Link Building Tools We Use at Distilled

Published on 11 March 2012 by willcritchlow in SEO

We recently gathered up a list of all the link building tools and resources we turn to daily across the company at Distilled. In the "TAGFEE" spirit of generosity, we thought it might be useful to others and we thought we'd share it here.

Link building is on our minds a lot of the time anyway, but even more so at this time of year in the run up to our Linklove link building conferences in London and Boston (it's in less than a month and yes, there's a discount for SEOmoz PRO members in the discount store, see below for more details or check out the trailer and a testimonial).

We have a variety of people helping our clients get more links in different ways and in different roles at Distilled. We have:

SEO consulting focussed on strategic changes
SEO execution and creative focussed on content creation and relationship building
Digital PR
Outreach

We also just have an ever-increasing number of people spread across three offices and eight timezones!

It's therefore inevitable that people will do things differently and use different resources. Over the years we've talked about a wide range of tools and resources in blog posts, at conferences and in client work - but the ones below are the ones that seem to have stuck around (or that we're trialling at the moment) and that came out in the canvassing of the team. In that spirit, I hope you'll find something of use here.

When we recently got our whole company together in London for the first time since Rob moved to Seattle to open our first US office in early 2010, part of the objective was to improve our processes and share knowledge across the company about how different consultants work. On one of the days we ran a (cheesily-named) ship-a-thon where we each aimed to "ship" things in a single day to improve Distilled. To give credit where it's due, Hannah decided to collate this list - I've just added some of the commentary and formatting. Thanks Hannah!

So, without further ado, here is the list of link building tools people in Distilled are using right now:

Data, Analysis and Research

Raven [Paid]

I'm sure you're all familiar with the Raven toolkit - it's great for reporting and analysis as well as having a bunch of tools to make your actual link building efforts more effective.

Excel [Paid]

Yep. The big X. You'd be amazed how many link building problems still need Excel.

Open Site Explorer [Paid & Free Versions]

Another tool that needs no introduction. Personally, between this and the moz toolbar, I cover off the majority of my day-to-day link data needs.

Ontolo [Paid & Free Versions]

I love what the Ontolo guys are doing with their toolset. This is one we are actively looking into to work out how we can get more out of it.

Majestic [Paid & Free Versions]

Just like you should always read two newspapers, you should always have two sources of link data. Majestic complements the SEOmoz data nicely. I most often find myself turning to Majestic data when I want to spot unnatural spikes in link growth, lower quality links (Majestic discards less of its crawl) or link growth comparisons over time.

Tom Anthony's Link Profile Tool [Free]

It's funny how little hacked-together tools can make it into your core toolset and especially in the competitive analysis (or pre-sales) phases, it's great to get a quick gut-check about a link profile.

JavaScript Bookmarklets [Free]

JavaScript bookmarklets FTW. Getting better at JS is one of those things I keep meaning to do, but in the meantime, why not just nick the ones Tom put together?

Citation Labs [Paid & Free Versions]

There are a bunch of useful tools here - go and have a poke around if you haven't already.

Link Diagnosis [Free]

Depending on how you're looking to slice and dice a link profile, linkdiagnosis gives you another view over the data.

Link Builder from Wordtracker [Paid & Free Versions]

When you're analysing link target data, there are a bunch of things you'd ideally like to automate and Wordtracker's tool makes a bunch of those manual steps easy.

My Blog Guest [Free]

Depending on the level of client and content available, we take a variety of approaches to finding guest post targets. My Blog Guest has a genuine community element to it and is definitely worth a look.

Blogger Link Up [Free]

Similar to My Blog Guest is another source for guest posts and guest post targets.

Haro [Free]

Although its effectiveness has declined as its popularity increased, HARO is still a good source for breaking into the PR game. Pro-tip: follow them on twitter to jump on breaking opportunities. Pro-pro-tip: build your own list of journalists on twitter to really take this to the next level.

Email and Outreach

Boomerang [Paid & Free Versions]

John wrote a post recently about gmail tools for outreachers that spells out in more detail why we love Boomerang and Rapportive (below).

Rapportive [Free]

The link building benefits of Rapportive are outlined above, but even if you're not building links day to day, if your job involves building relationships (and whose doesn't?) I strongly recommend using Rapportive. I'm great with faces and terrible with names, so it's good to see people's photo alongside their emails if nothing else.

Quick-n-dirty in-browser scraping

Multi Links for Firefox [Free]

Lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time rather than having to do them all individually.

Chrome Web Scraper [Free]

Scraper is a Google Chrome extension for getting data out of web pages and into spreadsheets. For all those times when it's not worth building a dedicated tool, but you need to grab a bunch of data off a page.

Chrome Link Clump [Free]

Lets you open, copy or bookmark multiple links at the same time in Chrome. Choose your browser, choose your poison.

Social networks

Twitter [Free]

It sounds stupidly basic, but we're increasingly seeing the social networks as link building tools. The power of private twitter lists in particular shouldn't be underestimated! I'm also a big fan of hacking around with the streaming API both to gauge "demand" (i.e. the number of people talking about different topics) but also for building quick monitoring and response tools.

Google+ [Free]

With the novelty of G+ and its high penetration in the world of webmasters and web marketers, it's a great way of building relationships with the "linkerati" at the moment.

LinkedIn [Paid & Free Versions]

Pro-tip with LinkedIn - get your executives and sales guys (or anyone in your organisation with a well-connected account) to trawl their account for the contacts you need. Bonus points if they'll let you work through it with them.

Facebook [Free]

Although of course links from Facebook are rarely even scraped / republished elsewhere (unlike Twitter), we've seen people increasingly using it for work (presumably as they get slightly more comfortable with the privacy options that G+ seems to have provoked). Relationship building and outreach can be surprisingly effective through Facebook with certain demographics.

CRM and contact databases

Buzzstream [Paid]

We are currently building our entire outreach CRM into Buzzstream. It's the most effective tool we've found for collaborating on shared contacts and keeping track of the links they give you.

GroupHigh [Paid]

Along with more PR-oriented solutions like Gorkana and Meltwater, it's sometimes nice to have access to blog data sources as well.

Advanced Search Operators [Free]

It's an old one, but still totally relevant (apart from the search engine naming!). Don't forget about the basics!

Google Docs Import XML [Free]

As we try out new search queries or ad-hoc tactics for clients, we need agile tools to go with them. Google Docs gives us one of the easiest platforms we've found for that kind of thing.

Followerwonk [Paid & Free Versions]

Mmmmm. Followerwonk. You've no doubt heard about it from all kinds of sources, but if you haven't checked it out yet, you should do that right now.

We Follow [Free]

WeFollow is a directory of Twitter users organized by interest. It's probably not rocket science to work out how to use that...

Blog Dash [Paid]

A permission-based blogger database. You get a different kind of opportunity out of this kind of directory, but you can also promote things in a different way when expectations have already been set.

Content promotion

Zemanta [Paid]

Zemanta suggests your content to relevant bloggers. We've made no secret of loving the concept and rating the service. We recently ran a meet-up in NYC in partnership with the Zemanta guys. For certain kinds of content and in the right niche, it's very effective.

Seeded Buzz [Paid & Free Versions]

Seeded Buzz allows you to promote your content to relevant bloggers.

Creative inspiration

Pinterest [Free]

The more we work on creative content, the more inspiration we need. Pinterest is great for this. When sharing internally, we use a combination of G+ (private) and Tumblr (public, great visual archive pages).

Creative Review [Free]

When I spoke to our creative team about where they get their inspiration from, the first two answers were CR and ffffound (I never know how many "f"s to put in that!).

ffffound [Free]

A great combination of on and offline inspiration.

Up and coming candidates

We're always trying out new tools and evaluating existing ones. Our current evaluation backlog (not all of which are for link building) looks like this:

Searchmetrics
Ginzametrics
Ahrefs
Toplocalsearch
Chartbeat
Niels Bosma's SEO tools for Excel
A variety of outreach / PR monitoring tools

What did we forget?

I'm sure there are both obvious tools that we should be using that we aren't and tools that we are using that we forgot to include in our list. Got some favourites? I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

If you'd like to learn more about how we (and other link building experts) go about things, we'd love to see you at Linklove.

We're running our dedicated link building conference in London on Friday 30th March (costing £449 - or £349 with the SEOmoz PRO discount) and in Boston on Monday 2nd April (costing $699 - or $549 with the SEOmoz PRO discount). You can check out the speakers and schedule here.

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SEO Monitoring Tools and Tips

Published on 22 January 2012 by willcritchlow in SEO

Posted by willcritchlow

In the real world, things go wrong. While we might all wish that everything we did was "fix once, stay fixed", that's rarely the case.

Things that were previously "not a problem"(TM) can become "a problem"(TM) rapidly for a variety of reasons:

someone changes something unrelated / without realising it would impact you or just screws up (e.g. deploying a staging version of robots.txt or an old version of a server config)
the world changes around you (there was a Google update named after a black and white animal a while back)
the technical gremlins gang up on you (server downtime, DDoS etc.)

In all of these cases, you'd rather know about the issue sooner rather than later because in most of them your ability to minimise the resulting issues declines rapidly as time passes (and in the remaining cases, you still want to know before your boss / client).

While many of us have come round to the idea that we should be making recommendations in these areas, we are too often still creating spectacularly non-actionable advice like:

make sure you have great uptime
make sure your site is quick

Today, I want to give you three pieces of directly actionable advice that you can start doing for your own site and your key clients immediately that will help you spot problems early, avoid knock-on indexing issues and quickly get alerted to bad deploys that could hurt your search performance.

#1 Traffic drops

Google Analytics has a feature that spots significant changes in traffic or traffic profile. It can also alert you. The first of these features is called "intelligence" and the second "intelligence alerts".

Rather than rehash old advice, I'll simply link to the two best posts I've read on the subject:

Here on SEOmoz by Rebecca Lehmann - 7 essential google intelligence custom alerts
Over on Blueglass by Annie Cushing - stay alert with google analytics

This is the simplest of all the recommendations to implement and is also the most holistic in the sense that it can alert you to traffic drops of all kinds. The downside of course is that you're measuring symptoms not causes so you (a) have to wait for causes to create symptoms rather than being alerted to the problem and (b) get an alert about the symptom rather than the cause and have to start detective work before paging the person who can fix it.

#2 Uptime monitoring

It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to realise that SEO is dependent on your website. And not only on how you optimise your site, but also on it being available.

While for larger clients, it shouldn't be your job to alert someone if their website goes down, it does no harm to know and for smaller clients there is every chance you'd be adding significant value by keeping an eye on these things.

I have both good and bad reasons for knowing a lot about server monitoring:

the good: we made a small investment in Server Density in May last year (and scored our only link from Techcrunch in the process)
the bad: we've been more enthusiastic users of our portfolio company's services than we might have hoped - some annoying server issues have resulted in more downtime for distilled.net than I care to think about. To add insult to injury, we managed to get ourselves hit with a DDoS attack last week (see speed chart below)

There are three main elements you might want to monitor:

Pure availability (including response code)
Server load and performance
Response speed / page load time

Website availability

There are two services I recommend here:

Pingdom's free service monitors the availability and response time of your site
Server Density's paid service provides more granular alerting and graphing as well as tying it together with your server performance monitoring

Here's what the Server Density dashboard looks like:

And here is the response time graph from pingdom:

You can see the spike in response time during the DDoS attack and the lower average response time over the last few days after we implemented cloudflare

Incidentally, you may not have noticed (it had passed me by until Mike gave me the heads-up the other day) that Google rolled out site speed to all analytics accounts without the previously required change to the GA snippet so you can get some of this data from your GA account now - here's the technical breakdown from some of Distilled's pages:

Site speed in GA

#3 Robot exclusion protocols, status codes

This was the most ambitious of my ideas for SEO monitoring. It came out of a real client issue. A major client was rolling out a new website and managed to deploy an old / staging version of robots.txt on a Saturday morning (continuous integration FTW). It was essentially luck that the SEO running the project was all over it, spotted it quickly, called the key contact and got it rolled back before it did any lasting harm. We had a debrief the following week where we discussed how we could get alerted to this kind of thing automatically.

I went to David Mytton, the founder of Server Density and asked him if he could build some features in for you lot to alert when this kind of thing happens - if we accidentally noindex our live site or block it in robots.txt. He came up with this ingenious solution that uses functionality already present in their core platform:

Monitoring for any change to robots.txt

First create a service to monitor robots.txt - here's ours:

Monitor robots.txt with server density

Then create an alert to tell you if the MD5 hash of the contents of robots.txt changes (see a definition of MD5 here):

robots md5 alert

If you copy and paste the contents of your robots.txt into an MD5 generator you get a string of gobbledegook (ours is "15403cbc6e028c0ec46a5dd9fffb9196"). What this alert is doing is monitoring for any change to our robots.txt so if we deploy a new version I will get an alert by email and push notification to my phone. Wouldn't it be nice to get alerted in this way if a client or dev team pushed an update to robots.txt without telling you?

Spotting the inclusion of no-index meta tags

In much the same way, you can create alerts for specific strings of text found on specific pages - I've chosen to get an alert if the string "noindex" is found in the HTML of the Distilled homepage. If we ever deployed a staging version or flipped a setting in a wordpress plugin, I'd get a push notification:

Server Density homepage noindex monitoring

Doing this kind of monitoring is essentially free to me because we are already using Server Density to monitor the health of our servers so it's no extra effort to monitor checksums and the presence / absence of specific strings.

#4 Bonus - why stop there?

Check out all the stuff that etsy monitor and have alerts for. If you have a team that can build the platform / infrastructure, then there are almost unlimited things you could monitor for and alert about. Here are some ideas to get you started:

status codes - 404 vs 301 vs 302 vs 500 etc.
changes in conversion rates / cart abandonment
bot behaviour - crawling patterns etc - given how disproportionately interested I was in the simple "pages crawled" visualisation available in cloudflare (see below - who'd have guessed we get crawled more by Yandex than Google?), I feel there is a lot more that could be done here:

Cloudflare crawl stats

PS - today is the last day for early bird discounts on our Linklove conferences in London and Boston at the end of March / beginning of April. (There's also a sign-up form on that page if you want to make sure you always hear about upcoming conferences and offers). I hope to see many of you there.

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