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Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE) was finally closed in November 2011.

YSE was without a doubt, the most popular tool and source of information for seeing what backlinks a site has.   Many tools and plugins used YSE to get their backlink data, so they all have been affected as well and have had to move to a new backlinking data source.

So now Yahoo Site Explorer is dead, what are the alternatives?

In this article, I will be taking a look at four alternatives for YSE.

Note that the services some of the serviced I’ve reviewed have paid subscriptions, I am only looking at the features/reports that you get with their free offerings.

Backlink Reporting Sites Reviewed

The four sites I’m be taking a look at are:

1. Open Site Explorer – Operated by SEOMoz.
2. Majestic SEO Site Explorer – Operated by Majestic SEO
3. Ahrefs Site Explorer – Operated by Ahrefs
4. Blekko – Search engine with SEO reporting facilities

One thing to note is that all of the four sites will give you different data and different results.  Unfortunately when it comes to backlink data, there just isn’t any resource that can give you 100% accurate results.

Videos of Yahoo Site Explorer Alternatives

For those who prefer the visual medium, I’ve created the following two videos to give you an overview of what each of the sites offers in terms of backlinking data and other SEO data.

This video covers Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO Site Explorer and Blekko.

This video covers Ahrefs.

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer (OSE) is operated by SEOMoz, who are a highly respected SEO organization.

OSE has free and Pro membership levels, with the paid membership getting you access to additional reports and services.

The reports you get in the free version of OSE include:

• Inbound Links
• Top Pages
• Linking Domains
• Anchor Text
• Ability to compare backlink metrics between up to 5 sites

The following OSE screenshot shows the default Inbound Links report.

 Open Site Explorer Summary

While there is some very useful data returned by OSE, probably the biggest issue is the freshness of the index.  Even though the index is large, it is only contains about 25% of all sites on the web.  That’s one of the reasons why the total number of backlinks reported is substantially fewer than what the other sites report.

Additionally, the data is only refreshed every 30 days or so, which means there is always a lag between new backlinks and when they are reported.

 Click here to try out Open Site Explorer

Majestic SEO Site Explorer

Majestic SEO currently would rank as the most popular Yahoo Site Explorer alternative.

Just about every piece of software like Traffic Travis, Market Samurai etc, all changed their backlinking data source from Yahoo to Majestic SEO.

Like OSE, Majestic SEO Site Explorer comes in free and paid subscription versions, where the paid subscription gets you access to more data.

Majestic Site Explorer reports include:

• Top Backlinks
• Referring Domains
• Top Pages
• Backlink History

Majestic SEO also have a few additional SEO tools that you can access.

The following Majestic Site Explorer screenshot shows the default summary returned for a site.

Majestic Site Explorer Summary

There’s a good reason why Majestic Site Explorer is popular, and that’s due to the size of the data and more importantly the freshness of the data.

Since March 2011, SEO Majestic update their index daily.  In the backlink history reports, you can use the “Fresh Index”, which shows you backlink data from the last 30 days, or you can use the “Historic Index” which shows you all available backlink data that Majestic SEO have for a particular site.

Click here to try out Majestic Site Explorer

Ahrefs Site Explorer

Ahrefs Site Explorer isn’t as well known as Open Site Explorer and Majestic Site Explorer, but it does have some very useful data that the other sites don’t.

Ahrefs is another free/paid subscription service.   If you don’t register, you are limited to 10 queries per day, if you register for a free account, you are limited to 20 queries per day.

Ahrefs Site Explorer reports include:

• Top Pages
• Backlinks
• Anchor Text
• Referring Domains
• Referring Subnets

There is also a SERPs Analysis function that is really handy as it will show you what keywords a site is ranking for and their position and movement in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The following Ahrefs Site Explorer Screenshot shows you the default information returned.

Ahrefs Site Explorer Summary

Even though the free version of Ahrefs is more limited than the other sites, the information it returns is very useful.   In particular, the ability to see what keywords and what rankings a particular site has is great when you are doing competition analysis.

Click here to try out Ahrefs Site Explorer

Blekko

Blekko is different to the previous sites as it is primarily a search engine.   However, it is a very flexible search engine that gives you very useful SEO data.

Blekko uses special filters/modifers that they call slashtags.  One of these slash tags is /seo, so when you do a query like:

somedomain.com /seo

You will get all the SEO data for that particular domain.

Blekko SEO Reports include:

• Inbound links and their location
• Outbound links
• Internal Links
• Crawled pages and their rank
• Domains that contain duplicate content

The following Blekko screenshot shows the default SEO information returned.

Blekko Summary

Of all the newer search engines that have been created, I’ve found Blekko to be the most interesting and most useful.

While it’s backlink data isn’t as detailed as the other sites, it is free, fast and easy to use.

Click here to try out Blekko

Recommendations

A lot of the time, the type of information and style you like to see it in comes down to personal preference, so my main recommendation is to try out all four sites and see which you like best.

That said, my two favourite sites are:

1.  Majestic Site Explorer – This is mostly due to it having the most comprehensive and accurate backlink data of the four and the freshness of the index.

2. Ahrefs Site Explorer – I like to use this site to get SEO data that the other sites don’t provide, eg: keyword/ranking data.

If you know of any other similar sites (that are free to use), please leave a comment below.

Cheers

What exactly,  is spintax?

That’s a question I get asked quite often, so I thought I’d write an article explaining what spintax is and what uses it has.

The term spintax is a contraction of “spinning syntax”.

Spintax is the format (or syntax) that is used by various software spinners and article submission sites that create or use spun articles.

There are various spintax formats depending on what software/services you use.  See the section titled “Spintax Formats” below for more details.

Article Spinning

Firstly, let me explain what article spinning is.

Article spinning is a method of creating one or more unique copies of an original article.  The level of uniqueness depends on the type and amount of spinning you do.

Typical uses for spun articles are:

1. Submitting to various article directories
2. Submitting to blog networks
3. Creating unique content for a website/blog

In general, the main purpose of spinning articles is to gain backlinks.

Spintax Example

Let’s look at a spintax example using the most common spintax format.

Let’s say our original article has the sentence:

Writing articles is a lot of fun.

Now if we format the above sentence with spintax, we might have something like:

{Writing|Creating} {articles|stories} is a {lot of fun|rewarding experience}.

Each of the words or phrases contained with {|} are randomly substituted in the spun article.  So for the above example, some of the variations generated would be:

Writing stories is a lot of fun.

Creating articles is a rewarding experience.

Creating stories is a rewarding experience.

And so on for all the combinations possible.  The number of variations depends on what software or service you use with your spintax.

You can spin articles at the word, phrase, sentence or paragraph level or a combination of all these.

Nested Spintax

Nested spintax refers to two or more levels of spinning.   Not all spinning software or services support nested spinning.

Nested spintax is probably best explained with an example.

Let’s say I have the following sentence in spintax format:

Article directories are {an important {element|component|aspect} of SEO|useful for {getting|gaining} backlinks}.

In the example above,  the first level spintax is in blue and the 2nd level is in green.  So some examples of the output this example would produce is:

Article directories are an important aspect of SEO.

Article directories are useful for getting backlinks.

Article directories are an important element of SEO.

Optional Words or Phrases

Another spintax function that is supported by most spintax formats is the facility to make a word or phrase optional.

An example of this is:

The best {|overall|general} product.

Note there is no word specified before the first pipe symbol.  The above spintax example would produce the following results:

The best overall product.

The best general product.

The best product.

Spintax Formats

Unfortunately, there is no standard spintax format.

In the examples given, I’ve been using the most common spintax format (sometimes known as Jet format) used by software spinners such as The Best Spinner.

This format uses {} to delimit the words/phrases to spin and the | symbol to separate them.

{word1|word2}
{word1 {level 2|level two}|word 2}

Probably the next most used spintax format is the one used by article submission sites like ArticleRanks.   The first level spin uses {~} and the second level uses [|]. For example:

{word1~word2}

{word1 [level 2|level two]~word 2}

Then there is the format used by article submission sites like the Free Traffic System which uses [spin]|[/spin] format.  For example

[spin]word1|word2[/spin]

Note that Free Traffic System only supports one level of spinning (also known as flat spin).

The Best Spintax Strategy

So putting everything together, what is the best strategy for creating the most effective spintax.

Well, the answer to that question depends on the purpose of what you want to use the spun article for.

However, let’s assume you want to use your article in as many places as possible, eg: article directories, blog networks etc.

Here’s the tips I use:

• Don’t be tempted to use an auto-replace option in your software spinner as you’ll just end up with a junk article that will take you quite a while to clean up.
• Manually spin each sentence or paragraph.  If you have a  large article, then perhaps spin ever second or third sentence.
• Then go through a spin at the word/phrase level by manually selecting the best synonyms.   This is an easy task with spinners like The Best Spinner.
• Make sure you proof read a couple of examples of the spun article to make sure it reads OK and doesn’t have any bad grammar or clumsy sentence construction.

By following these tips, you will greatly increase the chances of having your spun article accepted on the sites you submit it to.  Additionally, by having a high level of spin and uniqueness, it will help your rankings as the search engines will see your backlinks coming from articles with unique content.

Spinning Hyperlinks

The last part of spintax is spinning your hyperlinks.

Obviously, you don’t want to go to all the effort of creating a spun article and leave out hyperlinks to your site.

There’s no real difference between spinning plain text and hyperlinks apart from having to get the hyperlink format correct.  An example of a spun hyperlink is:

<a title=”{keyword one|keyword two}” href=”http://{example.com/page1|example.com/page2}” target=”_blank”>{keyword one|keyword two}</a>

The more keywords and URLs you add, the greater the potential for missing a quote or misformatted HTML tag.

If you need to generate spintax for hyperlinks, then you should check out my Free Spintaxer Tool.

Also, make sure you take advantage of my special LIFETIME 40% discount off The Best Spinner.

Cheers

ArticleRanks is one of the many content distribution systems that are currently around, so is ArticleRanks better than any of the other similar systems?

Firstly an overview of what ArticleRanks is:

In a nutshell, it allows you to publish your articles on a blog network in order to gain backlinks to your site.

ArticleRanks also allows you to receive content for your blog (if you want new content and/or to earn credits).

The process of submitting an article is:

• You create articles in spintax format (either pre-formatted or using the ArticleRanks article spinning options)
• Select your article category and tags.
• Select a distribution date and hit the publish button.

ArticleRanks Overview

How ArticleRanks Works

The best way to demonstrate how ArticleRanks operates is by watching the video below.

Advantages of ArticleRanks

In the past, I’ve been a big user of Free Traffic System (FTS), but after a while I found out that the total number of backlinks you gain is very minimal due to the limit on the number of sites your article is submitted to and the low quality of the blogs (that frequently disappear).

I tried out ArticleRanks early in 2010, as I was looking for an alternative to FTS.  I also considered SEOLinkVine, but the price really put me off.

It didn’t take long to work out why ArticleRanks was so much better.

The number one reason is the quality of the blog network and the quality of the articles.

Firstly, in order to gain credits for accepting ArticleRanks articles on your blog, your blog must have a Page Rank of one or higher.  This means that a lot of the blogs on the network are established sites with existing page rank that helps boost your link juice.

Secondly, there are various anti-spam mechanisms in place to help prevent junk or low quality articles on the ArticleRanks network.  This benefits not just the blog owners, but also the people submitting articles as it means the sites the articles are submitted to aren’t seen as low quality sites that are filled with mostly spam posts.

ArticleRanks also claim to add their own high PR sites into the network each month.

As a blog owner, if you receive articles from ArticleRanks, you have the options to limit the number of articles you receive, whether articles are auto-approved and auto-reject articles that falls below a set threshold of uniqness.

Another very good reason I like ArticleRanks is the number of sites my articles get published to.  Sites like FTS, have a quite low maximum number of sites your article will be published to.

With ArticleRanks, the lowest number of sites my articles has been published on is 72 and the highest is 145.  Also remember that your article can have up to 3 links in it.

Spinning Articles for ArticleRanks

While there are facilities in ArticleRanks for spinning your articles, they are a little clumsy.  What I do is spin my article using The Best Spinner.

However, for some strange reason, ArticleRanks doesn’t use the most common spintax format, so you need to export your spun article from The Best Spinner with the correct format.

This is easy to to with The Best Spinner.  It just requires defining an spintax export format for ArticleRanks.

The screenshot below shows what to define for the ArticleRanks export format:

Conclusion on ArticleRanks

ArticleRanks is currently my number one choice for article submissions.

The ArticleRanks interface is well designed and easy to navigate.

In general, I’ve noticed some good improvements in rankings from backlinks gained from ArticleRanks, and more importantly, most of those backlinks haven’t disappeared a few months later.

Click here to check out ArticleRanks

Cheers

OK, so I tried to come up with an interesting name for a phenomenon I’ve seen quite a few times now.

The backlink bungy effect is my term when your (or your competitors) search engine rankings get a huge boost and then come bouncing right back soon after.

So what is the cause for this effect?

Well, I first have to mention that search engines can be a law unto themselves and drastically affect your rankings without you touching your website or doing any off-site SEO.

This is most commonly seen in the so called Google Dance, where your site (particularly if it is new) can dance up and down in the Google rankings until it more or less settles down.

Backlink Bungy Effect Causes

The Backlink Bungy Effect is a direct result of two factors:

1.  A particular type of blog comment.

2. The timing of search engines.

Blog Comments On Multiple Pages

One of the most common ways to get a big boost (albeit temporary) in rankings is by placing a comment on a blog that has the “recent comments” widget enabled on the sidebar.

What this effectively means is that if you make one blog comment, it will appear on every single page on the blog.  For some blogs that can run into hundreds of pages.

Even better is when the home page has a good PR, so you get a double whammy from the one comment.

Of course, the effectiveness of the blog comment depends on three factors:

1.  Infrequent comments.  Typically, the list of recent comments in the sidebar is usually limited to the last five or ten comments.  If the blog is very active and there are a lot of comments being made, then your comment will quickly fall off the list.

2.  While a nofollow link is still counted, a dofollow link is going to have a greater impact.

3.  The other critical factor is timing of when a search engine indexes the blog.  If it happens to index the site while your comment is still in the recent comments list, then you’ll get the backlink boost, otherwise there’s no real change.

Don’t Despair

It can sometimes be very perplexing and frustrating when you see your site go up and then right back down again in the rankings, or seeing a competitor shoot above you for no apparent reason.

If you find that happening, it pays to check if you have fallen victim to the Backlink Bungy Effect.

Review of WP Syndicator WordPress Plugin

A few days ago I posted an interview I did with Andy Fletcher who is the creator of WP Syndicator and I’m now giving you my review having used it for a while.

I’ve been using WP Syndicator since its first beta release and it’s become one of my most important WordPress plugins in my standard SEO kit.  I’ve installed it on all my main blogs.

In a nutshell, WP Syndicator allows you to automatically syndicate your blog posts to high value web 2.0 sites and gain a whole lot of quality backlinks plus directed traffic to your site.

The only effort involved is initially setting up the accounts on the various web 2.0 sites before you can syndicate your posts to them.  This task will take around 30-45 mins to complete, but once it is done, you don’t need to worry about it again.

Syndication Sites

The image on the left shows some of the web 2.0 sites that WP Syndicator will post to.  This includes the major blogging sites such as WordPress.com and Blogger.com as well as micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.

As Andy mentioned in his interview, he’s always looking to add new sites if they are valuable.

You can configure WP Syndicator to set the maximum number of characters you want in the syndicated post (default 500 characters).

You can also configure the anchor text per post.  The default is “Read more…”, but you have the flexibility to make it anything you like, so including your keywords can be very useful.

When you want to syndicate your article, you can either set WP Syndicator to automatically syndicate it, or you can go into the WP Syndicator control panel and choose which sites you want to syndicate to and hit the button.

The great thing about WP Syndicator is that you can go back to all of your old posts and syndicate them as well.

WP Syndicator Video Overview

Rather than have me ramble on about how WP Syndicator works, I think the following short video by Shane Melaugh will give you a really clear idea of what it does.

Andy is very responsive to any changes and has made a number of improvements since the original release based on feedback he received from early adopters.

Grab the WP Syndicator WordPress Plugin here.

Backlink Battleplan Overview

Backlink Battleplan is the newest product created by Shane Melaugh.  It’s all about building backlinks, but with a very unique twist.

As you probably know, if you want to get a site of yours ranked in the number one spot in Google for a high-traffic keyword (meaning that a lot of people search for it and you’ll get lots of free traffic by being on page 1), it means that you need to beat some tough competition. The way to do this is to have reasonably good on-page optimization and then build backlinks.  Tons of backlinks, for really valuable keywords.

As a rule of thumb, you need more and better backlinks than your competitors have.  That’s what gets your site to outrank theirs.

And if you want lots of traffic, you’ll often have to build backlinks by the thousands.

Obviously, there’s no way you can do all that by hand, which is why most SEO’ers use different kinds of backlinking  tools that automate and speed up the process for them. And if you want to compete with these guys, you need similar tools.

Problem is, these tools are usually very expensive. Some of them will only cost you a one-off fee of maybe $100 or so, but most of them (most of the ones that are actually effective, anyway), will cost you anything between $70 and $170 each and every month!

What Sets Backlink Battleplan Apart?

What sets  Backlink Battleplan apart from other backlinking courses is that Shane teaches you how to build lots of backlinks using automation tools that are free!   And just because the tools and websites that you use are free, definitely doesn’t mean they are inferior in any way.  In some cases, the free tools are probably much better than the paid equivalents.

Another vital aspect of Backlink Battleplan is that you follow a checklist to ensure you successfully and effectively implement the backlinking plan.  There’s really not much point in having a whole bunch of tools without knowing how to use them and fitting them altogether.  I would be a little like having all the parts of a car engine on the floor and not knowing how to assemble them to make it work.

Background on Shane and Interview

Now while Shane is relatively new to Internet Marketing, the quality of his products is obvious.  I’d suggest you watch some of his free Backlink Battleplan Videos as you’ll soon get a really good idea of the quality of content.  The Free Videos include:

• Video 1: Why You Should Not Waste Money and Time on the Wrong Automation Tools!
  
  
• Video 2: Automatic, Free Backlinks from Web 2.0 Sites
  
  
• Video 3: How to Find Profitable Keywords and Build Backlinks
  
  

Additionally, Shane is a master trainer over at IM Elite and has produced some really useful and informative videos.

You can listen to an interview I did with Shane where he talks about how he got into Internet Marketing, his motivation for creating Backlink Battleplan and future plans.

Listen to the interview with Shane below.

Backlink Battleplan Contents

Here’s what the Backlink Battleplan consists of:

• 17 videos outlining the link-building strategy and explaining how to use the tools
• A complimentary PDF document covering the same material as the videos
• A checklist that can be printed out and used for each website promotion
• “RSS Warrior” an automated RSS directory submission tool.
• Bonus 1: Complete keyword research video training course
• Bonus 2: “Backlinks Quickstart”, an introduction to backlink building (for beginners)
• Bonus 3: A series of bonus videos expanding on the Battleplan concept

Shane does a really good job at explaining things very clearly and his videos show you step by step how to implement Backlink Battleplan from start to finish.

Backlink Battleplan Recommendation

As an Internet Marketer, I never review a product I haven’t used myself and I definitely never recommend a product that I don’t use in my own arsenal.  I very pleased to say that I’ve found Backlink Battleplan an excellent product and more importantly and highly effective and relatively easy way to gain lots of backlinks.

I’ve been using Backlink Battleplan (in conjunction with a few of my own backlinks techniques) on all my main sites and I’m very happy with the improvements I’ve been seeing in my rankings.

Grab a copy of Backlink Battleplan now as I am very confident you’ll find it excellent value.

There are so many article directories available that you could spend a lifetime trying to post to all of them.  However, that would be a monumental waste of time and effort as not all article directories are created equal.  What you really want to do is target your articles to the directories that are going to have the most authority.

In general, this means posting to article directories that have a high PR and have dofollow links.  That last point is very important.  There’s not much point in posting your article to a directory that has nofollow links as that will have minimal/no effect on your search engine rankings.

I’ve put together the following list of what I consider to be the best directories to post to.  If you’ve discovered any others that are valuable, please let me know.

Also, if you are serious about writing articles, you should read my The Best Spinner Review.