Tracking Links Tool

[DougRoberts]

Sara, you have a real fear of this happening? I don't know what niche you're working in, but it sounds like you have some particularly nasty competitors.

Do you have any evidence that this might be the case or any indication that their SEO activities in general are leaning towards the shady side?

As others have mentioned - I'm not sure it's something you should be overly worried about.

[AlanMosley]

If you read the comments in the article you will see dan was told by Goolge that they have not found any cases of this to have actually happned.

If you want somthing that tracks daily, try GWMT or BWMT

[Grumpy_Carl]

I'm of the opinion that anything a competitor can do to your site (within reason) cannot harm. If a competitor were to be able to point bad links at your site to get you banned, then what's stopping me doing that to my competitors, them doing it to me and so on.

At worst, I think Google will just discount the links.

[-Al-]

I use Advanced Link Manager for this job. Its pricey, and depending on the size of your project (number of indexed urls) it can take several hours to perform an update. If you pay for some dedicated proxies however you can ramp the update speed up a lot.

This aside, its very detailed and will enable you to keep track on a daily basis. Its also good for keeping track of your competitors links and to identify new link opportunities.

[RyanKent]

Hi Sara,

Since the loss of Yahoo Site Explorer data, I am not aware of any link profile which is faster then Majestic SEO. Personally I like Open Site Explorer, but it's updates are 4-5 weeks apart and some people prefer faster access to data.

When you are looking for these spammy links there are a couple thoughts you may wish to keep in mind:

• internet crawlers need to access millions of websites and billions / trillions of web pages. There is a huge amount of resources involved. OSE only tracks the top 25% of web pages and it still takes a solid month to crawl the web then process the data. To do so faster on a consistent basis would require a large amount of expensive resources.

• you can track links to your site from Google WMT as well. It will not show all the links, but it is a helpful addition to any link tracking process

• spammy links are often presented on spammy / low quality web sites. If you earn a link from the front page of the New York Times, that link will often be discovered by Google in minutes. If you earn a link from a random page on the site averageseodirectory.com it may take a month for even Google to find the link. Some links are not even found by Google because the web page which offers the link is buried in a site or is otherwise not valued.

I understand your desire to keep a clean backlink profile. There is absolutely no value in monitoring spam links on a daily basis. A once/month check in OSE or Majestic is quite sufficient to maintain your website at a high quality level.

I agree with you that spammy links can potentially harm your site. Even if you locate the bad links immediately, there is relatively little you can do to have them removed. Most sites which allow spammy links are very poorly maintained. The best thing you can do is to earn quality links to offset the spammy links.

One last thought: check your Google Analytics traffic data. If anyone clicks on a link to your site, the data shows in GA.

Best wishes.

[-Al-]

+1 For Majestic SEO also. Monitoring links with ALM on a daily basis is good for spotting new link oppurtunities and getting a feel for what your competition is doing though. Perhaps that may be considered a little obsessive however

[RyanKent]

I took a look at the ALM site and it seems like a helpful tool. I am disappointed they do not offer any form of free trial.

[heatherrobinson]

Hi SaraSEO

Have you looked at http://www.linkstant.com/?

Although I've not used it myself, it was recommended at SearchLove Conf last year and can apparently alert you to new links via email/SMS immediately.

Hope it's useful.

[SEO-Doctor]

You could also look at cognitiveSEO.

I wouldn't worry about them because they will be impossible to undo.

[willcritchlow]

Note that linkstant works by detecting new referrers so only finds links that people actually click on which is relatively unlikely to include any of the low quality links the OP is worried about.

[JaspalX]

ALM gives you a 30 day free trial - you might need to download their AWR product which includes ALM.  It's here http://www.advancedlinkmanager.com/download.html

BTW, I'm linking AWR, not so sure about ALM

[RyanKent]

Thanks for the link Jassy!

Do you use ALM? If so, can you share any feedback based on your experience? Would you recommend the tool?