Link Building Tool Box – Productivity on Steroids
Only after compiling this mega list, i realized how many tools i use on daily/weekly basis just for link building. I have mainly listed those tools which i use often and which are free to use. I keep adding/removing tools as i find better alternatives. If you think a tool is worth listing then please suggest it.
Note: We don’t accept paid inclusion
Use CTRL F + Search Term to find what you are looking for.
Link Building Menu
- Niche specific searches for link prospecting
- Data Scraping Tools for Link Prospecting
- Utility Linking Tools
- Twitter tools for link prospecting
- Facebook tools for link prospecting
- Linkedin tools for link prospecting
- Other Social Media Analytics tools which help in link prospecting
- Brand Monitoring tools for link prospecting
- RSS tools for link prospecting
- Q & A sites for building authority and link prospecting
- Other Link Prospecting Tools
- Tools for Link Building Outreach
- Backlinks Analysis Tools
Niche specific searches for link prospecting
- Alltop
- Best of the web blog directory
- Blogarama
- Blog Catalog
- Blog Dash - free tool to find bloggers in your niche. (paid version is also there)
- Blog Digger
- Blog Her (NEW)
- Blog Hints
- Blog Listing
- Blogio
- Bloggapedia
- Blogging Fusion
- Blog Search Engine
- Bloggeries
- Blogrolls - find other similar authoritative bloggers in a niche.
- Board Reader - search particular topics that are being discussed on message boards and forums.
- CrunchBase – search companies and employees’ profiles and contact details.
- Dmoz Search
- EatonWeb Blog directory
- Globe of blogs
- Google Blog Search
- Google News Search
- Google News Archive Search
- Icerocket Blog Search
- PostRank Blog Search – Bypass the login, use the search box to find blogs by topic & engagement metrics.
- Regator - curated blog directory.
- Technorati Search
- WordPress Tag Search - great tool to find niche specific wordpress blogs. http://en.wordpress.com/tag/[insert-your-keyword-here]/
- Yahoo Directory
- Yahoo News Search
…………………
Data Scraping Tools for Link Prospecting
- SERPs Redux bookmarklet - Scrape the organic search results from Google.com
- AutoPager – automatically loads next pages when you reach the end of a SERP esp. useful if you have a data separated over multiple pages that you want to scrape. Chrome extension. Firefox extension.
- Excel Plugin by Niels Bosma - Through this Plugin you can fetch several on-page elements from a URL or list of URLs like: Title tag, Meta description tag, Meta keywords tag, Meta robots tag, H1 tag, H2 tag, HTTP Header, Backlinks, Facebook likes etc.
- X-Path tutorial
- X-Pather - It is a firefbug extension used to quickly generate path expressions while browsing HTML and XML documents. Since X-Pather is a firebug extension, it means you first need to install firebug in order to use it.
- Scrapy - It is an an open source web scraping framework and is used to extract structured data from web pages & APIs. You need to know Python (a programming language) in order to use scrapy.
- Open Site Explorer - Scrape back links of an entire website.
- OBL Scraper+Contact Finder - scrape outbound links and contact details from a URL or URL list.
- Scraper - This chrome extension can scrape data from web pages and export it to Google docs.
……………….
Utility Linking Tools
- Backlink Builder
- Link Acquisition Assistant - returns 121 link acquisition queries
- Solo SEO
……………………
Twitter tools for link prospecting
- Advanced Twitter Search
- AnalyzeWords- Enter your Twitter name or the handle of a person to learn about his emotions, social styles, and the ways he thinks.
- Backtweets- tool to analyze any twitter profile.
- Followerwonk- search twitter bios and find people who share same interest. For e.g. you can determine the twitter profiles of event planners, SEOs, chiropractors etc.
- Free Twitter Follower Analytics in Excel
- Manage Fitter- find people you follow but are not following you. Lot of filter options.
- MentionMap – find people connected to influencers on twitter
- MuckRack – What are journalist talking about
- My Top Tweets – tool to find top tweets of a person
- Snap Bird - search the tweet history of any twitter profile.
- Topsy Social Analytics – search & compare how a blog/website performs on twitter.
- Tweetsheet – visualize the geographic impact of your tweets; show your best followers
- TwitterCounter - Through this tool you can graph the growth of any twitter profile over time. Good tool to find emerging influencers.
- Twitter Grader - check online influence of a twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded. Another tool to find emerging influencers.
- Twitter Reach – search for a URL, twitter name, phrase or hash tag to visualize the true reach of a tweet.
- Wefollow- tool to find people on twitter who are influential.
………………..
Facebook tools for link prospecting
- Facebook Insight - tool to find your influencers on facebook.
- Free Facebook Fan Page Analytics in Excel
- Free Facebook Competitive Analysis in Excel
- Facebook Search
- YourOpen Book - tool to search facebook updates.
…………………
Linkedin tools for link prospecting
- Linkedin Advanced Search
- Linkedin Advanced Answers Search
- Linkedin analytics for Businesses - tool to find your influencers on linkedin.
- Linkedin analytics for Individuals - tool to find your influencers on linkedin.
- Linkedin Search
Note: In order to fully utilise all the built-in analytics feature of Linkedin, you need to upgrade to Premium account of Linkedin
…………………..
Other Social Media Analytics tools which help in link prospecting
- Klout- klout Score measures online influence of a person on a scale of 1 to 100.
- PeerIndex - provides detailed analytics of your social stream.
- Sharedcount- track facebook (likes, shares, comments), tweets, Google +1s, diggs, linkedin shares, Google buzz and stumble upon of any page whether or not the page has sharing buttons installed.
- SiteTrail Analytics - get a quick snapshot of organic and social media presence of any website.
…………………..
Brand Monitoring tools for link prospecting
- Google Alerts- track brand mentions. Can also be used for link building.
- Hyper Alerts – send email reports of post and comments on a facebook fan page.
- Social Mention - determine what people talk about you on social media. You can also determine sentiments (positive, negative or neutral) and who are your top users etc.
- Topsy- another tool to find out what people are talking about you or your brand on social media.
- Twilert – works the same way as Google alerts does but only on twitter
……………………..
RSS tools for link prospecting
- Feedburner Analytics
- PostRank Analytics- tool to measure social engagement, determine social engagement sources and your top influencers. tracks RSS feed content’s performance in the social world.
………………………
Q & A sites for building authority and link prospecting
- Askville by amazon
- Linkedin Answers
- Quora
- Wiki Answers
- Yahoo Answers
- List of niche specific Q & A websites
………………….
Other Link Prospecting Tools
- 10000 Search Engine Queries for your Link Building Campaign
- Bing Social Search
- Blogger LinkUp – tool to find bloggers, guest post opportunities.
- BuzzStream Email Research Tool – tool to find email addresses
- Directories that work for Link Building
- Double Click Ad Planner
- Embedanything - tool to leverage content theft for link building
- Eight Fold Logic - similar to my blog guest but the audience is wider & the interface more customized for creating one-to-one, private connections.
- Google Search by Image
- Help a Reporter out
- ifttt- awesome tool to automate ‘if this then that’ type of task. For e.g. you can send yourself an email if i you are mentioned by a particular influencer in your niche.
- Link Building Toolbar - Keep track of existing links & links you are prospecting directly from within your browser.
- Link Prospector – it helps in finding tons of link building opportunities. Pricing option: ‘pay as you go’.
- MyBlogGuest - Tool to find guest post opportunities.
- Open Site Explorer
- Outreachr – tool to find contact details in bulk
- Peep Mail - tool to find email addresses
- SEO Takeaways BackLinks Analysis Tool - great tool to reverse engineer your competition and find linking opportunities.
- SEOmoz Competitive Link Finder - get a list of common backlinks acquired by your competitors.
- SEOmoz web directory list
- Tiny Eye - Reverse image search tool.
- Yolink – Searches the contents behind links
- Whitespark - tool to find location citation sources for you.
- Zemanta - help bloggers to find your work. add your RSS feed to zemanta.
………………………..
Tools for Link Building Outreach
- Ad Remover and Better UI for Gmail - Chrome extension which remove all the ads in Gmail, enhance its interface. compatible with the new Gmail.
- Boomerang for Gmail - is a Firefox / Chrome plugin that lets you take control of when you send and receive email messages. You can schedule an email to be sent later.
- Gmail Canned Responses - It is a Gmail lab tool. You need to go to Settings icon > Labs to enable it. It allows you to save email templates.
- Gmail Send and Archive - It is a gmail lab tool which adds a button to the compose form that lets you send a reply message and archive the email conversation in a single action. You need to go to Settings icon > Labs to enable it.
- Highrise
- ifttt- awesome tool to automate ‘if this then that’ type of task.
- Rapportive - It is a Gmail plugin which shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.
- Taskforce- It list emails as tasks and is a great tool to manage emails. It is like you installed a mini version of basecamp in your Gmail account.
- Texter - great tool for text substitution.
…………………………
Backlinks Analysis Tools
- Ahrefs
- Advanced Report of the Majestic SEO Tool - visualize the Geographic Profile of a site’s back links
- Bleeko – Free back links analysis tool
- Dr. Pete Worksheet - visualize the Quality of Back Links of a website
- Link Detective – free back links analysis tool. Determine link types.
- Majestic SEO BackLink History Tool - Visualize the Link growth/ Velocity of your website and that of your competitors.
- Majestic Site Explorer - analyze back links of a website
- Open Site Explorer- analyze back links of a website, compare ranking potential of two and more sites.
- SEO Takeaways Backlinks Analysis tool - determine the back link profile of your top SEO Competitor(s)
- Tagxedo - tool to create word cloud and visualizes the anchor text distribution analysis of a website.
- Linkstant – Real time (almost) monitoring of back links.
Other Tools
- BackLinks Removal Tool
- NetComber – tool to detect link networks.
If you like this post then you should subscribe to my blog and follow me on twitter.
Tweet
Only after compiling this mega list, i realized how many tools i use on daily/weekly basis just for link building. I have mainly listed those tools which i use often and which are free to use. I keep adding/removing tools as i find better alternatives. If you think a tool is worth listing then please suggest it.
Note: We don’t accept paid inclusion
Use CTRL F + Search Term to find what you are looking for.
Link Building Menu
- Niche specific searches for link prospecting
- Data Scraping Tools for Link Prospecting
- Utility Linking Tools
- Twitter tools for link prospecting
- Facebook tools for link prospecting
- Linkedin tools for link prospecting
- Other Social Media Analytics tools which help in link prospecting
- Brand Monitoring tools for link prospecting
- RSS tools for link prospecting
- Q & A sites for building authority and link prospecting
- Other Link Prospecting Tools
- Tools for Link Building Outreach
- Backlinks Analysis Tools
Niche specific searches for link prospecting
- Alltop
- Best of the web blog directory
- Blogarama
- Blog Catalog
- Blog Dash - free tool to find bloggers in your niche. (paid version is also there)
- Blog Digger
- Blog Her (NEW)
- Blog Hints
- Blog Listing
- Blogio
- Bloggapedia
- Blogging Fusion
- Blog Search Engine
- Bloggeries
- Blogrolls - find other similar authoritative bloggers in a niche.
- Board Reader - search particular topics that are being discussed on message boards and forums.
- CrunchBase – search companies and employees’ profiles and contact details.
- Dmoz Search
- EatonWeb Blog directory
- Globe of blogs
- Google Blog Search
- Google News Search
- Google News Archive Search
- Icerocket Blog Search
- PostRank Blog Search – Bypass the login, use the search box to find blogs by topic & engagement metrics.
- Regator - curated blog directory.
- Technorati Search
- WordPress Tag Search - great tool to find niche specific wordpress blogs. http://en.wordpress.com/tag/[insert-your-keyword-here]/
- Yahoo Directory
- Yahoo News Search
…………………
Data Scraping Tools for Link Prospecting
- SERPs Redux bookmarklet - Scrape the organic search results from Google.com
- AutoPager – automatically loads next pages when you reach the end of a SERP esp. useful if you have a data separated over multiple pages that you want to scrape. Chrome extension. Firefox extension.
- Excel Plugin by Niels Bosma - Through this Plugin you can fetch several on-page elements from a URL or list of URLs like: Title tag, Meta description tag, Meta keywords tag, Meta robots tag, H1 tag, H2 tag, HTTP Header, Backlinks, Facebook likes etc.
- X-Path tutorial
- X-Pather - It is a firefbug extension used to quickly generate path expressions while browsing HTML and XML documents. Since X-Pather is a firebug extension, it means you first need to install firebug in order to use it.
- Scrapy - It is an an open source web scraping framework and is used to extract structured data from web pages & APIs. You need to know Python (a programming language) in order to use scrapy.
- Open Site Explorer - Scrape back links of an entire website.
- OBL Scraper+Contact Finder - scrape outbound links and contact details from a URL or URL list.
- Scraper - This chrome extension can scrape data from web pages and export it to Google docs.
……………….
Utility Linking Tools
- Backlink Builder
- Link Acquisition Assistant - returns 121 link acquisition queries
- Solo SEO
……………………
Twitter tools for link prospecting
- Advanced Twitter Search
- AnalyzeWords- Enter your Twitter name or the handle of a person to learn about his emotions, social styles, and the ways he thinks.
- Backtweets- tool to analyze any twitter profile.
- Followerwonk- search twitter bios and find people who share same interest. For e.g. you can determine the twitter profiles of event planners, SEOs, chiropractors etc.
- Free Twitter Follower Analytics in Excel
- Manage Fitter- find people you follow but are not following you. Lot of filter options.
- MentionMap – find people connected to influencers on twitter
- MuckRack – What are journalist talking about
- My Top Tweets – tool to find top tweets of a person
- Snap Bird - search the tweet history of any twitter profile.
- Topsy Social Analytics – search & compare how a blog/website performs on twitter.
- Tweetsheet – visualize the geographic impact of your tweets; show your best followers
- TwitterCounter - Through this tool you can graph the growth of any twitter profile over time. Good tool to find emerging influencers.
- Twitter Grader - check online influence of a twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded. Another tool to find emerging influencers.
- Twitter Reach – search for a URL, twitter name, phrase or hash tag to visualize the true reach of a tweet.
- Wefollow- tool to find people on twitter who are influential.
………………..
Facebook tools for link prospecting
- Facebook Insight - tool to find your influencers on facebook.
- Free Facebook Fan Page Analytics in Excel
- Free Facebook Competitive Analysis in Excel
- Facebook Search
- YourOpen Book - tool to search facebook updates.
…………………
Linkedin tools for link prospecting
- Linkedin Advanced Search
- Linkedin Advanced Answers Search
- Linkedin analytics for Businesses - tool to find your influencers on linkedin.
- Linkedin analytics for Individuals - tool to find your influencers on linkedin.
- Linkedin Search
Note: In order to fully utilise all the built-in analytics feature of Linkedin, you need to upgrade to Premium account of Linkedin
…………………..
Other Social Media Analytics tools which help in link prospecting
- Klout- klout Score measures online influence of a person on a scale of 1 to 100.
- PeerIndex - provides detailed analytics of your social stream.
- Sharedcount- track facebook (likes, shares, comments), tweets, Google +1s, diggs, linkedin shares, Google buzz and stumble upon of any page whether or not the page has sharing buttons installed.
- SiteTrail Analytics - get a quick snapshot of organic and social media presence of any website.
…………………..
Brand Monitoring tools for link prospecting
- Google Alerts- track brand mentions. Can also be used for link building.
- Hyper Alerts – send email reports of post and comments on a facebook fan page.
- Social Mention - determine what people talk about you on social media. You can also determine sentiments (positive, negative or neutral) and who are your top users etc.
- Topsy- another tool to find out what people are talking about you or your brand on social media.
- Twilert – works the same way as Google alerts does but only on twitter
……………………..
RSS tools for link prospecting
- Feedburner Analytics
- PostRank Analytics- tool to measure social engagement, determine social engagement sources and your top influencers. tracks RSS feed content’s performance in the social world.
………………………
Q & A sites for building authority and link prospecting
- Askville by amazon
- Linkedin Answers
- Quora
- Wiki Answers
- Yahoo Answers
- List of niche specific Q & A websites
………………….
Other Link Prospecting Tools
- 10000 Search Engine Queries for your Link Building Campaign
- Bing Social Search
- Blogger LinkUp – tool to find bloggers, guest post opportunities.
- BuzzStream Email Research Tool – tool to find email addresses
- Directories that work for Link Building
- Double Click Ad Planner
- Embedanything - tool to leverage content theft for link building
- Eight Fold Logic - similar to my blog guest but the audience is wider & the interface more customized for creating one-to-one, private connections.
- Google Search by Image
- Help a Reporter out
- ifttt- awesome tool to automate ‘if this then that’ type of task. For e.g. you can send yourself an email if i you are mentioned by a particular influencer in your niche.
- Link Building Toolbar - Keep track of existing links & links you are prospecting directly from within your browser.
- Link Prospector – it helps in finding tons of link building opportunities. Pricing option: ‘pay as you go’.
- MyBlogGuest - Tool to find guest post opportunities.
- Open Site Explorer
- Outreachr – tool to find contact details in bulk
- Peep Mail - tool to find email addresses
- SEO Takeaways BackLinks Analysis Tool - great tool to reverse engineer your competition and find linking opportunities.
- SEOmoz Competitive Link Finder - get a list of common backlinks acquired by your competitors.
- SEOmoz web directory list
- Tiny Eye - Reverse image search tool.
- Yolink – Searches the contents behind links
- Whitespark - tool to find location citation sources for you.
- Zemanta - help bloggers to find your work. add your RSS feed to zemanta.
………………………..
Tools for Link Building Outreach
- Ad Remover and Better UI for Gmail - Chrome extension which remove all the ads in Gmail, enhance its interface. compatible with the new Gmail.
- Boomerang for Gmail - is a Firefox / Chrome plugin that lets you take control of when you send and receive email messages. You can schedule an email to be sent later.
- Gmail Canned Responses - It is a Gmail lab tool. You need to go to Settings icon > Labs to enable it. It allows you to save email templates.
- Gmail Send and Archive - It is a gmail lab tool which adds a button to the compose form that lets you send a reply message and archive the email conversation in a single action. You need to go to Settings icon > Labs to enable it.
- Highrise
- ifttt- awesome tool to automate ‘if this then that’ type of task.
- Rapportive - It is a Gmail plugin which shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.
- Taskforce- It list emails as tasks and is a great tool to manage emails. It is like you installed a mini version of basecamp in your Gmail account.
- Texter - great tool for text substitution.
…………………………
Backlinks Analysis Tools
- Ahrefs
- Advanced Report of the Majestic SEO Tool - visualize the Geographic Profile of a site’s back links
- Bleeko – Free back links analysis tool
- Dr. Pete Worksheet - visualize the Quality of Back Links of a website
- Link Detective – free back links analysis tool. Determine link types.
- Majestic SEO BackLink History Tool - Visualize the Link growth/ Velocity of your website and that of your competitors.
- Majestic Site Explorer - analyze back links of a website
- Open Site Explorer- analyze back links of a website, compare ranking potential of two and more sites.
- SEO Takeaways Backlinks Analysis tool - determine the back link profile of your top SEO Competitor(s)
- Tagxedo - tool to create word cloud and visualizes the anchor text distribution analysis of a website.
- Linkstant – Real time (almost) monitoring of back links.
Other Tools
- BackLinks Removal Tool
- NetComber – tool to detect link networks.
If you like this post then you should subscribe to my blog and follow me on twitter.
About the Author: Himanshu Sharma is the founder of seotakeaways.com which provides SEO Consulting, PPC Management and Analytics Consulting services to medium and large size businesses. He holds a bachelors degree in ‘Internet Science’, is a member of 'Digital Analytics Association', a Google Analytics Certified Individual and a Certified Web Analyst. He is also the founder of EventEducation.com and EventPlanningForum.net.
My business thrives on referrals, so I really appreciate recommendations to people who would benefit from my help. Please feel free to endorse/forward my LinkedIn Profile to your clients, colleagues, friends and others you feel would benefit from SEO, PPC or Web Analytics.
