Unnatural links are a big issue. A lot of sites were already penalized by Google for excessive unnatural linking. More will follow probably. Webmasters struggle to find the best means to identify the rotten apples in their garden while Google sharpens its weapons to catch “the enemy”. With Google Penguin 3.0 (based on the Matt Cutts’ numerotation … others would call it Google Penguin 6.0 )  lurking around the corner and the well-known search engine’s volatility, we are trying to always be one step ahead. We think that it is better to prevent than to treat and this is why we want to proudly announce some major improvements that we’ve made to our tool.

1. Simpler. Yet More In-Depth Unnatural Link Detection

The interface was simplified and all the functionality that could be found previously here is found in the Link Navigator, the tool that allows you to review all of the links and prepare the disavow of link removal campaign as quickly as possible.

2. The Most Common Unnatural Link Issues

Identifying the unnatural links is great but wouldn’t be greater if you had the means to see in a well-organized list what are the most common issues of those unnatural links? Now, you have this possibility. We’ve created a great chart that indicates what are the most common unnatural link issues of yours or your competitor’s site. This great list give you the possibility to make an overall idea about a site’s main issues but also comes in hand when trying to find a “clean-up” strategy for your site.

3. The Most Common Unnatural Anchor Text

Over-optimization of targeted anchor text has been given a lot of importance, specially in a bid to avoid getting slapped by Google’s Penguin update. The Penguin update’s effects have been visible on many websites that have unnatural anchor text distribution. In a competitive market it is crucial to know what unnatural anchor text a site has. This is why we’ve created for you a chart of the Most Common Unnatural Anchor Text. This list offers you great hints about what your next moves should be and gives you a great overview of your site’s main issues.

4. Top Unnatural Linked Pages

It’s never been easier to find out what are the top pages on a site the are most linked by unnatural or suspect links. We’ve created the Top Unnatural Linked Pages chart that helps you to find out in a flash the main domains or pages that might cause you the dreaded Google Penalty.

5. Unnatural Links History

Any site has, in different ratios, unnatural, suspect and ok links. It’s highly important to know which one are which but it is as important to have an overview about the historical evolution of the unnatural, suspect and ok links. Now, you can check this out in a blink, just by getting a glimpse of the weekly historical evolution of the unnatural, suspect and ok links.

6. Quickly Setup Unnatural Links E-mail Alerts

A highly recommended feature is the Unnatural Links E-mail Alerts, which sends you e-mail the moment it finds new unnatural links for your site ( or competitors’ site). This feature allows you to stay up to date with the evolution of the Google Penalty Risk without the needs to constantly check your cognitiveSEO account. You will receive only the most important mails that matter to your business.

7. PDF Report to Pitch New Clients and Amaze The Current Ones

Whether you want to present the data and statistics to your clients or you want to present amazing pitches in order to get new clients, you can create a very comprehensive unnatural links PDF report with the most important information. The generated report can be white labeled with your own logo, if you need it.

8. In-Depth Documentation Guide on How to Best Use the Unnatural Link Detection Tool.

Even if the tool is simple to use, there are a few things that you should know before using it in order to have the best experience and recover your site faster. We have wrote a very in-depth guide that includes both video tutorials and written documentation of each of the functionalities of the tool. You can access the unnatural links guide documentation here. You can also find a full documentation for the entire cognitiveSEO toolset on the support.cognitiveseo.com site.

Conclusion

Even though you may see yourself as a true white hat SEO and you do everything by the book, you never know when you’re going to be under a negative SEO campaign siege or get hit by the dreaded Google Penguin 3.0 (or another unnatural links update). As Google constantly improves its algorithm you may never know when you end up on the wrong side of its Guidelines. That’s why you always have to be prepared by monitoring your link profile constantly. As the scout motto says “Be Prepared”, which means to always stay in a state of readiness so you can better react in troublesome situations. The Unnatural Link Detection Tool transforms the  assiduous workload of monitoring link profiles and identifying unnatural links into a simple task.

The post Google Penguin 3.0 – Prevent / Protect / Recover Your Ranks Before it Hits appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

1. The New Anchor Text Distribution & Classifier

The Anchor Text Distribution and Classifier is the place where you can define your brand and commercial keywords in order to see the overall distribution of your anchor text cloud. This is a great feature because it helps you to have a clear overall image of the anchor text profile. Yet, for this classification to be as accurate as possible it is very important to identify the commercial and the brand keywords. For a quick reminder, the brand keywords are the name of your brand or the name of your website and the commercial keywords are the keywords that have a commercial intent and may be used by a person when searching in Google. A very simple definition would say that the Brand Anchor Text is one of the signals that Google takes in consideration when deciding if a site should be “trusted” or not, while the Commercial Anchor Text tells Google what keywords might the site be interested in ranking.

Understanding how to effectively classify the brand and commercial anchor text is crucial in order to have an excellent unnatural link detection classification.

The cognitiveSEO’s new Anchor Text Classifier allows you to:

1. Filter The Anchor Text

To make your job easier, we’ve created the Quickly Search Anchors search box. You can type here a specific keyword and the widget will only show you the anchor texts containing that keyword.
By default, the anchor texts for your entire link profile will be listed. But if you want to see the anchor text for live links only, you now have the show only live links option.
We’ve created some ordering options that will be useful if you want to take some snapshots to include in a presentation or to visualize the keywords that really interest you. For example you can randomize your anchor texts in order to make an image about your overall anchor text profile, or you can have your keywords ordered by their strength or by brand.

2. Bulk Classify Anchors

This feature allows you to to quickly classify multiple anchor text keywords in bulk. In order to do that, you first need to search for the relevant keyword and, then choose what type of classification you want (brand, commercial or misc) and hit the apply button. All those anchors will be classified in bulk instantly.

3. Classify Quicker by Showing Only Unclassified Anchors

Show Only Misc Anchors helps you to finish your classification process quicker by showing only the Unclassified or Misc Anchors. By checking this option you can see what keywords are neither in the brand or commercial category and might need to be further classified. When Show Only Misc Anchors is on, all your actions will be applied only on the miscellaneous keywords.

4.Individual Anchors Classification

You can choose to classify each keyword individually. All you have to do is hover over the wanted keyword (pass your pointer over the wanted keyword) and a menu with “classify as: brand, commercial or misc” will appear. Thick the classification you wish for and your job with that anchor is done.

If you don’t want to work with the Anchor Text Classifier or you’ve finished classifying all the anchor texts and you don’t want to make further changes, you can choose the Disable Classifier option. You can hit this button at any moment of your analysis. The process is reversible (meaning you can go back to classifying anchor texts any time you want).

2. New Unnatural Link Detection Features for Power Users Mostly

In the Unnatural Link Navigator ( the fastest & most accurate Unnatural Link Detection tool ) we’ve made some updates in order to help users who are working with thousands of links to save time and be more efficient.

1. Save a Bookmark for Easier Work Return on Big Projects

When you are working on big projects and you are dealing with thousand of links, it is very likely that you are going to divide your work amount throughout several days. Every time you launch the navigator it is highly important to know what your work status is and continue from the point you left it. To do that, we offer you the possibility to save a bookmark. Hit the Save button every time you want to exit the navigator and press the Load button every time you want to start working again from where you last finished. Extremely simple and extremely useful.

2.Know What Links You Already Saw in the Navigator and Filter by it

Every time you’ll visit a link, its color will change so you can easily identify which links you have already visited. Even more, you have the possibility to see and work only with the links you have already visited or only with the links you haven’t visited yet. All you have to do is go to Filters – Link navigator – choose visited or not visited.

At cognitiveSEO we try our best to meet the needs of our customers and continually improve our features. We don’t want our clients to have only the best results but also an excellent experience while using our tool. We invite you to check our new great updates and if you haven’t tried our tool yet, take advantage of the free trial and convince yourself by the benefits that cognitiveSEO can bring to your business.

To be able to test the system, we give free 14 day trials so you might want to take advantage of that first and see if the tool is up to your expectations. You will also get the full functionality of the tool, including full backlink analysis, daily rank tracking, social visibility and a plethora of cool & useful stuff.

The post New Anchor Text Classifier & Unnatural Link Navigator Power User Features appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

We quickly understood that you needed a fast way to manually validate the links to be disavowed, in order to be 100% confident that those are the correct ones.

In order to be 100% sure that a link is unnatural or not, you actually need to load that page and look for the link on the page.  The major problem, is that you usually have to visit hundreds, if not thousands, of links and this process takes a really long time and becomes very annoying.

That is why we created a new cutting-edge tool:

The Unnatural Links Navigator

 Automatic Classification + Manual Review  = 100% Winning Disavow

In order for you to understand how efficient this is I created a quick case study that exemplifies the complete creation of a Google Disavow file that is 100% manually verified.

How I created a 100% verified Disavow File in just 10 minutes!

Google Disavow Case Study

This quick case study shows you how to create a 100% correct and validated disavow file in approximately 10 minutes.

The site has approximately 500 referring domains and 1400 links.  I will go trough all of the links that need my validation before adding them on the Disavow list and generate the Google Disavow file ready to be imported in Google’s tool.

Quick Video Wins:

• Unnatural Links Detection Tips & Tricks.
• How to save hours on the Disavow Process.
• How to quickly & visually browse a site’s link profile.
• How to generate a Google Disavow file ready for import.

Time is Money … as the saying goes 

10 minutes vs 6 hours

You Win 5 hours & 50 minutes

Without these tools, to facilitate the entire disavow process you will need at least 6 hours or more to do it.

Just a few ideas on how you could use the saved time for your immediate advantage:

• Webmasters
  • Improve the problematic site.
  • Work on creating more quality content.
  • Create better Link Building Strategies.
• Agencies
  • Get more client work and do it in the same timeframe.
  • Adjust your pricing to be even more competitive.
  • At the same time Win more $$$!!!

Who needs this tool?

This is the ideal tool if you’ve received an unnatural link warning or have been penalized by Goole.

Checking your links is a breeze now. After the manual review of the entire list of links just hit the Google Disavow Export and you have the file ready for the Google Import.

The full list of Improvements

1. Improved Detection Algorithm

We improved the automatic detection in order to reduce the false positive ratio even more. We have analyzed tens of thousands of sites and improved the algorithms accordingly. We now have over 50 rules and an automatic learning system that trains itself. More improvements may be seen in Exact Match Domain scenarios, where in the past we had some problems in understanding the link profile naturalness.

2. Improved UI

We optimized the way you should use the unnatural link detection tool by segmenting the visual interface and the actions you can do. Here are some of the most important improvements:

1. Tells you how natural, or not, your site is.
2. Bulk Disavow,Tagging & Ignoring domains/links.
3. The New Unnatural Link Navigator for fast validation.
4. More columns such as Anchor Text and Faster Search.
5. More Link Data and Naturalness Reasons.

3. The New Unnatural Link Navigator

Here are the most important features of the Navigator:

1. Automatic Page Loading.
2. Instant Visual Preview of the link – no more View Page Source.
3. Link Data and Actions.
4. Instant HTML Code Inspector – to see the where the link is in the code.
5. Keyboard Navigation for the quickest link profile browsing
6. Full List of Links and Filters that you can apply.
7. Customizable Interface.

The new technology that is used to highlight the links on the page rendered the old link previewing system obsolete.

4. “How to” Videos Added

We also added “How to Videos” around the tool and will be adding more in the following days. This will improve even more the way you use the tool as it gives you expert help on how to do it best.

14 day Free Trial!

To be able to test the system we give free 14 day trials, so you might want to take advantage of that first and see if the tool is up to your expectations. You will also get the full functionality of the tool, including full backlink analysis, daily rank tracking, social visibility and a plethora of cool & useful stuff.

The post The fastest & most accurate Unnatural Link Detection + Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.