Only after compiling this mega list, I realized how many tools I use on daily/weekly basis just for link building. I have mainly listed those tools which I use often and which are free to use. I keep adding/removing tools as I find better alternatives. If you think a tool is worth listing then please suggest it.
Use CTRL F + Search Term to find what you are looking for.
Link Building Menu
- Niche specific searches for link prospecting
- Data Scraping Tools for Link Prospecting
- Utility Linking Tools
- Twitter tools for link prospecting
- Facebook tools for link prospecting
- Linkedin tools for link prospecting
- Other Social Media Analytics tools which help in link prospecting
- Brand Monitoring tools for link prospecting
- RSS tools for link prospecting
- Q & A sites for building authority and link prospecting
- Other Link Prospecting Tools
- Tools for Link Building Outreach
- Backlinks Analysis Tools
Niche specific searches for link prospecting
- Alltop
- Best of the web blog directory
- Blogarama
- Blog Catalog
- Blog Digger
- Blog Hints
- Blog Listing
- Blogio
- Bloggapedia
- Blogging Fusion
- Blog Search Engine
- Bloggeries
- Blogrolls – find other similar authoritative bloggers in a niche.
- Board Reader – search particular topics that are being discussed on message boards and forums.
- CrunchBase – search companies and employees’ profiles and contact details.
- Dmoz Search
- EatonWeb Blog directory
- Globe of blogs
- Google Blog Search
- Google News Search
- Google News Archive Search
- PostRank Blog Search – Bypass the login, use the search box to find blogs by topic & engagement metrics.
- Regator – curated blog directory.
- Technorati Search
- WordPress Tag Search – great tool to find niche specific wordpress blogs. http://en.wordpress.com/tag/[insert-your-keyword-here]/
- Yahoo Directory
- Yahoo News Search
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Data Scraping Tools for Link Prospecting
- SERPs Redux bookmarklet – Scrape the organic search results from Google.com
- AutoPager – automatically loads next pages when you reach the end of a SERP esp. useful if you have a data separated over multiple pages that you want to scrape. Chrome extension. Firefox extension.
- Excel Plugin by Niels Bosma – Through this Plugin you can fetch several on-page elements from a URL or list of URLs like: Title tag, Meta description tag, Meta keywords tag, Meta robots tag, H1 tag, H2 tag, HTTP Header, Backlinks, Facebook likes etc.
- X-Path tutorial
- X-Pather – It is a firefbug extension used to quickly generate path expressions while browsing HTML and XML documents. Since X-Pather is a firebug extension, it means you first need to install firebug in order to use it.
- Scrapy – It is an an open source web scraping framework and is used to extract structured data from web pages & APIs. You need to know Python (a programming language) in order to use scrapy.
- Open Site Explorer – Scrape back links of an entire website.
- OBL Scraper+Contact Finder – scrape outbound links and contact details from a URL or URL list.
- Scraper – This chrome extension can scrape data from web pages and export it to Google docs.
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Utility Linking Tools
- Backlink Builder
- Link Acquisition Assistant – returns 121 link acquisition queries
- Solo SEO
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Twitter tools for link prospecting
- Advanced Twitter Search
- AnalyzeWords- Enter your Twitter name or the handle of a person to learn about his emotions, social styles, and the ways he thinks.
- Backtweets- tool to analyze any twitter profile.
- Followerwonk- search twitter bios and find people who share same interest. For e.g. you can determine the twitter profiles of event planners, SEOs, chiropractors etc.
- Free Twitter Follower Analytics in Excel
- Snap Bird – search the tweet history of any twitter profile.
- Topsy Social Analytics – search & compare how a blog/website performs on twitter.
- TwitterCounter – Through this tool you can graph the growth of any twitter profile over time. Good tool to find emerging influencers.
- Twitter Grader – check online influence of a twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded. Another tool to find emerging influencers.
- Twitter Reach – search for a URL, twitter name, phrase or hash tag to visualize the true reach of a tweet.
- Wefollow- tool to find people on twitter who are influential.
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Facebook tools for link prospecting
- Facebook Insight – tool to find your influencers on facebook.
- Free Facebook Fan Page Analytics in Excel
- Free Facebook Competitive Analysis in Excel
- Facebook Search
- YourOpen Book – tool to search facebook updates.
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Linkedin tools for link prospecting
- Linkedin Advanced Search
- Linkedin Advanced Answers Search
- Linkedin analytics for Businesses – tool to find your influencers on linkedin.
- Linkedin analytics for Individuals – tool to find your influencers on linkedin.
- Linkedin Search
Note: In order to fully utilise all the built-in analytics feature of Linkedin, you need to upgrade to Premium account of Linkedin
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Other Social Media Analytics tools which help in link prospecting
- Klout- klout Score measures online influence of a person on a scale of 1 to 100.
- PeerIndex – provides detailed analytics of your social stream.
- Sharedcount- track facebook (likes, shares, comments), tweets, Google +1s, diggs, linkedin shares, Google buzz and stumble upon of any page whether or not the page has sharing buttons installed.
- SiteTrail Analytics – get a quick snapshot of organic and social media presence of any website.
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Brand Monitoring tools for link prospecting
- Google Alerts- track brand mentions. Can also be used for link building.
- Social Mention – determine what people talk about you on social media. You can also determine sentiments (positive, negative or neutral) and who are your top users etc.
- Topsy- another tool to find out what people are talking about you or your brand on social media.
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RSS tools for link prospecting
- Feedburner Analytics
- PostRank Analytics- tool to measure social engagement, determine social engagement sources and your top influencers. tracks RSS feed content’s performance in the social world.
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Q & A sites for building authority and link prospecting
- Askville by amazon
- Linkedin Answers
- Quora
- Wiki Answers
- Yahoo Answers
- List of niche specific Q & A websites
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Other Link Prospecting Tools
- 10000 Search Engine Queries for your Link Building Campaign
- Bing Social Search
- Directories that work for Link Building
- Eight Fold Logic – similar to my blog guest but the audience is wider & the interface more customized for creating one-to-one, private connections.
- Google Search by Image
- Help a Reporter out
- ifttt- awesome tool to automate ‘if this then that’ type of task. For e.g. you can send yourself an email if i you are mentioned by a particular influencer in your niche.
- MyBlogGuest – Tool to get guest post opportunities.
- Open Site Explorer
- Peep Mail – tool to find email addresses
- SEO Takeaways BackLinks Analysis Tool – great tool to reverse engineer your competition and find linking opportunities.
- SEOmoz Competitive Link Finder – get a list of common backlinks acquired by your competitors.
- SEOmoz web directory list
- Tiny Eye – Reverse image search tool.
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Tools for Link Building Outreach
- Ad Remover and Better UI for Gmail – Chrome extension which remove all the ads in Gmail, enhance its interface. compatible with the new Gmail.
- Boomerang for Gmail – is a Firefox / Chrome plugin that lets you take control of when you send and receive email messages. You can schedule an email to be sent later.
- Gmail Canned Responses – It is a Gmail lab tool. You need to go to Settings icon > Labs to enable it. It allows you to save email templates.
- Gmail Send and Archive – It is a gmail lab tool which adds a button to the compose form that lets you send a reply message and archive the email conversation in a single action. You need to go to Settings icon > Labs to enable it.
- Highrise
- ifttt- awesome tool to automate ‘if this then that’ type of task.
- Rapportive – It is a Gmail plugin which shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.
- Taskforce- It list emails as tasks and is a great tool to manage emails. It is like you installed a mini version of basecamp in your Gmail account.
- Texter – great tool for text substitution.
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Backlinks Analysis Tools
- Advanced Report of the Majestic SEO Tool – visualize the Geographic Profile of a site’s back links
- Bleeko – Free back links analysis tool
- Dr. Pete Worksheet – visualize the Quality of Back Links of a website
- Majestic SEO BackLink History Tool – Visualize the Link growth/ Velocity of your website and that of your competitors.
- Open Site Explorer- analyze back links of a website, compare ranking potential of two and more sites.
- Tagxedo – tool to create word cloud and visualizes the anchor text distribution analysis of a website.
- Linkstant – Real time (almost) monitoring of back links.