We introduce you:

Fresh Links

Check your Fresh Links Now!

We just made it easier for you to quickly check new links for any site. This allows you to check the new links that were acquired by a site in the last 14 days.

The Fresh Links tab is available for all the type of checks supported by the backlink explorer:

• Domain
• Subdomain
• URL
• Prefix/Folder

Don’t forget to use the integrated bookmarklet

We consider the bookmarklet an important addition to this tool, as it directly integrates with your link research flow by simply not breaking it.

Click the bookmarklet button and it will analyze the site you are visiting in your favorite browser(it works on any browser).

This is great for quick checks. If you need more in-depth information, you should run a campaign with your sites and get access to all the goodies cognitiveSEO has to offer.

Enjoy cognitiveSEO!

Would you like to have your favorite feature implemented? Let us know by mail at support@cognitiveseo.com

The post Fresh Links & a fine-tuned Backlink Explorer appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Today we introduce:

Prefix / Folder Backlink Checking

I am sure that at least once in your “SEO PRO life”, you needed to quickly check the backlinks for a product category (ONLY) or a blog directory?

This new feature allows you to segment the links that point to all of the pages on a site that respect a specific word pattern.

You will instantly get, not only all the links to the pages respecting the prefix pattern, but you will also get historical link growth information for those pages only + everything you would normally get for a Domain/Subdomain or Page analysis.

To better understand the usefulness of this new feature here are some use cases for the prefix/folder analysis.

5 Creative Use Cases for the new Prefix analysis option.

1. Who are the most linked authors from SearchEngineLand?

   

2. What are the most popular Techcrunch articles for any given day?

   

3. How did the MoneySuperMarket “Car Insurance” folder links evolved over time?

   

4. What are the major news stories on CNN this month (September 2013)?

   

5. What are Microsoft’s most active Twitter accounts?

   

Happy Backlink Hunting!

What do you think of this new feature?

The post 5 Creative Use Cases for the New “Prefix” Backlink Checker appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Instant Backlink Explorer

Check your site for Free Now!

explorer.cognitiveseo.com

The concept of this new tool is to allow quick access to important backlink data in seconds. It is not your average backlink checker. It does so much more.

The new link explorer tool is free to use by anyone (even without a cognitiveSEO account / limited features apply). The free trial gives you full access to all the data.

Here are some of the most important data points that are displayed for each and every backlink check:

• Monthly Link Velocity
• Daily New/Lost Links
• Nofollow vs Dofollow – Visual Link Explorer
• Link Profile Authority
• Backlinks List
• Social Metrics
• Domains TLD Distribution
• Domain Profile Authority
• Referring Domains List + Site-wide Backlink Data
• Top Site’s Pages
• Anchor Text List

All this, in a super quick report that is instantly ran for You.

You have ready to run bookmarklets integrated, so that you can run the reports super quick directly from the browser.

You are also able to run in-depth link analysis (for unnatural links analysis/ cutting-edge pitches / superior competitor link analysis and more) . This is “the crème de la crème” of the cognitiveSEO toolset.

The new Backlink Explorer is designed for quick backlink inspection. It gives you an overall idea of the links for the analyzed site.

We hope you will enjoy it and that it will solve most of your instant backlink checking problems.

Some Notes:

• This new tool will replace the old Backlink Reports section in the site. This section was removed today. Any reports ran by our current customers can be re-run in this new tool and exported from there.
• The link data used by this tool is extracted from all the partners listed on the site.

The post [Free] New & Fancy Backlink Checker appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

1. The Blindness of the Total Link Counts

A lot of SEO professionals are impressed, and  guided, by the total raw link counts of a site.

I often hear people talking about the number of links a site has, when, in fact, they should talk about the number of referring domains.

Example: Site XYZ has 100k links.  This number is useless … it does not mean anything.

Let’s me put it like this:

It is not about the link counts … it is actually about the referring domains when you try to quickly understand the popularity of a site.

Those 100k links are all coming from 1 referring domain. This isn’t a popular site. It is a link profile generated out of tons of site-wide links. These links do not increase the value of the site at all.

What about, if the site had 1000 links from 300 referring domains.

Much more popular site when you look at the referring domains number.

Forget about the total raw link counts when you try to quickly grasp an overview on the popularity of the site. Referring Domains is the important number.

2. The Natural Unnatural Link Concept

WTF is this?!

How can an unnatural link be natural?

Links, as everything else, should never be put out of context. It’s like taking someone’s phrases out of the discussion. That is called “Fallacy of quoting out of context” and it is the practice of quoting out of context. Usually you get a totally different meaning putting the quote out of the context. And a lot of people do it for various reasons … (but that is another discussion)

The same can be applied to links. Here is a quick example.

First POV – A Link Out of the Context.

Looks like a natural link. What’s wrong with having a forum profile? Nothing. In fact it is recommended to be active on your top industry forums. You will increase your exposure.

Second POV – The same link in the Context of the Link Profile.

Here is the context of the link: 667 links from 249 referring domains. Let me be more accurate. That is 22% of the entire link profile.

So it doesn’t look natural anymore …

Focus on the entire context when you are doing backlink analysis!

3. Google PR is a Great Metric

Google said several times that they intentionally randomize the Google PR on random sites in order to make it harder for webmasters to reverse engineer the quality of a page.

I often hear SEO’s talking about the PR of a site, when they try to qualify the site as a potential link building prospect.

That is the wrong way to do it.(BIG DOT)

Use other metrics in order to quantify the quality of a site. The best metric, is the ranking in Google of that site or page. If the site ranks well, we got a good prospect. If it’s nowhere to be found, ignore it.

Forget about Google PR! It is too misleading.

4. Great Link Analysis Conclusions on Outdated Link Data

This one gives you almost ZERO information, and worst … it can be very misleading.

Did you know that your link profile is made out of LIVE and LOST links.

Live links is obvious, but Lost links are links that once existed and don’t anymore. A tremendous amount of pages become broken every day. Without having a list of freshly crawled data (at least a week old or so) that analysis is not accurate and can be misleading. On a normal site you can easily have a 40% Lost link ratio. If you would include that in your analysis you would have a 40% wrong result.

You should have a system in place that crawls your links on demand and provides you with fresh data, as we do in our toolset, at cognitive.

These are only 4 concepts that a lot of SEO’s still work with without knowing that they might be totally wrong. Hopefully this list will clear these misconceptions and make you a better SEO professional.

I am really interested in your thoughts, and other misconceptions, that you think are still kicking in 2013.

<a href="http://depthdeception.blogspot.ro/2009/10/understanding-evolution.html" target="_blank">*photo</a>

The post 4 Important Backlink Analysis Misconceptions still kicking in 2013 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Important Update!

We released the automatic unnatural link classification tool to help you in your unnatural link recovery, after this post was published.

We recommend you check it for unnatural link analysis!

With the latest chit chat that Google is going to release the next version of Google Penguin soon, I think it is a good time to remember how you can easily detect unnatural links in your sites’ profile.

This detection technique can to be used for any site, even if it did not receive a penalty or unnatural link warning. It is a good technique that you can use to understand and manage the risk that you might be exposed to when the next unnatural link update comes.

Lovely site BitsofLace – Unfortunately Bad Linking Used …

This case study presents the story of a penalized site and how an unnatural links detection process should be approached. (mention – the site was brought to our attention by one of our customers asking for help in segmenting the unnatural links pointing to this site)

The site is operating in the “Lingerie” niche (BitsofLace.com) and has received several unnatural link warnings in the past. Their rankings have dropped significantly because of the unnatural links that were built in the past by several agencies or individual SEOs.

Let’s start with the conclusion so you can quickly understand what was wrong with the links of this site.

To put it simple, this site lost rankings because of an often seen, boring and un-creative link building strategy that combines a deadly mix of:

• Paid blog posts
• Web Directory links
• Forum & Article Directory links

So how did I find all this out? Here is the entire process described.  You can apply it to any site.

I started with a full link profile analysis. Looking for big distributions of links I notice the following:

• A high density of blog, article directory and web directory links
• A high number of commercial anchor texts versus brand related.

These signals guide me to look further at the webpage type distribution.

1. The story of the Paid Blog Links

Blog links are not unnatural usually, neither web directory or article directory links (or any other type of link … just to clear this out) … but it all comes to the distribution, volume and how they were acquired.

I check the deeper profile of these blog links.

We have them split in:

• Blog Post links
• Blog Comment Links
• Blogrolls and similar link types

Let’s dig deeper. The majority of the links are coming from blog posts. This could be a natural thing.  Content Marketing, customers writing about the service etc.

This isn’t the case unfortunately.

The first unnatural links signal is the low quality of the linking pages.

If I order by link quality, the most important link looks like a paid blog post. Natural links (expos, trade shows, real reviews etc) are also found but these are a tiny fraction (max 1%).

I should have looked at the commercial anchor text distribution for the blog links segment first of all.

A 55% commercial anchor text ratio is totally unnatural for sure.

I am looking at another 3-4 links and I can profile them all based on the similar footprint.

Here are some screenshots so that you can get the idea.

Content written around commercial anchor text posted on these blogs. All of these blog post links are unnatural from Google’s point of view. They were built with the sole purpose of influencing Google’s rankings. They do not provide any value to the user!

The same can be said about the other links coming from blogrolls and blog comments.

~21% Unnatural Links Detected on Blogs.

 2. The story of the “old and dirty” Web Directory linking technique.

How natural can Web Directory links be you should ask yourself? Last year Google even started de-indexing directories.

Let’s be frank for a moment, you put those links there with the sole purpose of increasing your rankings.

Rarely we see high quality web directories sending real traffic to your site via the link posted there.

With such a high distribution of 23% links coming from web directories I should mark all as unnatural without even looking at them. But let’s be accurate and methodical and make an informed decision.

Having such a high percentage of 93% links DoFollowed, highlights the intention of the people that “optimized” this link profile to have the site rank higher with Web Directory links.

I tried inspecting these links in various forms so that I could find a quality link from a web directory.

I couldn’t!

I checked the most powerful links ordered by Domain Trustworthiness and Link Trustworthiness. All the top links are low quality web directories (from the user’s experience point of view) by any metric you choose to filter.

Here’s a quick preview on some of these low quality unnatural web directory links.

~23% Unnatural Links Detected on Web Directories.

 3. The story of the Forum “Personas”

Normally you get people talking in forums about your product. They might be mentioning your brand, talking about your service etc. When you have a high distribution of forum domains sending links to your site we can only have two options:

1. The site is a “super super” successful brand.
2. The site is promoted by a “super” proactive forum spammer.

Again we have a lot of DoFollow links. Raises a red flag!

In the forum links segment I searched for the word “profile” in the title or link and this is what we got as a visual link profile.

Why I searched for the word “profile” you might ask?

Because this represents the fingerprint for forum profile pages or “personas” as some SEOs call them.

Fake Forum profiles created with the sole purpose of generating unnatural links to the promoted site.

We do have some natural links generated by real people on the forums but these are like 10% out of the entire dataset. The rest are “personas” generating links both on profile pages and inside forum discussions.

~17% Unnatural Links Detected on Forums.

4. Article Directory Thin Content can Sink your site.

As a link building strategy this is an old one, that once worked and now it doesn’t anymore. As with any other link building strategy, the more it is abused by SEOs worldwide, the less it is going to work on a long term, as it is something that is generated unnaturally with the purpose of influencing the search engine’s rankings.

Here is the type of thin content linking in with commercial anchor text that was used for this site.

Natural Link?

Not at all!

Human generated content posted on a mass scale on 95 article directories. Variation of the anchor text and content is found on all of these sites. The problem is that Google can fingerprint this as it has a big proportion of the link profile and it raises a red flag for Google to check.

~11% Unnatural Links Detected on Article Directories.

Let’s recap:

• ~21% Unnatural Links Detected on Blogs.
• ~23% Unnatural Links Detected on Web Directories.
• ~17% Unnatural Links Detected on Forums.
• ~11% Unnatural Links Detected on Article Directories.

Total 72% Unnatural Links Detected

And this is not all!

We can go even deeper and check the other type of pages, and I am sure we will find more unnatural links. I just wanted to showcase how easy it is to spot these unnatural links by segmenting the links by webpage type.

The website type segmentation gives you the macro view on the link building strategies used.

The analysis was done in 5 minutes + 10 minutes to have the cognitiveSEO system crawl and analyze the entire dataset of links so that we have fresh data on the links analyzed. It took me 5 hours to finalize this article though :). I hope you will enjoy it!

Here are some other articles that are of great help when it comes to identifying unnatural and low quality links:

• Identify Low Quality Links [how to]
• Surfacing Unnatural Links > Why You’re Doing it Wrong [how to]
• Backlinks Analysis Case Study
• Google Penguin Case Study
• Google Penguin Crashes Wedding Site’s Shady Link Building Strategy [case study]

What do you think about the unnatural link building strategy used by this site?

What other methods do you apply to segment unnatural links?

The post Unnatural Links Detection – How To Guide & Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Main Topics

• What are Unnatural Links?
• How do I spot them?
• How do I recover from an Unnatural Links Penalty?
• Quick Overview of the recent Interflora Penalty.
• “Unnatural Link” Sites Analyzed – Case Studies
•     SmartLipo – Medical Surgery Niche
•     Allesovergokken – Online Gambling Niche Netherlands
•     Webhostingmadness – Webhosting Review Niche
•     Learnenglishindublin – Learning Foreign Languages Niche

What are Unnatural Links?

• Links that are created with the sole purpose of influencing a search engines rankings.
• Mostly DOFollow links, these links can be spotted by Google using trained algorithms that search for specific patterns in specific niches.
• These algorithms are also “helped” by humans that verify specific sites and possibly flag them. You can read more about this if you search the cognitiveSEO blog for Google Rating & Webspam Guidelines. There was a leaked document last year that explains the process.

A few examples:

• blog comments built at mass scale
• link networks that interlink and link to a specific site to help it increase its rankings
• paid dofollow links (advertorials, sponsored links etc )

More on the subject here.

The BIG 3 Rules of Ranking with Natural Links

1. Google is a machine that is trying to “emulate” the real world.

• What it seems unnatural in the real world should be unnatural to Google. (if it is not now, it will be in the future)

2. Become Trust Worthy!

• Prepare for this. It Takes Time. (like in real life).
• Basic Idea – Show Google that you are Trust Worthy and Google will give you Ranking Juice.
• Gain Trust without Commercial Anchor Text.
• Be Strategic & Patient.

3. After Google Trusts you Don’t Abuse it!

• Start using Commercial Anchor Text to guide Google to rank you better.
• Continue to build trust!

The BIG 5 Rules of Unnatural Link Analysis

1. Each niche is different, and this can be seen by the different link profiles.

• This is from a naturalness point of view.
• Everything has a Context. Put is out of the Context and it has no value.

2. The same rules to identify unnatural links in different niches will not apply.

• There are generic ones that will apply though, such as – high number of low metric links.

3. Look for Backlink Profile Extremes.

• Analyze from different angles. Profile by Site Type, Link Type, Metrics etc.

4. Big Density of Commercial Anchor Text compared to Brand Anchor Text

5. Look for Links with Similar Footprints. (Advertorials, Link Networks, Footer Links etc)

How should I recover from Unnatural Links Penalties

1. Identify & Mark the Unnatural Links.
2. Ask the site’s webmasters to remove those links.
3. Most of them won’t, so your only chance is Google Disavow.
4. Do it carefully! Don’t sent the whole list of links to Google. It won’t work.
5. Explain what happened and give details for as much unnatural links as possible.
6. Remove all unnatural links from an affected domain.
7. Wait … while “waiting” start building natural links. Increase your Trust and Dilute you Bad Link Profile.

Quick Overview on the recent Interflora Penalty

1. Interflora is a site that sells flowers in the UK and other countries. It is one of the biggest flower sites in the UK.
2. Approximately a week ago it was penalised by Google and the entire SEO community started to analyze this.
3. My opinion is that this is an enforcement of another guideline from Google regarding “advertorials”. This is because Matt Cutts himself posted the same day on twitter a short note about the specific guideline.
4. There were other cases in the past with sites like JC Penney and others that were penalized by Google.(“brands”). For Google this is the easiest way to spread the word about an enforcement of their guidelines.
5. A way of educating the SEO community.
6. Was this purely about other unnatural links? I do not think so. Other competitors of Interflora have a big amount of unnatural links and still they are not penalized. This was about “Advertorials”.
7. If we check these against their competitors we will see that this makes the difference.
8. A “new old” unnatural link = the advertorial link.
9. What it works today … might not work tomorrow!
10. But a lot of spammy tactics still work.
11. Work for a day or a week. But if you plan for longer than that you have to comply.

The post Backlink Analysis – Google Penalties Case Studies appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Visual Link Explorer – Cutting-Edge Link Graphs Made Simple

This is the easiest, yet advanced, visualization that allows you to comprehend the ever-growing complexity of a site’s link profile.

No other SEO tool has implemented automatic extraction, creation, and navigation of Link Graphs. Until now only advanced technical SEOs could implement similar link graphs using complex tools such as Gephi or Fusion Tables. This did not only require advanced technical skills but it also required a lot of time to implement.

The New Visual Link Explorer creates link graphs on the fly (no technical skills required … and it saves a huge amount of time by having them automatically generated) based on the backlinks of the analyzed site. It also has “pure” SEO features that are dedicated to backlink analysis, such as:

• Link Profiling – Live/Lost Links, NoFollow/Dofollow, Website Type, etc.
• Comprehend Link Quality by using different Link Metrics.
• Highlight Link Relations using the Search Function.
• In-depth Zoom on each Link.
• Navigate using Sliding and Zooming.
• Save Link Graph Snapshots – WYSIWYG.
• Optimized to work fast with tens of thousands of links.

This is a dream come true for any SEO professional that at least once in his/her carrier needed or wanted to have that cutting-edge, that would put his/her analysis/pitch or client report above the competitors.

What is this good at?

I would like to quickly highlight some of the most useful things that can easily be achieved with the new link explorer:

• Visually Comprehend Backlink Profiles in a Heartbeat. (understand faster)
• Eye candy & Airplane View of a Site’s Links (get the “cool” big picture)

• Pitch or Report to Clients with a unique twist. (always be unique)
• Navigate inside a site’s link profile (intuitive visual backlink navigation)

• Quicker Side-Panel Visualization with Instant Link Preview Onpage

• Faster Competitive Analysis. (save huge amounts of time)
• Quickly spot link prospects on competitor profiles. (find faster)

Give me more details. It’s too vague …

Having spotted some of the macro uses of this tool, I would like to go a bit more in-depth and give you actual examples of some of the Visual Link Explorer use cases.

This visualization combined with the rest of the strengths of the cognitiveSEO platform will allow you to do your SEO stuff much smarter and faster.

• Instantly Spot, Low and High-Quality Links.

• Search for links by (url, anchor text etc) and highlight them among others.

• View Broken Links Distributions over the entire link profile of a site.

• Identify Themed Linked Pages Easily

• Identify the most linked pages of a site and how their backlinks look like.
• Filter out Broken Links and Analyze only Live + In-Content Links. (hundreds of other filter combinations are available )

Other Notable stuff about the Visual Link Explorer

While the tool aggregates link data from a multitude of backlink providers (Ahrefs, Blekko, SEOkicks, majestic SEO & Moz) to ensure the completeness of your link profile data, you can also import links from Google Webmaster Tools to make the analysis even more complete.

This is only the initial step in the whole on-demand backlink analysis process. After we aggregate, de-duplicate and sort the data, we re-crawl those links allowing our platform to apply a unique range of algorithms to each and every backlink, extracting information such as the type of the linking site (blog/forum etc), link type (in-content, blogroll etc) and many others.

We even take image snapshots and identify the visual location of the link on the page with our unique visual crawler.(for each link we gather top quality metrics that allow you to view the link profile of a site from various POVs)

Conclusion

Backlink Visualization has a multitude of use cases as shown above. The Visual Link Explorer as it is implemented on cognitiveSEO is not only a visualization but it is also a new way to navigate and discover a site’s link profile. I hope you will find this new feature as useful as we, and the people that tested it prior to its official lauch, did.

To finalize this post I would like to make a short note on what the new Visual Link Explorer is meant to be:

Cutting-Edge Navigational Backlink Visualization that Impresses Clients and Empowers SEO Professionals to Quickly get backlink intelligence that otherwise would take ages to comprehend.

 Thank you!

My big thanks go to our current customers for providing active feedback, to the cognitiveSEO team for developing such a great new feature and to the smart people in the SEO industry that have influenced this implementation, indirectly, by writing quality articles on the subject of backlink graph visualization and link graph networks. Read more on the subject, from their articles directly:

• Understanding Industry Verticals Through Backlink Visualisation and Analysis – Andrew Hughes
• Ultimate Data Visualization Guide for SEO – Himanshu Sharma
• Visualize Your Backlinks with Google Fusion Tables – Mark Cianfranni – Ex SEERInteractive
• Visualize your Site’s Link Graph with NodeXL – Aleyda Solis – SEERInteractive
• How to Visualize Link Data in Gephi – Justin Briggs

 … Links are Beautiful Now …

The post Visual Link Explorer – The Easiest & Most Powerful way to Visualize Backlinks appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

In the age of raw link data and hundreds of SEO metrics, we are improving the backlink analyzer concepts used in our  tool by providing:

1. Fresh & Complete Link Data [Aggregated & De-duped] from Ahrefs, MajesticSEO, SEOmoz, Blekko & SEOKicks.
2. Re-crawled & Classified On-Demand for You.
3. In an “easy to digest” UI.

I want to personally thank, all of our customers, who have provided the precious feedback that allowed us to revamp the inBound Link Analysis to a simpler & better link analysis concept, integrated with the most important features that any link builder needs.

The whole concept of the inBound Link Analyzer module is about simplifying the complexity of the link ecosystem. SEO and Link Building are getting more complex than ever, and having complex tools, will not help you, the user, in making more well informed decisions about your SEO day to day activity. Going through tens of thousands of raw links gives you almost nothing, that you can actually use in your backlink strategy plan.

Total link counts, nowadays only tell you 1% of the  ranking story of a site. That is why, you should focus on backlink segmentation and classification that will allow you to understand the  link profile of the analyzed site.

A few of our customers had early access to this upgrade, and they were enchanted by it (thank you all for the great feedback you provided). Here are some of their opinions on the old vs the new backlink analyzer:

Let’s move on to the actual upgrades that the tool got. Here is a list with all the new or redesigned functionalities of the cognitive SEO tool.

Based on the concept “A picture is worth a thousand words”, here are, all of the above, 18 features exemplified with screen photos and short descriptions.

First, I would like to thank you for trusting us in your SEO analysis adventures and would love to have you test the tools. You can get your free 14 day trial here!

We merged over 20 pages in one single dash with 36 charts and one big table with all your links. You won’t have to browse through tens of pages anymore, loosing time and wondering how to correlate the various link data. You can print the charts and also export link data from each individual table. The “big” page even loads quite quickly!

We added import functionality for Google Webmaster Tools data ( Bing Link Explorer and other link data providers ) so that you can compliment the data that we extract from all the backlink providers that we use, with the data that you love most. You can even import custom lists of links with the click of a button.

You will receive weekly mails with the new links that appeared in that timeframe. This works both on your site and your competitors and it builds out a link velocity graph inside the app. This is a great link intelligence advantage, being able to see how your competitors link profiles are evolving compared to yours, and at the same time, to have access to the exact links that create the evolution of thee backlink profiles.

Finding common anchor texts between your site and the competitors and visualizing anchor data has never been easier. You can easily use this data to understand the strengths & weaknesses of your link building plan, in terms of anchor text distribution. Spotting over-optimized anchor text is like a breeze now!

On each campaign re-crawl, we save different data points that allow you to see the evolution of your backlink profile. For example you can view the evolution of a link profile from the site type, point of view or from nofollow/dofollow links. Many more are data points are saved.

View the most linked pages of the sites that you analyze. You are also able to visualize how the referring domains vs links are acquired for each individual page of the analyzed site.

One single page where you can compare over 20 charts and correlate the most important seo metrics to tell you what makes the difference between your site and your competitors sites. It has never been easier to compare such huge amounts of link data in an easy to digest & fast interface.

In the Competitive Link Analysis area you will find the Winner vs Loser comparison, based on different link metrics. You can even apply different filters and the comparison will change dynamically. So many possibilities here! Link building and analysis is all about creativity and what you are looking to accomplish.

In certain situations you might only want to check the most important link from each referring domain individually. Keeps your analysis even more focused!

Easily compare and identify unnatural linking patterns using the common referring domains and common IPs. You can easily spot link networks from this chart alone!

Until now, you where only able to run subdomain analysis on the campaigns that you created inside cognitiveSEO. From now on your possibilities are endless because you can run both full domain analysis and subdomain analysis. If you want you can even run the analysis on a custom list of URLs.

Adding campaings in cognitiveSEO is  cleaner now. We splitted the campaign concept in two: One-time Snapshots & Recurring Campaigns. The big difference is that “Recurring Campaigns” will be automatically re-crawled weekly and also allow continuous rank tracking. “One-time Snapshots” are best for one-time site benchmarking & analysis and client pitches.

We were detecting in-Content links since the initial launch of cognitiveSEO in December 2011, but until now we missed to add this chart. We believe this is a great addition to our range of charts as this tells part of the story on how links were built to the analyzed site.

The Link History dimension was added. Now you can filter the links, based on a selected timeframe. You will be able to analyze only the links that appeared in the last 2 weeks for example. Great for detailed link velocity analysis!

MajesticSEO introduced a few months ago their New Trust & Citation metrics. We have integrated them in cognitiveSEO, in these beautiful charts that tell you what each point means and what it actually represents.

We did not work on this revamp, for 5 months, without taking in consideration our Enterprise users. Our system is scalable with dedicated servers and custom enterprise plans (contact us at support@cognitiveseo.com), to allow you to analyze millions of links on demand, with the detail and granularity that no other backlink analysis tool gives you.

The whole page, with all the charts, can be filtered dynamically, and you will get the entire page re-drawn with the new filtered data. For example if you only want to view the link profile of the backlinks that point to your URLs that contain the word “blog” and have a rating of 3 to 5, after you apply these filters your page will be refreshed and you will see only the filtered data & charts.

The link analysis dashboard is a really long page (“Extended View”). If this design does not fit you, we have the tabbed view, which we named the “Condensed View”. Either way, these are great link visualizations that will help you understand backlink profiles and allow you to make decisions faster.

The two biggest challenges of this upgrade were:

• Simplify Complexity
• Scale the system for Enterprise users.

I want to thank the entire team here for the continuos work that they have put into this new upgrade.

It was a real challenge and we hope that you will LOVE IT.  Get your free 14 day trial here!

Share any thoughts, ideas, issues … by commenting on this blog post.

Enjoy your link analysis!

The post Backlink Analysis Tool – Simplified Link Intelligence appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

High authority, relevant backlinks are gold for search engine rankings. And we are always attempting to trace and to get our hands on them.

When it comes to find the best backlinking opportunities, there are two options. The first is to do your own prospecting by identifying influencers, thought leaders, and adjacent (related but not competing) niches in your industry. The second option is to promptly find the most valuable links your competitors build, and to try to get those sites to link to you too.

This second option is called competitive backlink analysis. If you’re out for the low hanging fruit, the second option is probably what you’re looking for. After all, why not piggyback on their research, saving you precious time and money?

A component of our SEO services is link building. And part of that link building is performing a competitive back linking analysis. Invariably, when we start working with a new client they want to know why ACME Inc. or AJAX Corp. is outranking them. We show them why by performing few analyses, one of which is to reverse engineer their competitor’s backlinking strategy.

I use MajesticSEO and SEOmoz to gather raw backlinking data, and then use Excel to perform the analysis. Usually, these were all the tools I need. Until recently, that is. I have now added a powerful new tool to my arsenal: Cognitive SEO’s tool.

In this article I will show you how to use this incredible backlinking analysis tool to identify your competitors’ backlinking strategies.

There’s a ton of analysis you can perform, but in this article I will show you how to:

• Weed out the dead links from the live ones (a time saver by itself when you go over thousands of back links).
• Identify their most common backlinking strategies.
• Dig deeper into their strategies by identifying tactics like important followed blogs your competitors are commenting on.
• BONUS: I will share some filters to show you how to pinpoint specific backlinking strategies.

These are just a few of the things that one can do with Cognitive’s platform. Inbound link analysis is just a component of the platform – you can actually manage your link building campaign and track SERP rankings too, all under one roof. That’s nice.

For the purpose of this article we will focus on Inbound Link Analysis only.

Once you’ve created your account on Cognitive, I highly recommend that you link it to your MajesticSEO account to get more backlinking data.

If you want an in-depth analysis on your competitors’ backlinks, you have to create a campaign where you define your site and your competitors’. Don’t just use the Backlinks Reports, as those reports are just a quick overview on their backlinks.

You’ll get an email when the crawling of the backlinks is done. Select your Campaign at the top and choose the Inbound Link Analysis tab.

Cleaning up the dead links

SEOmoz tool is a good source for basic backlinking analysis, but the main problem with its data is that it contains all backlinks, live or removed.

So, the first thing you want to do in Cognitive’s SEO platform is to weed out the dead links. That way your analysis is focused only on currently live backlinks.

To do so, use the Inbound Links Filters:

It’s also a good idea to group links by domain, so your analysis evaluates partners, and not pages.       That is especially important if you analyze competitors that have a lot of site-wide links. You don’t want to end up analyzing 100 pages on the same domain. One or two is more than enough to identify your competitor’s strategy on a specific site.

The final result will look like this:

Important note about the Inbound Links Filters

All the reports provided by Cognitive SEO platform (webpage type, link positioning, link status, nofollow links, deep links) are also accessible as filtered attributes, features or metrics.

For example, if you want to identify backlinks in the footer, you could go to the Link Visibility report under the Inbound Link Profiles tab and look at the visibility breakdown:

But you can use the filters to access the same data in the complete Inbound Link Portfolio report:

Filters are actually a very powerful way to segment data from a report in even more detail.

A note on nofollow links

The platform also allows the exclusion of nofollow links, but I strongly recommend performing the competitor analysis including this type of link. You can uncover new link partnerships this way.

Most common strategies

Finding out what strategies your competitor is deploying is so easy, you won’t believe it. Just use the Webpage Type report under Inbound Links Analysis:

As you can see, we’ve identified that the most important backlinking source for this particular competitor is blogs.

Digging deeper with blogs

We’ve identified that blogs are a major backlinking strategy for them. Using filters, we will now dig even deeper to find out:

–        Which links are live

–        Which links dofollow

–        Which links are in the body rather than the footer and header

–        Which links contain the word “SEO”

All the results below are delivered in seconds:

BONUS: Specific Backlinking Strategies Filters

Use the following filters in the Inbound Link Portfolio report to pinpoint specific backlinking strategies:

To identify blogs where competitors are commenting and links are followed

Sponsorship opportunities

Guest posting

Exact match backlinks

Backlinking URLs with a lot of authority (lots of links pointing to them)

Juiciest backlinks (few outbound links from those pages and high home page PR)

For this one you have to use a mix of reports and filters:

Article directories or Press Release sites that dofollow

Finding country level backlinks

Kudos to Cognitive SEO for developing such a powerful and useful tool for backlinking analysis! Use it wisely and,

See you at the top!

The post How to Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’ Backlinking Strategies appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.