Links to your webpages, come and go.

Maybe today you have gained a few links but also lost others.

You can never know what changes have been made within your link profile, unless you monitor your links. Of course, there are probably hundreds or thousands of them, but don’t panic.

Monitoring is not as hard as it is to build. All you need to do is to use the right tool.

So, let me resume the main things you should do on a current base to stay on top of your link profile.

1. Get your true number of links

First of all you need to know the real number of links to your website.

There are different sources where you can get the link data for your website (Open Site Explorer, Google, Yahoo! Site Explorer, Blekko) but the results you will get won’t be the same. They will be quite different from one source to another and it is not a question of who’s right or wrong. It’s a matter of data freshness.  Search engines don’t update this kind of information that often and it gets outdated.

But, in the end, who will you trust? Which of them is the right one? You can never know…  That is why I suggest you to use Advanced Link Manager and verify these links. It takes the links search engines give and it verifies each of them to see exactly how many (and which) of them are really linking to you. Thus, it gives you a more accurate number of links for your website.

In the Unverified Referrers report you can see the full list of links gathered from the search engines, regardless of whether they are still active or not. The Referrers report contains only those links that have been verified by Advanced Link Manager and are currently active.

2. Evaluate your progress

It is also very useful to look at the evolution of your links and the trend they have over time. Thus you can evaluate the progress you have made with your link building strategy and make the decisions needed in the future.

Are you loosing to many links from your link profile? Have you made any improvements in link building in the last period of time? Or, are your efforts not paying the results you have hoped?

Advanced Link Manager enables you to see the evolution of both the number of unverified links, provided by search engines (Unverified Referrers)and the number of verified referrers. Using the Search Engine Evolution tab in your Advanced Link Manager copy, you can see, in raw numbers or graphically, the evolution in time of your links, according to each search engine you select. Or, for a more accurate analysis, you can swap to the Backlinks Evolution tab, and take a look at the evolution of your verified links.

3. Track links differently

You can go a little bit further into analyzing the evolution of your links, and group them into relevant categories. What kind of links have you gained and which are lost? Are you loosing some of your best links? Are you gaining only week links, that bring not so much value to your link profile?

Just group your links according to their quality (or decide any other criteria you find relevant for your websites referrers) and use the Referrer Categories tab in Advanced Link Manager to view separately, the evolution of each category.

4. Check reciprocity

If you are building reciprocal links or maybe three or four way link exchanges, then you certainly need to track them separately. You have to make sure the links remain active between all webpages from the chain, so the partnership could be fair.

Without a special tool it would be very difficult to spot the leaks in these linking chains, because you would have to go and verify yourself each link between the webpages from the chain. But, you can use the Reciprocal Linking tab from Advanced Link Manager where you can see, for each reciprocal link you have defined, which of the links from the chain are broken.

Of course, you can always add more tasks to your link building routine and you can also share them with us, in the comments section below or, come join our discussions on Twitter.

Photo credit: Damon Duncan