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Understand Link Building and Your Competitors with LinkResearchTools

Understand Link Building and Your Competitors with LinkResearchTools

This is a sponsored post.

Well-known SEO toolkit grows up to 15 tools.

It’s only been three months since our last review of the Link Research Tools back in early December 2011 when Yahoo Site Explorer was switched off and they presented a more than convenient replacement for Yahoo Site Explorer.

The enormous growth of Christoph C. Cemper’s LinkResearchTools since then made me take another look at their latest features.

Time for Link Research?

As you all know search engine optimization is going far beyond pure link building. To achieve good rankings you have to mess with a lot of things. While choosing the best keywords might be a tough challenge on its own, nowadays you should do a smart competitive analysis for every niche. Only then can you leverage your time and budget in the right way. But who really has time for that when he should be building links like crazy?

The results in search engines depend on several factors such as the language, the relevant keywords, the link distribution across link types, anchor text, domain endings (TLDs), countries and so much more. Therefore it’s impossible to make a “general” statement about the perfect link profile as you can read it echoed across many blogs and publications.

Every niche, country and language follows a distinct mixture of ranking factors and rules. It’s even possible that the link profile of a certain niche differs itself from other niche relevant topics – depending on the keyword.

In order to avoid penalties by the search engines and achieve better rankings you have to build the most “natural” link profile. But what is natural? What looks “natural” in the one niche is “overdone” in the other, and vice versa. You can only find out by researching your competition.

The folks at CEMPER.COM have released a great toolset and presented ongoing improvements and new tools in their LinkResearchTools suite for the last 3 years now. They have extremely stirred up the market. I must confess that their pace and quality of the new tools surpasses all my expectations.

So let’s have a look at their latest tools:

Quick Domain Compare

The Quick Domain Compare tool allows you to compare up to 5 domains with a preset of various SEO metrics.

Like the Quick Backlinks tool, this gives you a quick overview on a set of domains – be it to understand which (expired) domain to buy, or where to acquire links from. I just started the QDC Tool and was stunned as the report came back instantaneously. You have to love the new styling, everything there you need for a quick check.

For every domain the Quick Domain Compare Tool comes up with these metrics:

  • POWER metric (a new metric – as you guys might know from my QBL review)
  • Google PageRank
  • Alexa Rank
  • Theme of a Domain
  • The country in which each domain is hosted
  • Type of a Site
  • How many domains linking to your site (Domain Popularity as well as Class C Popularity)
  • General number of backlinks to your domain (as well as backlinks of .EDU and .GOV domains)

 

All this data is supplemented with a total score and displayed in a fancy scorecard. The strongest domain is supported by a good looking highlighting which allows you to immediately see the best domain.

The tool provides additional shortcuts to start other relevant tools right inside the report that makes using the tool and further research even easier. Additionally they implemented a few bookmarklets which allows you to start the QDC and others right off your browser bar.

Competitive Link Velocity

As mentioned before, a huge part of the link building process is understanding your competition. The Competitive Link Velocity (short CLV) allows you to evaluate what your competitors were doing in link building for the last 2 years. By clicking the “Find Competitors” link, the tool automatically generates your top 10 competitors for a certain keyword.

This new Competitive Link Velocity tool is as fancy as it could be. It provides you with a graphical heat map which displays the link building process i.e. the growth of links for any domain you specify over time. Just like the QBL and QDC tools, this tool creates a complete report within a second or two.

For every domain the CLV comes up with a nice overview where the overall link growth is shown and 6 different others depending on which metric you’d like to look after. You have views for Domain Popularity and five other common link types namely text-, image-, NoFollow-, deleted- and redirect-links.

All link types are shown in colored variations, depending on the number of grown links. The monthly separated view allows you to compare your domain against your competitors and learn how a natural link profile should look like.

 

Recurring Reports & Email Notifications

If you’d like to get a monthly status on your further process in link building or want to know how if your PageRank has increased, you would have to run your QDC & CLV reports on a monthly basis. To help its users not having to do so manually this new version includes a feature to automatically re-runs your reports on a weekly or monthly basis.

 

Comparing your domain or link growth over time is an important factor. This feature allows you to simply one-time set up your reports and you’ll get automatically informed by mail when your report is finished.

All of the now 15 tools in the LinkResearchTools suite have it, so it’s easy as cake to compare changes in your backlink profile or watch the results of your link building over time. You can basically automate all your link based reports.

Link Check Tool

This sounds a bit boring, I know. In general, a link check tool has to check an incoming link if it still links to its specified target page. We all know these creepy low budget link check tools out there but I think the Link Check Tool cannot be compared to any of them because it goes far beyond a simple link check.

The Link Check Tool offers 2 different modes which allow you to check your source link against the appropriate target or any combination of source and target – the so called fuzzy link checking mode. Additionally the tool allows you to choose every covered metric of the LRT toolkit. This means for each of your links you get up to 53 SEO metrics.

Another great feature might be the Excel import, which integrates your full link lists without extra customization. The additional columns of your link lists are presented in a different color directly in your reports, so you can import your spreadsheets right away, and get them back again.

The interface is divided into a graphical and a table based layout. Whereas the first part allows you to have a quick look at your found links and selected metrics the detail table provides a detailed overview for every metric at a glance.

The Link Check Tool works best when you combine it with the recurring report function, which automates your complete process.

If you would like to know more about the awesome set of tools I’ll recommend you to visit the vendor’s site. Their tool pages are easy to follow and support is great getting back to questions.

Want to try it?

Did I mention that Christoph just sent out a link for a free Superhero account of its toolkit? This is the best account, just topped by the premium Enterprise account. Today the trial page is still reachable and definitely worth a try. Don’t you think so?

http://cemper.co/trial

Make sure you get an account and let me know what you think!
I’d love to hear your feedback on these innovations.

Category SEO Sponsored Posts
Laura Cruz Freelance Writer | Consultant at Laura Cruz Speaks

Laura Cruz is a freelance writer, speaker and online marketing consultant. She has been in the affiliate marketing world for ...

Understand Link Building and Your Competitors with LinkResearchTools

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