Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool Introduces and explains the Backlink Healthcheck Tool In this video we introduce our free online Backlink Healthcheck tool, and show you how it can help you recover from a ranking penalty - or avoid one in the first place. We ve built a FREE tool to help you quickly and easily diagnose the health of your backlink network in less than 5 minutes. Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 1
Here s how it works... The first thing to do is to open up your copy of Market Samurai. For this example I m going to create a new project and as my seed keyword, I ll use keyword research. Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 2
Next I ll go to the SEO competition module and I ll come down here and click the Custom URL button. Here you can add in the url of your website. For this example I ll use our site www.noblesamurai.com Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 3
And you can see that Market Samurai has now pulled back the data associated with my custom URL. Now to begin our link network analysis, all I have to do is come over here and click on the small green arrow. Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 4
I can then come across here and click the Anchor Text Analysis button. Market Samurai then brings back a list of the top 1000 links that point back to your site, and most importantly, the anchor text of those links. Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 5
Now as you may recall, one of the most important triggers for the Penguin penalty appears to be the ratio of the different types of links that point to your site. So lets now take a look at how I can quickly figure out what my ratios actually are: The first thing I need to do is to come down here and click the Export Anchor Text Data button. And now I ll just click the Save button to export my data to my desktop. Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 6
And here you can see that Market Samurai has exported my backlink data as a CSV file to my desktop. Having exported my data I can now visit the site: http://www.marketsamurai.com/c/linkhealthcheck Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 7
And here is the Link Network Health Check up page. To get started all I have to do is click the Choose File button. And in this window I can now find and select a csv file that I ve exported from Market Samurai. Now our noblesamurai.com website WASN T hit hard by the Penguin Update, however, we ve been analysing a lot of sites that were hit, and you can see the exported csv files of these sites here. Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 8
So let me select one of these sites and now I can simply click the Upload button. The page will then upload your backlink data for processing. Now in the spirit of full disclosure, I should let you know that while these numbers and percentages are actual data from real world businesses, we have changed the urls and the keywords to protect the privacy of the business owners who allowed us to review their sites. The most important thing is that the link ratios ARE from real businesses and have not been altered in any way. When you upload your data, you ll notice that all your anchor text phrases are initially classified as generic links. Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 9
What you now need to do is go through this list and categorise each anchor text phrase as a brand link, a target link or a generic link. Just to recap: A brand link is a link that includes some form of your url, company name or product name. A target link is a link that contains specific keywords you ve been targeting And generic links are all those odd links that are leftover such as click here, or visit this website Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 10
etc. So let s work through this example. One way you can categorise your keywords is to go through this list one phrase at a time and select whether the anchor text is from a brand, target or generic link. This is OK if you don t have too many links to work through. However, if you have a large number of keywords, here s a quicker way to process your links. In this example, what I can do, is come across and select a particular keyword, for example Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 11
weight loss (1) and then select the Target radio button (2). You ll now notice that ALL of the phrases that had the word weight loss in them have been automatically categorised as target keywords. And for this website, this does a pretty good job of quickly selecting all the phrases that the site owner has been actively targeting. Now you may remember that the backlinks containing your URL and product names are brand links, so I ll quickly go through and identify my brand links. Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 12
And you can see that the odd links such as free and visit are left as generic links. So in just a couple of minutes, I ve been able to classify my links and now I can come up here and check my link ratios. This pie chart shows that of the 1000 highest authority backlinks to this site s homepage, 71% of the links have target keywords as anchor text, 25% of the links have branded anchor text and 4% of the links have generic anchor text. Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 13
After analysing a number of sites that were hit by Google s Penguin update, the one common factor that we ve been able to identify is that most of the sites that were hit had a high percentage of target keywords as anchor text. Based on our analysis we recommend that you should now be aiming for a target keyword anchor text percentage of around 20%, a brand percentage of around 40% and a generic percentage of around 40%. Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 14
So that s how to quickly and easily perform a link network health check on your site in less than 5 minutes. This analysis will show you the current state of your backlink network and help you see either why your site was hit by the Penguin update or how close you might be to activating a penguin penalty in the future. Noble Samurai's Backlink Healthcheck Tool - 15