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Why SEO link tools suck

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 1, 2007 in Search Engine Optimization

SEOs are easy to please. All you have to do is create a tool that performs a useless “link:” search on Yahoo! and grabs the Toolbar PageRank from Google and SEOs are happy.

What they think they learn from Yahoo!’s reported backlink data, I don’t know. They certainly don’t learn anything useful for search engine optimization.

I’ve seen tools that grab title tags from destination pages for forward links (but they don’t report the outbound anchor text).

I’ve seen tools that report broken outbound links (but they don’t report working outbound links). I tested one popular forward link checking tool this morning and it reported a 404 result for a page that is working just fine.

I’ve seen tools that grab one page from a site and list its outbound links.

But when you try to export the data these tools make you jump through a lot of hoops.

Sometimes I just want a printed report (that I can print to a .TXT file) that says, “Here is your page, here are the outbound links on the page, here is the anchor text for those links”. I don’t want to see Toolbar PR. I don’t want to see whether the tool thinks the URLs are dead.

Sometimes I want to export a list of links to a spreadsheet. Then I’d like to see: linking page URL, outbound link URL, outbound link anchor text.

Sometimes I’d like to have a tool run through a directory/folder tree on my hard drive and grab every page that ends in “.html”, “.htm”, “.shtml”, “.htm”, etc. and parse them and tell me: linking page name, outbound link URL, outbound link anchor text.

It would be nice if the tool limited its link extraction to sections of the page that are only likely to be found by visitors (people and search engine robots). I don’t want to see links to CSS files in my HEAD section. I don’t want to see links I may have commented out for whatever reason.

It would be great if the links to images or embedded objects were excluded or separated from the links to HTML pages.

I’d like to be able to specify what I think an HTML page is.

I DON’T want the link checking tool to crawl my Web site (it pisses me off every time someone crawls Xenite.Org just to see what I do with my main Web site). I DON’T want the link checking tool to crawl other people’s Web sites. But I could live with a tool that crawls my site IF AND ONLY IF I CAN PROVE TO IT THAT IT’S MY SITE.

SEO link tools tell you stupid nonsense like the IP address where the link is located, whether the destination page links back (sorry, but if that’s how you look for reciprocal links, that’s pretty lame), and whether the link is NOFOLLOWed (I don’t care).

Except for NOFOLLOW, no one needs to know any of this stuff for search engine optimization. The NOFOLLOW knowledge is helpful to a certain extent but I’d rather the tool just say, “No outbound links on page”, “no NOFOLLOWed links on page”, or “all outbound links are NOFOLLOWed”. Don’t clutter my pretty simple link report with itemized crap that no one can make use of.

So what if one link on a page is NOFOLLOWed? That tells you nothing — ABSO-FRICKIN-LUTELY NOTHING — useful for search engine optimization. If you want to sit there and analyze someone’s personality on the basis of whether they NOFOLLOWed a single link, that’s your problem. Please don’t waste my time with useless junk information in your SEO tool.

There are a lot of free SEO tools that tell you nothing useful. I have yet to find even one tool — even for sale — that tells me all I need to know about links. I don’t ask for much: just page name/location, outbound link, outbound link anchor text.

Is that too much to ask for?

I want an export feature that doesn’t make me click on crap and select this and select that. Just give me everything so I can delete columns in my spreadsheet.

I want the ability to see which pages on a site have outbound links (GREEN) and which pages on a site don’t have outbound links (RED). Other people may want the ability to change the pretty color coding scheme, maybe the ability to put icons on the screen, and they will probably nag you for the stupid useless Toolbar PR.

At the very least, make the default settings EXCLUDE reporting Toolbar PR and inbound links. At the worst make it configurable so I can turn that crap off and ignore it so I can get some real analysis done.

If you’re going to insist on putting backlink unfunctionality into the tool (thus limiting its usefulness for search engine optimization), LET ME PICK THE FRIGGIN SEARCH ENGINES AND QUERIES. That’s right. I don’t want to see Yahoo!’s bogus link data. I don’t want to see Google’s randomized link data. But if I have to see that crap, LET ME TURN IT OFF. LET ME PICK A DIFFERENT SEARCH TOOL. LET ME PICK THE QUERY.

Make it configurable.

I will use this blog to write a glowing review and blazing endorsement for any real link checking tool that anyone cares to create. So far, I’ve only found one that comes close. I ain’t telling you which one it is. We’re still evaluating it but on first pass it makes a HUGE impression.

It may or may not clutter the results with useless crap like Toolbar PR, Yahoo! backlinks, etc. At the very least, it is telling us things we want to know but I want to know I can trust the data. So I’m not endorsing it.

Anyone who wants to mention a tool in the comments is welcome to. We will disable the links. All I want are domain names. But please spare me all the well-known SEO link checking tools. I’ve tried them. They all suck. ALL OF THEM.

If you would like to contact me privately, you may use my contact Michael Martinez form on Xenite.Org. Be warned that the contact form attempts to filter out link requests (and I feel it does a pretty good job). I strongly urge you NOT to include specific URLs in your first message to me. Just tell me the name of the tool, whether you wrote it, and why you like it.

If I can find the tool in a search engine, I’ll give it a try.

If I cannot find the tool in a search engine, you don’t know enough about SEO to be giving me advice on which SEO tools to try out.

Considering all the above, any tool suggestions will be appreciated. I’d really like to see people get their heads out of the Toolbars and create some really decent, useful SEO analytical tools.