5 Tools to Visualize Page Outlinking Tactics

August 27th, 2008 by Ann Smarty | 16 Comments

I love playing with visualizing tools because they allow to see what you might have missed exploring a table or a graph. This time I have compiled the list of tools that show various outlinking tactics and characteristics.

1. SearchStatus or SEOquake FireFox extensions both visualize on-page nofollow attribute usage by highlighting (or striking through) links that use rel=”nofollow”:

on-page nofollow usage

2. Iwebtool Visual PageRank (as the name suggests) visualizes on-page internal toolbar PageRank distribution plus it shows external links and links using rel=”nofollow”:

visualize pagerank

3. Web Developer FireFox extension allows to visualize each link full address and properties and also (linked) images alternative text:

Web developer - link address

4. Link Evaluator (or a similar one: LinkChecker) visualizes each linked page header status (to allow you find broken links for example):

visualize header status

5. Crazy Egg visualizes on-page links click-through by showing a “heat map” (overall on-page links popularity) or a “confetti” (on-page link popularity depending on the referral):

Crazy Egg - Confetti

Comments

16 responses so far ↓

Darrell Long on Aug 27, 2008 at 9:10 am

Ann, great post on tools for link building tactics, i really liked the one that allows you to visualize each link full address and properties.
Pablo Palatnik on Aug 27, 2008 at 1:07 pm

Where is the “no follow” link stuff displayed in the SEOQuake plugin?

Do you have to activate it somehow, I just downloaded it and I dont see it.
Ann Smarty on Aug 27, 2008 at 1:49 pm

@Pablo: right-click on the SEOquake icon in your statusbar => put a tick at “line through nofollow”
WebSite Design Orange County on Aug 27, 2008 at 6:23 pm

Double check the visual PR you get from iwebtool, if you compare them to the PR results from the multiple Google data centers sometimes they don’t match.
Chaitanya Patel on Aug 27, 2008 at 10:58 pm

Pablo: Just click on external link tab in your seoquake toolbar, it will open a new window and will collect information of all the links, and will show attribute within the next column of the link.
SEO/SEM blog on Aug 28, 2008 at 2:09 am

SEOpen does the same thing highlighting nofollow links + some much more ;)
Eurodipity on Aug 28, 2008 at 3:01 am

Muy interesante este post, lo añadire a mis marcadores.Salu2
ScratchWeasel on Aug 28, 2008 at 4:15 am

Nice post Ann,

I must say that my favourite link visualising extensions for Firefox are; a) SEO Quake toolbar with the clickable ‘Ext. links’ button which opens a new tab to show properties of all outbound links from that page and, b) Web Developer toolbar with its ‘outline custom elements’ function, it really helps you visualise exactly what you’re interested in when assessing a page.

Once extension I’ve really been missing since Firefox 3.* was released is the Link Counter extension, I found this easiest for a quick glance at link properties of a page.
sampat on Aug 28, 2008 at 1:16 pm

visualise exactly what you’re interested in when assessing a page.
Tanner Christensen on Aug 28, 2008 at 1:47 pm

I have been using CrazyEgg for about a year now and I recommend it strongly. They have a free version that works great, and being able to visualize where your users are clicking/coming from/searching for is extremely valuable info.

Though, I have found that CrazyEgg doesn’t always show all visitors to the site.
Toscana - Tirreno on Aug 29, 2008 at 2:34 am

There is also the RankQuest Toolbar that makes this job efficiently.
Søgemaskineoptimering on Aug 29, 2008 at 4:45 am

Great Article once again Ann! Hope the Iwebtool Visual PageRank tool will be made into a FireFox plugin at some point though.
Nick Stamoulis on Aug 29, 2008 at 6:03 am

This is a wonderful tool and great find! I think we are all getting a little “no follow” crazy!
Jonathan on Aug 29, 2008 at 10:11 am

Crazy Egg is great as long as you don’t have a lot of Javascript or Ajax on your pages. I think this will become a bigger and bigger problem for these tools as the web becomes more application and less pages.
Esther Checa on Sep 2, 2008 at 3:33 am

Thank you very much for your seo tools articles, really usefull!
Richard Vanderhurst on May 18, 2009 at 8:45 pm

Nice Post! I always use search status and SEO quake these tools gives me a lot of idea about the site. I will to add the other tools that you’ve mentioned on this post. Thanks!