I want to start out the OpenLinkGraph introduction by showing you the current web-frontend. When you type-in the domain you want to query, we will show you a summary-page for that domain. Here, we want to give you a quick but informative outline of the domain's backlink-profile. We want you to be able to get a feel for the domain in just a few seconds. Up top, we have the most important metrics: total amount of all links found as well as the respective amount of different host-names, domains, IP-addresses as well as networks they link to. With some experience, you will be able to use these values as well as their relationship to each other, to quickly get a basic idea of where to place the domain. Further down, we will then show the domain's best-linked-to URLs as well as the most commonly used linktexts. These, as well as the graphs showing the link-source-countries and Top-Level-Domains, have their own separate pages where you can sort them freely and get additional information for each.

The most powerful section can be reached through the “Links”-tab: here, we list all the links we could find for the domain. Seeing how this usually leads to extremely long and confusing lists, we integrated a number of interesting filter-options. You are also able to precisely choose and filter the link-source as well as the link-target, each on its own page. This means that it takes only seconds to get results for queries such as “show all links for sistrix.de, that are connected to a URL on the www.seomoz.org/blog directory”. That is not to say that the other filter-options don't pack a punch themselves: a query for link-type (text-link, picture-link, 301, 302, canonical or meta-refresh), for example, can often bring to light some interesting insights into linkbuilding-strategies. Searching for link-text can expose risky link-buys, while filtering results by follow/nofollow, Top-Level-Domain as well as country-of-origin complete this section. It starts to get really interesting once you combine these filters and jointly use them. We designed the system in a way that you are able to use any number of filters at the same time. We will then sort all the links found through those filter-options and return them to you.

The other tabs in the OpenLinkGraph beta will show you summary evaluations on the hostnames for a domain that is being linked to, single URLs, link-texts, Top-Level-Domains as well as for countries. For all of these evaluations, we will show the entire amount of links returned, as well as the host-, domain-, IP- as well as net-pop. The returned lists are also sortable by these 5 criteria. So much for this short introduction into the current state of the OpenLinkGraph. The next blogpost will be about the size of the index as well as a comparison to other services.