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There is an excellent thread at HighRankings Forum on the topic of how you should or could track one's link building efforts. The topic in this thread started off about how to track links accrued due to a link building contest. However, the topic moved into how to track link building efforts for a site in general.
Many are of the opinion that no tool can accurately measure the links acquired over time. Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and the various other tools, to many, are not that accurate. As Rosemary said in the thread, "one month Yahoo would show 10,000 inbound links and the next month only 300." It is hard to rely on tools that you don't know how it works and when there is a bug, you cannot fix it yourself.
Others say that when they build links, they store the information in a spreadsheet to report back to the client. I have seen this done. I am a firm believer that if you are hiring a link building company, they should provide you with an organized means of knowing what links they acquired for you, from where and when they acquired them. I have said this before, so I say it again.
Others in the thread said they just gave up on collecting and monitoring this data.
How do you track your back links?
Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.
Comments:
HichamD
12/30/2009 05:23 pm
I use AdvancedLinkManager Set it up to crawl every week to get a report of new and lost links. of course it can't be 100% accurate but it's pretty close
Fred Munoa
12/30/2009 06:18 pm
As mention in that thread I use one tool ONLY and compare metrics within my sites. Its like benchmarking data, of course I do not take that as a fact as everything related to SEO. LinkScape or Majetic SEO could do the trick.
Gunjan Pandya
12/31/2009 12:50 am
I am maintaining a one excel sheet with details of link URL, Link Added date, Anchor Text, PR etc. to track backlinks..
No Name
12/31/2009 12:55 am
I use SEO Spyglass weekly, like you have mentioned about other tools, is not 100% accurate but it has worked pretty well for me, I would say is 95% accurate.
Tzvi Harel
12/31/2009 11:17 am
I use SEO Spyglass as well as "no name". it's a great tool not just for tracking backlnks but also as a tool that can teach you a lot about your competitors. In my opinion, you can't really measure the accuracy of such tools and it's obvious that any tool that you are using, for either finding and tracking baclinks or for any other SEO usage, are just tools and nothing more! It's like getting use to drive from A to B on daily basis and once you get use to the road with knowing all the bumps and turns - you then decide to use GPS for the same well known route. After a while, you'll get lost if god forbid, it lost its signal... SEO is a lot of testing and researching and not just automated machines and short cut tools! It doesn't mean that you can't use them, just do so wisely.
Jaron
01/20/2010 06:56 pm
As many on that forum mentioned, the only real way to know exactly what links you've gotten (through your own efforts) is to track it on a spreadsheet. Some software will help you with that, but it can be expensive. For those interested, I recently created a free online tool to track your backlinks. It automatically verifies that all your links are still live and tracks the PR, anchor text, contact info, etc. of your backlinks. It's free to use if you provide a simple backlink. You can check it out at http://backlinkreporter.com/ . Good luck!
EggDir
02/12/2010 07:47 am
The webmaster tools is a good place to know which links are pointing to my website, but I use an excel sheet and write down all the web pages (not websites) i've submitted my website to. This way I know exactly where my website is listed and what are the PR of those websites.