Hub Finder 3.0 Update - SEO Tool Chest

The already powerful Hub Finder has been updated to version 3.0 by it's creator, Aaron Wall of SeoBook. This tool is very useful in locating potential hub pages that link at a specific resource. You can enter a list of sites alone or find the link results for top sites from Yahoo!, Google, or both. You can also see the link co occurrence from a combination of sites you input, plus search results. Very Cool!

There are many variables you can set to try to filter out noise results.

• Number of results (1 -10)
• Which search engine to get back link data from (Yahoo!, Google, or Both)
• minimum number of link matches required (1 -10)
• Depth (50, 100, 150, 200, or 250)
• Link match type (page or domain)

See my previous blog post SEO Tool Chest - Link Tools 3 for more details. The best way to understand this versatile tool, is to try it.

If you have your own Google API key, please enter it so my doesn't run out so soon. If you get a 403 Forbidden error, it usually means that one of the built in API keys has been used up for that day. If so, please check out SeoBook's original Hub Finder or the one mirrored at Cyclicious.

Happy link hunting!

martin

Updated SEO Friendly List Released

Dan, at info.vilesilencer.com, released an updated version of his great SEO Friendly List today. This update reflects several new directories, plus listings of all the directories that were recently de-indexed by Google.

Last week, I mentioned the problem some directories were having, but as of the last PR update on 07/14/05, only a few of the directories I have reviewed were affected. Now 4 more have bit the dust! Why is this happening? I don't know, but I suspect that some innocent sites might have been caught by G's wide net while catching "scraper sites".

I have updated my reviews accordingly and have added a "nofollow" tag to my links to play it safe.

I will keep an eye on this situation, but I still believe that most of the free directories are still good for link building.

martin

Do Free Directory Links Really Count?

Whenever SEOs hear about my Free Directory Listings Reviews, their first question is almost always, "do those links really count?". That is a valid question, so I have decided to try to answer that in my directory reviews.

I have added another column to the quick reference table titled "IBL Shown". This shows if that directory's links are shown in a back link check, at one of the big 3 SEs, for my site or one of my client's sites that I used in the review test sample.

Remember Yahoo! is known to show the largest sample of back links, Google only shows a very small sample and MSN shows something in between. The fact the an IBL (inbound back link) is not shown in Google or MSN is not very significant.

I used SeoElite to initially check this data, but you can do the same thing for free with Link Harvester since you don't really care about your link anchor text for this exercise (note: as follow up, I went back and double checked with Link Harvester and found a few that SeoElite missed and vice versa). You can also just check your back links manually at each search engine using the link: and/or linkdomain: commands. The Moral of this story is that none of these tools or the search engine are 100% consistent, but good enough for our purposes.

So you want to know the answer to the title question, do you? Well the answer is some do and some don't. So far I have only reviewed my site and one other, but I will be checking all the sites in the review sample and adding those results to my reviews.

I know the next question you want to ask. That is, "even if the links are shown, do they count for much?". That's a bit harder to clearly answer. Using the "Link Value" calculation data in SeoElite as a guide, the directories links show a range of strength from what I consider "minor strength" to zero. I can tell you that submitting to free directories got this site noticed by search engines in the beginning, before I had any other back links.

I will continue to monitor the back links and update my reviews accordingly.

As always, comments are welcome below (you folks aren't very chatty) or you can email me by clicking on my name.

martin

Some Free Directory Listings Moved to Duds

Although I have not had any problems with free directories that use 302 redirects on their links, I'm opting to follow the collective experience of other SEOs and move all listings of free directories that utilize 302 redirects to my "Duds" page. I am doing this to make it clearer that these directories could cause problems and won't benefit you with any PageRank credit.

I have also moved a couple of other directories to the "Duds" category because they appear to have fallen from Google's grace.

There has been a lot of talk recently about whether Google is declaring war on directories (free or paid). The directory category at the ODP has been PR0 for a couple of toolbar updates and it does appear that some directories have recently been de-listed, banned and/or penalized for some reason. The collective forum speak seems to hone in on AdSense, scraper sites, type of script, empty categories and possible duplicate content issues.

While I have not yet seen any definitive data on this new situation, I believe it comes down to the quality and uniqueness of the directory. A lot of these banned sites appear to all be using the same directory script and are pretty much cookie cutter templates. Some I have seen, haven't even taken the time to change some of the default text, such as "add whatever text here" sort of thing. I can't remember where I saw a couple of those, but I didn't add them to my reviews.

I will continue to monitor this situation and hope to see some hard data on this soon.

Please feel free to comment below or email me by clicking on my name.

martin

SEO Tool Chest - Link Tools 3

I have just added Hub Finder, another great free link analysis tool to my SEO Tool Chest. This is another free link tool developed by Aaron Wall at seobook (thanks Aaron for making these tools open source).

Hub Finder is used to identify hub sites and hub pages so you can then try to get links from them (as those links may help more in many modern search algorithms).

Aaron developed Hub Finder 1.0 a while back and it was useful, but didn't offer the ease of use that his Link Harvester does. He has rectified these shortcomings in Version 2.0.

The new version allows you to export your data via a .csv file (a major benefit). Another useful new feature is where each co occurrence link was marked with an X before, now that X links to the page the link is on (a real time saver).

You can now select many different options on how you can mix and match your hub findings between URI that you enter vs. top ranking sites from Yahoo!

For a list of all the new features, check out the link to seobook above, or better yet, just try Hub Finder to see for yourself.

These tools that Aaron has developed are Open Source and can be mirrored by anyone. This is really important since they use the Yahoo! API and that is limited to 5,000 queries per day. If you want to mirror this tool, your server must support DOM XML. My favorite hosting company, lunarpages does offer this on select servers and when I wanted to mirror Link Harvester, they moved me, for free, to a DOM XML enabled server!

As always, please comment below or email me by clicking on my name. Until next time, happy link building (I still hate link building, but all these tools in my Tool Chest make it so much easier and productive).

martin