General Overview
Link Prospector is a link building research tool designed to find and return lists of potential partner sites. Built for speed, the tool can return a huge amount of data link builders can sift through to find link building opportunities. The tool has a clean and simple interface and has the ability to export what it finds.
There are two help videos on the site as well. Before you launch the tool you will need a complete list of keywords and an idea of the type of sites you want to prospect for.
Great for the novice broken link builder
If you’re not good with footprints, or if you just want to get a general start to your campaign without putting a ton of time and thought in up front, Link Prospector will do a lot of the work for you. If you’re building links for a store that sells horse figurines, you’ll probably have some high level keywords you’ll want to target to find relevant link rot.
Simply start a new campaign, give it a name you’ll remember and then select find prospects to start a new report.
Add a report name and then select the type of report you want (essentially telling the tool what type of prospects you want it to find). Here we’re looking for link and resource pages that we can crawl for dead links.
So what is Link Prospector doing to find you prospects? It’s running a bunch of Google queries specifically designed to discover links and resource pages. While I don’t know exactly what queries it runs, it takes the keywords you specify and will run searches along the lines of “{keyword} intitle:links” which runs a Google search on ONLY pages that have the word “links” in the page title and then sorts your results of those pages based on your keyword. It combines a bunch of these types of searches with the five keywords you specify in your report and then scores them based on the frequency of the times a page returns in the results and how high it ranks (which is referred to as LTS). This gives you a general idea of the value of the links right off the bat.
When setting up your report you can give LP some parameters to work within like:
- Region: Where geographically you’d like the searches to pull from.
- Search scope: Results from the web, blogs, or both.
- Depth: How deep into Google do you want to pull results from – 20 would be the first two pages, 100 would be the first ten. If you’re just getting started you may want to try a few queries and see how deep they appear to be relevant before clogging up your results with a bunch of irrelevant crap.
- TLD: Pick the type of domains you want to pull from, if you’re only looking for .edu links you can limit to that.
- Date range: If you want results from the past, day, week, month or year, you can specify that here.
- Safe search filters: If you’re link building for adult sites, turn this off.
- Email notification: This can be handy when you’re multitasking, tell LP to send you a reminder email when your report is done.
- Keyword selection: The links report lets you select five keywords to work with. So without putting much thought into it, for a first report I’d probably use some high level phrases like figurines, animal figurines, toys, animal sculptures, and horse art for my horse figurine website.
- Exclusions: You can set specific exclusions to filter out pages that you know will clog your results (another good reason to run some manual queries before running LP). You can exclude Twitter, LinkedIn or other troublesome domains that don’t fit your prospecting needs.
Pros & Cons
When it comes to link building, there are many ways to acquire links. No matter what you do or which vertical you’re in, in order to rank well you need quality pages hosting your links.
That’s where using a tool like Link Prospector can help, it will research and analyze a large amount of data before listing potential link partners. It cuts your search time down considerably.
While it cuts your search time down, it does little for your review time and you need to know up front you’ll spend a lot of time picking through the results for sites to link with. If you run a lot of terms and go deep, you’ll have a tremendous amount of content to wade through, just look how many prospects came back in my sample tests.
Results past the 150 mark were so-so to lousy, I wouldn’t go deeper but it’s up to you. Again, Link Prospector is not at fault for what is being returned, it brings back what it finds when searching. If the engines have garbage results, so does the tool. If a webpage uses a term conversationally and out of context, it doesn’t “understand” that and returns the page anyway.
You’ll have the same results if you search by hand, it will just take hours longer and won’t come in a neat and exportable package. Here is where using the best keywords and the tilde (~) will help tremendously by returning a wider array of results. Sadly, I had to stumble on this little tidbit to try it out, it was not included in the main help video.
The main help video, which is over seven minutes long and done in one shot, should come with a timed tabled of contents and a transcription accessible from every page and point in the campaign. For now it doesn’t, so if you want to review the main help video while working, you have to log out to see it or pull up a second tab and start over.
The site lacks a FAQ section (this would help with specific points) or a section explaining advanced search operators. It also lacks a detailed explanation for the LTS (Link Target Score), there is one but I had to email Garrett for the information.
Understanding what LTS is and knowing how to use it would be a big help when reviewing results. Even though LTS analyzes pages based on criteria set by Link Prospector, having this information and knowing how sites are scored would go a long way to helping qualify pages during the review process.
Link Prospector is a good research tool for the serious link builder, you will definitely find a lot of potential link partners when using it. Take advantage of the free trial before you begin, it will help you get used to the large amounts of data the tool produces and help you plan a way to use it. I recommend you play both videos several times before launching your first campaign and have Garrett’s email handy as you work.
So what does it cost?
Depending on how many credits you need each month, the price ranges from $27 per month (for 20 credits) to $347 per month (500 credits). At Netvantage we seem to do just fine with 50 credits per month for $47 per month. Most reports we run cost 1-2 credits. The size of the report dictates how many credits you use. If you want to pull Google’s first 20-100 results for a links query it’ll likely only cost you one credit. If you want to go 500 results deep, your cost is going to go up. Fortunately, before you submit, LP tells you what your report is going to cost you so you can adjust accordingly if you’re running low. If you do run out, there’s also a nice feature that allows you to top off your credits for $2 a credit (minimum of 5).
