know that’s not exactly nice, but since the search engines don’t exactly allow you to pay for that bandwidth…
Backlinking tools are great, but I would like to see an internal linking tool that extends what you can get from Zenu’s Link Sleuth tool and Google Webmaster central internal linking tool which only appears to use a sample of your data.
The tool could build a library of key stats for each page. Link Sleuth does some of this showing you how many inlinks and outlinks a page has and what level it is on, but I would also like to see the variation of anchor text used pointing to a page and whether the page has been indexed or not and what the PageRank is etc.
Hey, great tool and thanks so much for putting it out there. I’m developing a few of my own and will certainly contact you for some feedback/constructive criticism.
As for the tool, I’d love to see how many other links that the linking page links to, which would tell me if it’s a “Links” page, or if it’s a legitimate “These guys are awesome” page.
Cheers mate, keep up the good work.
Should show not only PR but Alexa, Technoratiy, Digg, Del.icio.us and the Cache Date at all the major search engines.
A function that would be much appreciated would be to be able to use a TAG-word.
Forinstance: Analysing a blogg
Instead of investigating the whole domain, only analysing the posts containing the TAG-word. Thus you would get the answer to what links are connected to a certain subject-area. Then it would be great if the tool would “crawl” along those links and keep doing just that.
how about on page factors like keyword in h1, h2, anchor, density on page, keyword in domain and file name, date published, the ability to omit dmoz based listings (a massive issue with hubfinder)
Hi,
Really looking forward to using this. Great idea to do this as an open source tool.
Is anyone familiar with a current tool that excludes sitewide links?
Cheers
Rich
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May 13, 2008 at 8:29pm