Often we just want to know the metrics of a collection of sites quickly. This is a very blinkered ‘metrics as filter’ approach I’m going to show here, but if you have either personal or project based restrictions in play then this can save you a world of time in your prospecting. I’m going to assume that the metrics I care about are similar to the metrics you care about (if not, you can always pull them into excel with the right APIs). Right, let’s get started.
Multi Links is a rather handy Firefox extension that allows you to right click and drag to highlight any hyperlinks in the selected area. On release, the extension will then either copy the links to the clipboard or instruct your browser to open each link in a new tab:
For Chrome users, I’d suggest Linkclump as an alternative. I’m not really a Chrome user so I can’t vouch for it. It may even be better. Install either/both and get friendly and learn the shortcuts.
The output of either of these tools can then be pasted straight into either excel if you’re handy with API’s or into tools.seogadget.co.uk. I then suggest you order/filter the output based on your most valuable indicator. For instance, say your necessary conditions for being an acceptable place for a link are:
- Must have a pagerank greater than 2
- Must have a domain authority greater than 32
- Must have more than 600 linking root domains
The most sensible ordering of data would not be organising by PR (I have a hypothetical Venn in my head of how these metrics interact):
If you’re working in excel, great, use the filters. The uses are pretty obvious. Switch Google to 100 results and get creative with the queries, have a play around Alltop, go to one of those articles that lists 10,000 websites looking for guest posts (I expect most sites on those lists now wish they were not).
Deep prospect through blogrolls quickly
Hit relevant blog with sidebar link. Copy sidebar list to excel. Use multilinks to select sidebar links again, this time to open in new tabs – we’re not looking at metrics yet. Flick through tabs, looking for sidebars. Repeat process until satisfied. Filter. You now have a large list of relevant blogs that fit your minimum acceptable metrics. Closely inspect and proceed to build some links. The great thing about this process is it allows you to collect a list of sites an insider (which you are probably not) thinks are good. It also feels like you’re building a pyramid for some reason.
BONUS: Plain text solution
I use outreachr’s email and url extraction tool on any bulk emails encountered in plain text format (non-hyperlinked links). I then combine the output with multilinks. For those of you who recieve Blogger Linkup‘s emails, this can be an easy way to see what’s worth your time rather than copying, pasting and manually reviewing every website. Just review the sites that are left. Any questions, or ways to do this better, fire away.