Link Diagnosis

10) The results for all reports are wider
Users can now easily enlarge a portion of the report for more usable viewing. Users can collapse and expand the sub-menus to analyze specific data instantly

9) Upgraded Blog
The design and layout of the blog has been reformatted so that users can check up on Link Diagnosis news and updates. Don’t forget to read all the comments of each blog entry as our users always have great input. We read every single comment and do our best to develop based on user feedback.

8 ) PageAge Check
At Link Diagnosis we understand that checking PageAge of a site is a key part of evaluating the quality of a link. We built a PageAge check within the links tab so that users can gather all of the important information they need as quickly as possible.

7) Select Rows Using Shift and Control
Users can now export selected parts of a report to gather specific information. This option was built so users can research a backlink portfolio using targeted criteria.

6) Improved Charts
Some people like charts to get the visual breakdown of statistical data. The new charts image is cleaner and uses a nicer color breakdown.

5) Creating Accounts and Saving Reports for FREE!
This new upgrade almost made #1, as the ability to save a report is one of the best features of the site. We analyzed the reports that were being run and noticed that many sites were being run multiple times in a single day. You can still run as many reports as you like,  but now you can save and load them in a matter seconds.  Best of all it’s FREE!

4) Export Using Selected Data only Now Available
Many of our users run reports with many results. We understand that filtering through all of this information is time consuming. Analyzing a sites backlinks doesn’t have to take hours. Users can now select a group of links and export them in a matter of seconds.

3) Updated Link Data
We provide better data by truncating out multiple links coming from the same URL, so in 100 links from the same URL we take the top page and display it only once (very important for PageRank scraping limitations). We are allowing users to continue using the classic version Link Diagnosis. The updated data allows users to gather information quickly and analyze the sites that are important in your link building campaign. We will also roll out an option to run “full reports”, like Classic Link Diagnosis, vs. “optimized reports” like New Link Diagnosis.

2) Faster Reports
SEO’s and website administrators today have to do more in less time. We have sped up the process so our users can analyze more sites and run more reports in less time.

1) No More Paging!
Number one is without a doubt the elimination of paging. Many reports had hundreds of pages of data; unless you exported the report it was difficult to get the entire picture. Users no longer have to page to see the information and can still export if needed.

The Link Diagnosis team has been working hard to get the new site ready. Over the past several months we have read all of the comments in our last post and did our best to apply your requests to the new site. It has made the experience very challenging and fulfilling to integrate our thoughts and your ideas into a new upgraded site. We decided to keep the service free, and provide as many services as we could without charging the community.

Before you dive in and start running reports here are a couple of tips and updates so you are prepared for the new site.

• New Download:  Before you get started make sure that you have downloaded the new tool. Here is the URL to go straight to the download page:

www.linkdiagnosis.com/download.php

• Adobe Flash: The new version of the site is now all in Flash.  This update allows for you to see all of the back links for the site at once. There is no more paging on the new site.  Make sure that you have the latest version of flash.  You can download the latest version of flash here:

http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Both of these updates will prepare you for the new and more advanced Link Diagnosis experience.  The new site has improved on all of the old functionalities and added tons of new features.

The new flash version of Link Diagnosis gives us the ability to sort information faster.  Since we can display more and sort information easier you can now sort and organize your report using different criteria.

• Page Rank:  You can now sort by PageRank from 1-9.

• Anchor Text: Using the columns on the report you can sort your report by anchor text.

• Outbound Links:  By selecting the column you can sort from least to greatest number of outbound links.

The reports page now displays information in a more user friendly layout.  We have had numerous comments requesting better sorting and filtering features.

At the top left of the report page you will see the results from the report displaying the total number of backlinks, total number of unique anchor texts, and the number of pages indexed.  On the top right users can select groups of links using the PageRank filter or the link type filter.  Selecting links is helpful as you can now export specific links to CSV format.

There are 4 buttons below the overview data, which include:

• The Links Tab- This tab enables you to open a URL in a new window, check the page age of a URL, or run a new report.

• The Export Tab – The feature will let you save an entire report or selected URL’s to a CSV file.

• The Charts Tab- This features a brand new graphic summary of a backlink report.

• The Save Tab – The tab allows you to save a report to your account.

Clicking the top of any of the columns will sort the results in ascending or descending order.

The pages indexed and most popular anchors display have also been modified for quick and easy sorting and improved display. See the below screen shots for a better layout of these pages.

Pages Indexed Display:

Most Popular Anchors:

The biggest update that Link Diagnosis has released is the ability to run a save a report and create projects.   Some reports can take 15 minutes or more to complete, and we noticed that many users from the same IP address run the same report multiple times. To improve efficiency for our users we are now allowing users  the ability to save these reports and retrieve them at anytime.

You can create your LinkDiagnosis.com account by following this link:

http://linkdiagnosis.com/login.php

Once you have created your own account you will be able to quickly load saved reports and create projects. Here is a screen shot of the new navigation for Link Diagnosis accounts:

We are constantly working on new features and will be unrolling out new functionality in the coming months.

Please let us know what you think and send over any suggestions.  We take your comments very seriously and read everyone’s feedback.

Hello Link Diagnosis Users,

As always, we appreciate your loyalty, and wanted you to know that we are busy working on an updated free version and paid version of Link Diagnosis. We are not going to take any functionality away from the free tool version.

We need your input though. What else could we be doing? How can we make the results better?

Please provide your insights. Keep in mind that speed is always an issue based on the sheer volume of scrapes we perform. We will soon allow you to modify the results sets so that data can be more quickly reached.

Best,
LinkDiagnosis.com Team

Link Diagnosis has been redesigned in PHP and moved to a new server. The tool is already performing about 20% faster. We are working hard to offer some additional services, which will allow you to control the speed of the tool. Every computer is different and different browser versions react differently so right now we have to keep the speed slower so it works for everyone.

We will also be incorporating a service which allow you to create and store projects online, setup multiple URL’s per project, combine multiple URL results into one big report with sorting, and even private-labeled report exports. Stay tuned folks – more good stuff to come!

I have just released a new feature to Link Diagnosis Firefox Extension that will allow easy diagnostics of the indexed pages on your website.

Couple of weeks ago I was facing a tedious task of finding out which pages out of 100k on the site are indexed and which are not. I knew that some of them could have been marked as duplicate content or that Google simply didn’t indexed them because of the size of the website.

First I installed Google Webmaster Tools hoping that Google will tell me that. Unfortunately, the Indexed Pages tab just points me to use site: command.

I don’t trust site: command. Especially, the count of number of pages is very inaccurate. I know I have 100k pages and Google tells me I have 150k pages indexed.

Also, there is no easy way to see more than 1000 pages (you can play with inurl: commands but it takes ages and you can get banned).

Because of these problems I decided to code a tool which would automate it – Site Diagnosis.

The internal algorithm of the tool works as follows:

1. Go through every URL in XML Sitemap file and do a simple check inurl:http://www.samplesite.com/dir/url1
2. For every url that does not appear on inurl: command there is still a chance that page is indexed but does not appear with inurl
3. For every url in XML Sitemaps I get a title and perform this check site:http://www.samplesite.com sample title
4. If the page does not rank in top 10 for its title within the site then probably something is wrong.

This check is suprisingly accurate and most of the pages that don’t survive this check have some problems like duplicate content, missing titles, missing content or not enough content. These troubled pages usualy don’t appear in the search results if you search for any text on the page – not even when you enclose sentences in quotes.

Obviously, the goal of search engine optimization is to fix these pages so Site Diagnosis will hopefully be essential in identifying them.

For anyone who doesn’t know there is a date filter on Google which brings you only results that were created within the last xx period. See screenshot:

When you use that filter and see the search result pages then you will see that under every listing there is a date which shows you when Google saw that page for the first time. We can then use this information to find how old the page is if we craft the query to include the url of the page we are interested in.

inurl:http://blog.linkdiagnosis.com/?p=16

For that query it returns the date when my blog post about Amazon was created – 15 February 2008 – which is spot on.

Now to make it even easier to get the age of the page I have created a new feature to Link Diagnosis Firefox Extension.

Install the extension and you will be able to find out the age of the page with one click.

See the screenshot below:

Enjoy!

P.S Don’t do many queries at once otherwise Google will ban you (for me after about 70 inurl commands with 1 sec delay). If anybody has any tips how to prevent that from happening, then please let me know and I will code the age of the page to the main report so you can see both metrics – pagerank and age together.

Over the last couple of years the trust of the website and page has been primary factor when evaluating the value of the link. Most of the people for simplicity use pagerank for evaluating how much benefit will give the link to their site. Bill from SEO by the SEA has just written an article how search engines are evaluating the links and content importance based on on-page factors.

The most important bits from Yahoo patent (and also from Microsoft research paper) are that search engines can and do create a visual model of the page to find out which is the “Most significant element”. Some of the factors that Yahoo confirms in the paper:

• formatting of the text – bold , h1 etc. – GOOD
• tables with data and other grid-like structures – GOOD
• distance from the top and center. The most important ones are near the horizontal center of the page and also above the fold.
• content / links that are at the absolute header/footer of the page – BAD

Microsoft research paper talks more about the fact that Pagerank model is extended where the atomic entity is not the page but page-block. One page can have multiple blocks with each having different semantics and importance.

This information can have serious impact on how the link juice is flowing from the pages and especially the part from Microsoft paper affects that. Most of the bought links are not placed in the “Most Significant Element” of the page – which is the main content bit. The bought links are placed in side bars, footers etc. These research papers say that these links are much less important than the links which are within the content block. This then just rises the value of bought content links of PayPerPost style where they are within the context of the blog post.

Another implication of these research papers confirms that search engines are able to reconstruct the HTML Document Object Model and know which content is important regardless of the position in the source code of the page. This contradicts with many SEO Experts which have been claiming in the past that you should put the most important content first just after the BODY element.

As always, your comments are welcome.

I have just released 1.0.5 version which should fix the most annonying bug – report goes to 100% and then freezes. If you get this sometimes then please update to the new version (FF should automatically pickup the new version anyway). If you have any other problems, please fill the bug report with as much information as possible so we can make the tool more stable together.

More than 500 SEOs use this tool every day and  I am glad that numbers are raising. Please don’t be afraid to share this tool with others  – more people use it – more I will want to include better features and spend time maintaining it.

Cheers!

Its not Link Diagnosis related but one of my sites went down because of Amazon S3. Anyone else sees that ?

I can see that Colin Schlueter on Jaiku just ask if its down so it may be a start of major outage?

UPDATE: This thread on Amazon forums discusses over 35 minute down time.

Just wanted to share the cheer when I see SEOs all around the world enjoying the extension.

Well, at least I hope they are enjoying it as I don’t understand a word in spanish, german or russian .