This post will provide a complete walk through for how to start monitoring backlinks with Linkody and introduce each of the key features Linkody offers for monitoring your link building efforts. If you’re confused about how any of the elements of Linkody work, this is the crash course that will set you on the right track.
Add Your Site
The first thing you need to do is add your site to your account. To do this simply click on the ‘Manage Sites’ button and then you’ll see a button which says ‘Add Sites.’ Click on this and it will take you to a page where you can begin adding sites to your account. Note if you have more than one website, you can add them all at once here. If you want to add more than one, click the ‘multiple sites’ tab and add your home page URLs in the box, one per line. If you only have one site to track click on ‘Single Site’ and type in your URL, then click ‘Add Site.’ You can also associate a budget to each of your sites and keep your paid links cost in check (see Manage your paid links cost and budget with Linkody).
Finding Links
You’ll now be back at your main Sites page, and you’ll see any sites you’ve added listed here. The next step is to find the links currently pointing in at your sites. Click on the domain name you want to set up first, and then click on the ‘Discovered Links’ tab. The first time you do this Linkody will automatically go out and find a list of inbound links to your site. You can then go through and decide which of these links you want to monitor in order to get more information about your link profile.
Monitoring Backlinks
Once the link harvesting has finished, you can start monitoring backlinks. To monitor all the links Linkody has found, just click the blue ‘Monitor all links’ button. Otherwise, you can manually go through the list and click the ‘monitor’ text link at the right hand side beside each of the links to choose individually, or use the checkboxes on the left hand side to cherry-pick the links you want to monitor, then click the ‘Monitor’ button under ‘Monitor all selected links?’ once you’re ready to continue.
Immediately at this point Linkody will tell you which of your links are follow and nofollow, and where there are site errors on pages linking to you. You can use this info to start following up on link partners who aren’t keeping up their side of the deal or who have given you nofollow links when they weren’t supposed to.
Manually Adding Existing or Expected Links
You can add URLs where you have a link or you are expecting a link to show up in future (for instance, a page where a link partner has promised to add your link). This saves you from having to manually check when link partners make your links live – Linkody does the work for you (see How to use Linkody’s prospect links feature and save time).
Tagging Links
You can also add tags to links or groups of links. This feature can be used for whatever purposes you may have, to categorize your links or to keep track of which links are coming from different sources or strategies – for instance, you can tag links as coming from guest blogging, or article submissions, or trading with link partners.
Click the “tags” blue tab, you’ll see how many links have been tagged for each of your tags. Clicking on a tag will display the links that have this tag. This way you can filter and navigate easily between your link categories. You can also filter your links by entering a tag name in the “quick search” box in the “links” view.
Analyzing Your Links
This is where Linkody really comes into its own by allowing you to start monitoring backlinks and discover meaningful data that can help you optimize your link building efforts.
To start looking into Linkody’s analytics data, click on the blue ‘Analytics’ tab. This will take you to a page where initially you’ll see attribute and domain distribution information. Essentially on this page you can see:
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- the spread of different attributes used in your links (eg text vs image links)
- the percentage of follow vs nofollow links in your profile
- top-level domain distribution (for instance how many .com links, .net links, .org link and so on)
- domain distribution (how many domains are linking to you and how many links come from each domain)
This gives you a pretty good overview of which sites have contributed multiple links to your profile, or whether you have a large number of links coming from only a few domains (this is generally not a good thing for your SEO – you ideally want to have a wide variety of domains linking to you, not just a small handful sending hundreds of links each).
On this page you’ll also see a tab at the top that says ‘Anchor.’ Click on that and you’ll now see a whole new range of stats related to the anchor texts of your link profile.
First you’ll see the number of links using a particular anchor text along with the percentage of your total link profile that represents. The same information is shown in the graph format underneath. Below that you have a table showing single keyword distribution, as opposed to complete anchor text phrases. Again, this is also shown in a graph format underneath.
At a glance this lets you find out if your link profile is top-heavy towards a particular keyword, or if there’s room to focus on building more keyword anchor texts without getting into Google penalization territory (see Using Linkody to Monitor Anchor Text and Avoid Google Penalties).
You’ll probably start to notice from looking at this data that there’s a strong correlation between the keywords you’re ranking best for, and your most common anchor texts. This very clearly illustrates the relationship between good anchor text and achieving high rankings, and you’ll immediately be able to see where you need to focus on new anchor texts and keywords in order to improve for the keywords you’re currently struggling to rank well for.
Configuring the email reports
Linkody will send you email reports showing a summary of your links’ status per domain, if some of your prospect links went live, or if some of your links are expiring soon. You can configure at which interval (daily, weekly) you want to receive Linkody’s automatic reports and if you want to received them unconditionally or only if some of your links are not OK. Linkody will also send you email alerts when it discovers new links (you can disable this feature).
With these 2 kinds of email reports, you can sit back and relax, Linkody will let you know when you should take action, either because of a link having been removed, or because of a new link that you potentially want to monitor.