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What are your thoughts on BrightEdge?
With the whole JCPenney linking fiasco in the recent news, do you monitor your SEO linkage? BrightEdge is a SEO company that helps you monitor those links. What are your experiences with BrightEdge? What other SEO link monitoring tools are there?
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4 Answers
I'm not 100% familiar with BrightEdge, however it seems to be a generic software package to implement business class SEO with a bit of analytics to provide info on back links as one of the features. It's actually fairly easy to check your site's back links on your own without paying for pricey software:
For Google simply type link:www.websitename.com and it will provide you a list of the sites linking in. You can also use Alexa.com to check this. Keep in mind these take a while to get updated, so your best best is to have Google Analytics installed on your site where you can keep track of all referring sites on a day to day basis. Many software solutions that claim to track incoming links are actually just built on the Google Analytics API.
That being side, for the average user who doesn't want to spend too much time studying analytics and trends, signing up for a package that puts all the information in a neat and tidy bundle might not be the worst thing in the world.
As far as getting back links and the JCPenny scandal, staying away from a problem like they encountered is as simple as staying away from 'shady' black-hat link operations. There's a good way to create back links through business partnerships, referrals, and creating relevant content related to your site. Google 'likes' these pathways because it actually bolsters the relevance of searches, as opposed to pushing 'SEO juice' towards irrelevant links.
David,
Thanks for your comments. It's true that there are a lot of tools out there for checking links back to your site. BrightEdge BrandSafe Link Audits goes beyond the capabilities of any of those individually. First, there's the matter of convenience of getting all this information in one neat report. We also offer much comprehensive information than you would get from each tool on its own because we are drawing from multiple sources. If a user is checking across multiple sources, it will now take seconds instead of hours to understand their site's linking situation. Finally, installing the Google API will allow site owners to see sources of traffic, but they can still miss plenty of links pointing to their site that don't necessarily send any traffic.
And I definitely agree with you that BrandSafe Link Audit is a great opportunity for users that don't want to get bogged down in analytics and spreadsheets and would rather have a single report. Let us know if you want to give it a try at our web site: http://www.brightedge.com.
Staying away from "black hat" seo firms is a guarantee you won't get shady links. As I've said before, I can go get 100,000 xrumer links from really bad places to your site in about 48 hours. In the really competitive markets, everything goes and there's a lot of money being spent on malicious backlinking towards competitors.
So, Brightedge or not, it's completely naive and borderline negligent to not have something to monitor you backlink profile.
It's a bit of a scam what they are doing. You can get a "link audit" by going to SEOMOZ's SiteExplorer, www.siteexplorer.org, and get the exact same data and report for free.
I was excited to see this "free" offering today and disappointed to find out with was an excel sheet from SEOMOZ free data and their sales guys just wanted to sell me there expensive software. Felt like I was being shammed into something.
Don't know anything else but my experience today was kind of negative - thumbs down
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