Analyse your backlinks with Backlink Watch

Steven Chappell posted about a useful backlink checking website yesterday called Backlink Watch. The site comes across as quite spammy as there are a lot of text links on the home page and a lot of banner ads at the top of the results page. And due to the volume of backlinks it gives you information on, it can take quite a while to load up the results.

However, I would still recommend checking Backlink Watch out. There are lots of backlink checkers on the web however BackLink Watch lists some info that most other online checkers do not (most good SEO scripts do provide this info though).

After you enter your URL it brings up the results page, which displays the total number of backlinks to your blog near the top. It then lists information about 1,000 backlinks.

Each backlink listing shows you :

• Backlink URL – The URL of the page linking to you.
• Anchor Text – The anchor text or image which was used to link to your blog.
• PageRank – The PR of the page linking to you.
• OBL – The number of outbound links on the page which is linking to you.
• Flag – Any tag which has been added to the link to your blog.

It doesn’t seem to work perfectly though. In my report no PR figures were displayed. Also, out of the 25,000 backlinks BloggingTips apparently has, only 1000 were displayed. However, it isn’t clear which 1000 baclinks were chosen and why. Many of the links dated back to 2007 which makes me question how useful this is.

Nevertheless, the service does provide some interesting information. For example, at a glance you can see that the sites with more outbound links are sending you less PR than other websites which have the same PageRank, as they are spreading more PR juice around

I also think the flag column is useful as you can quickly see which links have the nofollow tag added to them. All of the nofollow links in my report came from comments on other blogs but this could be useful for catching out stingy linkers (ie. you link to them and they link back using the nofollow tag in the link).

Google Analytics is clearly a much better and much more reliable way of checking who is linking to you but with this site you can also check the backlinks of your competition and see what terms are being used to link to them. So it could explain why they are linking above you on competitive keywords in the SERP’s.

As I mentioned before, the report seems to be listing much older links for me, which is why I’m not raving about this as much as I think I should. However, it’s a free website and provides some useful info about your blog so I recommend checking it out.

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