Majestic SEO announced yesterday on their blog that they are making their Site Explorer tool free for verified domains. If you’ve never used Majestic SEO before, their Site Explorer tool offers a quick and easy way for websites to view the backlinks to their site and assess the value of those links. Backlinks, as you may know, are one of the ways Google judges the relevancy of your site and can help determine where your site ranks on SERPs. In addition to making the Site Explorer tool free, Majestic SEO will be adding other features for users and making layout improvements.
There are several reasons why it’s important to know what sites are linking back to your domain. First of all, it makes you aware of who is linking to you and in essence, who is talking about you. For instance, if see that a major news site has recently linked to your domain, you can leverage this by talking about it or sharing on your social media profiles–in other words, you can benefit from the link while it is still news. On the flipside, you can also see poor, low-quality or spammy links that are linking to your site. A good indicator of a bad link might just be as simple as seeing where the link is coming from. If the domain linking to your site has no relevancy to your business, it might not be a good link.
Although Google Webmaster Tools also allows you to view backlinks under “Links to Your Site”, Majestic SEO’s Site Explorer tool goes a bit more in depth with additional data such as anchor text, crawl dates, redirections and other link types. Anchor text can be a quick indicator of spammy links, especially if the anchor text has no relevancy to your site. For instance, if you are a real estate domain and you see links to your website with anchor text such as “Pokemon” or “Cialis” you may have been hit with some spam or malware and will possibly want to look at getting those links removed. Majestic SEO also provides metrics such as Citation and Trust Flow that rate the quality of a link. A higher Citation and Trust Flow usually means the link is of better quality. In addition, Majestic SEO offers more in-depth reporting of backlinks over Google Webmaster Tools, although I suggest using both when analyzing your backlinks as GWT literally shows how Google is viewing your site.
Accessing this data is one thing but analyzing and making sense of what it all means is another. An SEO expert at our SEO firm can help you interpret the data and take the necessary steps to get your website on the right track.
Brian Carver is an Account Manager at SEOhaus. If you would like to stay up-to-date on all of the latest SEO industry news and tips, you can subscribe to our blog here.
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