Published on June 10, 2012 Ways to find links – Welcome back Yahoo! Site Explorer
If you are not using Bing Webmaster Tools, Microsoft’s latest update is a reason you should be. The popular and useful link-finding tool previously known as Yahoo! Site Explorer has come back in the form of Bing Link Explorer.
It’s a powerful tool that is useful for finding out the links that your own site has, as well as the ones of competitors. Until this tool was added a few days ago there were few ways to find this information for free – you had to rely on tools that were either restricted or expensive.
Why does your online shop need a link finding tool?
If you want your website to rank well in the search engines, the recent changes by search engines to shut out certain ‘optimisation’ techniques do not change the two fundamentals of what makes a site rank well: quality, relevant content and high quality, authority links. There has been a lot of talk lately about whether search engine optimisation is “dead” as a result of recent updates by Google, and signals by Microsoft (who run Bing) that they too are looking at ways of preventing sites from manipulating their results. It’s clear that search engine optimisation is not dead, but what counts for building your reputation has changed and building your online profile requires more effort than ever.
Links continue to be a source of votes for search engines, but it’s not quantity of links that matter or even the quantity of high ranking links. It’s the quality of relevant, authority links that will determine the success of yours or your competitor’s site.
If you want to understand how your site ranks where it does or how your competitors rank where they do, then understanding the link profile is absolutely essential to your success.
Bing Link Explorer
Through Bing’s latest Webmaster Tools update, Microsoft have given business owners a useful free tool to help you do this. This invaluable tool is called Link Explorer.
It’s a welcome return of a tool that was previously well known in marketing industry as Yahoo! Site Explorer but discontinued (to the dismay of marketers around the world) after the agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo!
The tool lets you not only search the backlinks of your own websites but you can put in the websites of any of your competitors and do a search on their links. Doing this for competitors that rank better than you on search terms gives you insight into where links to their site come from. You can then establish a profile of your target competitors and where they are building their links (and how).
Your link profile
What counts for search engines is a natural link profile. This means that the sources of your links should come from different places and not just be a whole lot of paid links from one type of place. For example, if all the links to your site come from “profiles” that you or a freelancer created for your site in irrelevant forums that you do not participate in, then the search engines will value these links back to your site very little.
If you have some profile links in forums relevant to your industry (that you participate in and have posted a number of posts to), have links from people’s blogs, links from social media sites where people have recommended you, have links from quality (Australian) directories where your business is listed, have links from industry authorities or recommendations from partner sites, and guest posts on blog sites in your industry then your link profile is more natural.
What also counts is the words that are used to link to your site (this is called “anchor text”). If all of the words that link to your site are all the same, then this isn’t very natural and usually viewed as an attempt to manipulate the search engines. Those links will therefore not count as strongly in calculating your link profile “popularity” score.
How to get into it
Let’s take a look around. To find Link Explorer,first sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools. If you don’t already have an account with Bing Webmaster Tools, go to www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster and click on the link that says “Open a Webmaster Tools Account”. This takes you to a screen where you can sign up with Webmaster Tools for your site.
You will need to add your own website and verify that you own it before you can use the tools and get into Link Explorer. If you have an Ozcart shopping cart website, you can do this by going to the Setup menu in your store admin and Search Engines, and then choosing Bing Webmaster Tools. It’s a matter of copying and pasting part of the “meta” tag that Bing asks you to use into the admin, saving the settings and verifying in Bing. Just a couple of minutes work.
Once you have verified your site, you can go into Bing Webmaster Tools and into the site that you are managing. This gives you a menu down the left hand side of the screen. One of the items under that is Diagnostic Tools, and Link Explorer is shown as a menu under that. See the screenshot below.
What you can find out from the Bing Link Explorer
When you use the Link Explorer you can put in a URL (it can be the site you are managing or one of your competitor’s sites) and it will tell you the list of the links to that website that have been indexed by Bing. It will also show you the indexed title of that particular page as well.
You can also filter your list by putting in a particular keyword phrase and see the links to that site that include that text in their titles, important in determining if too many links to your site use the same text or text that is not relevant to what you sell.
There is still a place for paid tools which will give you a much richer set of analysis about links to help you measure the quality of those links. But for a simple tool that is free, Bing Link Explorer is an invaluable tool that you should not ignore. Along with other powerful new features in Bing Webmaster Tools, it gives you more information to help your marketing efforts.
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Ozcart has been in business since 2006 and is an online, hosted shopping cart that you can use for your current or new online store. We offer so many features for the same low price. In fact, we are addicted to adding new ones to ensure that we remain one of the best choices for a shopping cart.
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