Toolbox: Backlinks

Ever since Google started to make backlinks a substantial factor for ranking, the majority of the functional SEO-work is the organization of new, as well as the optimization of existing backlinks. The major problem with this is that while you have a rather accurate depiction of your own backlinks available through the Google-webmastertools, the same is not the case for competing websites. A few month ago I already came up with some thoughts about on problem under the headline "Problems of the backlink-analysis”. As I mentioned then, we operate our own backlinkindex to broaden the fundamental data, compared to the usual backlink checkers which will contain 1.000 Yahoo results at best.

The new version of our backlink-checker draws on this index and uses it as well as the usual Yahoo-data. To clarify just how much data becomes available, here the amount of backlinks that the tool is able to find for a few well known domains:

Domain	Anzahl Links	Domain-Popularity
wikipedia.org	81.030	19.898
amazon.de	68.398	10.066
spiegel.de	46.672	8.918
heise.de	36.774	8.340
sistrix.com	2.812	680

Just so this is not only just dull theory, I made the CSV-export for the domain “spiegel.de” available online: backlinks_spiegel.de_2008-10-19.csv (6,4MB)

With this data, which is noticeably broader and more comprehensive, we are able to do a lot of interesting things: a “hubfinder”, which checks the backlinks of the top-10 or top-20 domains for a keyword with Google to find common backlinks, only starts to be fun this way. The association of links to their IP-addresses, which shows the geographical source, is often interesting and can reveal some trickeries. During the beta test, Löwenherz from Seo-Scene suggested to compare the backlinks for two sites to find potential backlink-sources which are already in use by the competition but have been overlooked by yourself – which is a very interesting approach, that I am sure I will implement.