Have you ever needed to get the link data for a website and ended up having totally different results coming from similar sources?

Why didn’t they provide with the same results? How are you supposed to know which one are the REAL ones?

And if you think of all the hours you’ve spent just to get to this dead end….

And this is not the only inconvenience you have when querying the search engines for link data…

But there are solutions for these problems. Let me break them down for you:

Have certainty over your link data

The reason why the search engines and other link databases (such as OpenSiteExplorer) provide different results is because they are not too frequently updated and links have changed since the last time they were checked. Some new ones may have appeared and others may have been removed.

You cannot know which is your real number of links or exactly which are the links pointing to your website, unless you verify each of them.

This is one of Advanced Link Managers great assets! After it gathers the link data from all the sources, it verifies it. You can be sure that the referrers list it builds, is made of REAL and ACTIVE links.

This does not mean that you will no longer know which links have been moved or deleted. Even if they are not active anymore, old links will still remain in the list but will be marked as deleted. This way you will know the present links, the new added ones and those that have been removed.

Although the search engines provide with uncertain link lists, you might want to know which are the results they retrieve. Therefore Advanced Link Manager builds a separate list (the unverified referrers list) with these links, so you will know exactly which are the results gathered from each of the search engines you have chosen.

Use every piece of information you can get

Search engines usually give a limited number of links (mostly 1000). This means that even if you do have more than 1000 links, search engines (let’s take Yahoo for example) won’t tell you more than 1000 links. This is quite frustrating, right?

Well, maybe in the future time this problem will be solved, as the new arrived Blekko already has taken notice of that and it provides with an unlimited number of links. But in the meantime, if you wish to have a more accurate link profile, you must query for links as many search engines as you can.

This is why Advanced Link Manager gathers data from over 100 search engines (and by that I mean different search engines and not just different local Google Search Engines) and it compiles a huge list of links to cover all of your existing links.

Save and expand your work

With the links displayed as search results, there is not that much you can do. You can’t export them, you can’t sort them, you can’t merge the results from multiple search engines, you can’t put together a unique list of links and you can’t evaluate their quality. The only thing that you can do is to visit the websites that link to you.

Not very insightful right?

This is why you need a tool for link building and monitoring. You need to process the data from search engines and to get actions out of it. Advanced Link Manager gets for each link, lots of useful information such as Page Rank, mozRank, number of backlinks, if the link was added, removed or switched to nofollow.

This way you can switch and twist your data in any way you see as fit for your needs. And of course you can export it in about any format of file you wish (HTML, XML, PDF, Excel, CSV, Text… you name it) so it is not stuck in the application.

Let’s conclude!

So, be clever and don’t rely just on search engines to get your links. You will only come to the conclusion that it is quite time consuming, mostly useless and completely inaccurate.

There are other better ways, don’t you think?

You can express your thoughts in the section below or you can more easily get in touch with us for further discussions, on Twitter!

Photo credit: @boetter