Backlink is also called Inbound Link (it seems to be called "backlink" in Chinese). Since the blog was launched, there have been two articles mentioning its importance: How Search Engines determine the ranking of the website and Search Engine Calculation of Google Penguin. It is certainly beneficial to understand this concept, but if you are doing SEO analysis for your own company or want to go deeper, you need a tool to help you analyze which websites link to you, who they are, whether they are good links or bad links...etc. This article will introduce a tool developed by a company I like very much, Moz:Open Site Explorer!
Introducing OSE:
OSE allows users to analyze:How many backlinks are there for your company (or your opponent’s website)? Which websites these backlinks come from? Is the authority of these websites high or low? What is the anchor text of the link?...something like that. The method of use is also very simple. Just put the URL in and let it run and a bunch of data will pop up.
Open Site Explorer has a trial version and a paid version. If you just want to learn about this tool, although the trial version can only see the first 20 data (ex. backlinks), it is enough to give you an overview of its functions. The paid version allows you to see complete information. If you are interested in doing more research, you can register and get a one-month free trial. I just want to write an article to introduce it because the trial period is coming soon~
(As an aside, if you change your email address to register, you can use it for an additional 30 days. People who are doing internships in this field or have a small website can use this step. Just remember to cancel.)
Below I use TaiwaneseYiyou.com (follow) http://www.eztravel.com.tw/(nofollow) gives an example to show you how to analyze step by step.
Enter the website to be analyzed
Once you enter Open Site Explorer, you will see this very simple screen. Just enter the URL in the red circle and search.
digital interpretation
Next you will see a bunch of numbers as shown below
Authority
Authority is divided into page and domain. Domain is the score of the entire eztravel.com, and page is calculated based on each web page. In the example above, Page Authority calculates the score of the "home page" instead of the entire domain.
The domain of my blog is blogspot, a product of Google. The authority is naturally very high, with 93/100, but the page is digitalmktingnote.blogspot.com, with only 1/100...
Page Link Metrics
- Just Discovered represents new backlinks to this web page in the past 60 days.
- Established Links refers to the total number of links (6,641) from several different websites (237).
Spam Score
These are the 17 dangerous factors considered by Moz. They are a good indicator. If there are too many violations, it may be judged by Google as unnatural or intended to fabricate backlinks and be punished. You need to upgrade to Pro to see this. Here are a few examples:
- Thin Content: There is not much content in the website. If you use pictures or videos instead of text to tell readers what the website is about, you may have this warning, because search engines cannot fully interpret content other than text.
- Anchor Text Heavy Page: The entire web page or article is full of hyperlinks, which is as annoying as a bunch of hashtag FB posts.
- Site Link Diversity is Low: Most external links come from a few websites.
Filter
Next there are several categories, Target, Link Source, Link Type:
Target:
Use my article as an example. The website address is
http://digitalmktingnote.blogspot.com/2015/11/seo-backlinks-tool-open-site-explorer-ose.html
- this page: External link to this article
- this subdomain: Links to digitalmktingnote.blogspot.com/, may be external links to other articles
- this root domain: Connect to blogspot.com, other blogs are included in it
Link Source:
- all pages: includes the following two
- only external: only counts backlinks, links from websites under other domains
- only internal: Links under the same domain, ex: Article A connects to Article B
Link Type:
options include link equity, no link equity, only 301, only 302 and the more familiar only follow, only nofollow. The main thing is to determine whether the link that the other party points to your website has passed the link juice. I will introduce those terms when I have the opportunity to study them in the future.
Inbound Links
Finally comes the main event. A lot of web pages will be listed below, including the other party's website name, Page Authority, Domain Authority, Anchor Text connected to Yiyou.com, etc.
There are a bunch of options to choose from on the left side of the screen, and you can find suitable information according to your research needs.
Just-Discovered
This option allows you to see new backlinks in the last 60 days.
I found that some of the webpages under this tab used to be articles from two or three years ago. It may be that the website was crawled again and was considered a new webpage. Although it is mixed with some old articles, you can still find out whether any media or blog mentioned eztravel here.
Top Pages
This option looks at which web page is the most popular in the same domain. At the same time, you can also see which web pages of the domain are normal (HTTP Status: 200) and which ones have problems (ex. 404 page not found).
The webpage with the second most inbound links on Yiyou.com is their privacy page, and there are many webpages with 4XX problems. It is probably because some expired active webpages have not been removed.
Anchor Text
Anchor Text can see what words are connected to Yiyou.com,"Yiyou.com", "Yiyou.com", "[no anchor text]" (picture), see if there is any chance to contact the author of the website or article, and ask them to change the anchor text to a keyword or brand name. If you suspect you are suffering from Penguin Penalty, you can also check to see if there is an Over Optimized problem.
Link Opportunity
There are two very good functions here. The first one is to see who mentioned your website but did not put a link. The same is to see if the author can be contacted. The following is an example of Yiyou.com. You can see that chinapost mentioned Yiyou.com several times but did not put a link to it.
The second one is to look at those articles that have links to your competitors' websites but not to yours. I compared Star Travel (startravel.com.tw) and Lion Travel (liontravel.com.tw) and found that there were 222 webpages that mentioned both of them but did not mention Yiyou.com (or they mentioned it but the link failed).
Conclusion:
Open Site Explorer is a really good tool and not too complicated. One thing that must be emphasized is that it is a third-party tool after all, and what Moz sees is not necessarily the same as what Google or Bing sees! The above information cannot be guaranteed to be 100% correct. For example, when I mentioned Yiyou.com earlier in this article, I hyperlinked it, but after several hours, Just Discovered did not detect that I had an external link to Yiyou.com.
However, I still hope that you have learned something from this article. Next time your boss asks you to do backlinks analysis, off-site SEO audit, or you want to see how your website performs, you won’t know where to start!
Keep exploring