Majestic

Majestic SEO is one of the best link intelligence tools available to website owners today and the best part is that it’s free, at least a big part of it is, and definitely holds it’s own against tools such as Link Explorer from Moz and link data from RavenTools.

Navigation in Majestic SEO

Anchors

The “Anchors” page will show you the anchor text of your links as collected by Majestic SEO. If you notice that some of your links have bad anchor text, you can contact the linking sites and ask politely to change the text to something more meaningful. You have to be careful doing this though so that you don’t risk getting your links removed. Be polite and don’t ask for something unreasonable, for example an ugly keyword rich link. Remember that bad anchor text is better than no link at all.

Ref Domains

If you navigate to the “Ref Domains” page, you’ll see a list of websites that are sending you traffic. This can be helpful because these are sites that have already linked to you and may link to you again. You can try contacting the site owner or one of the writers to begin a business relationship. Eventually, you might be able to write a guest post on their site with a link leading to your site or you could even just mention an article you’ve written recently that they might be interested in. After creating a networking relationship with someone be careful not to send him or her everything you create and instead focus on the “top shelf” stuff so that you don’t end up annoying them.

History

You can view the chart to see the “backlink discovery “of your site. This shows the rate at which your site has been gaining links. It should look very natural. An example of an unnatural link profile would be if you saw a large jump in one month and then a massive decrease a couple months later, or vice versa. Instead, your link profile should steadily increase or stay stable.

Top Backlinks

Next up is the “Top Backlinks” page, which is only available to subscribers. These are the incoming links to your site that Majestic is feels are the most powerful. If what they show doesn’t look great, you should consider working on building higher quality links to your site.

Gathering the Data

There are several other pages of data available in Majestic, which you can look over on your own, but let’s skip ahead to creating a report and building links to your site.

On the options page, you can set a variety of things, but I leave everything default, except for the source flags section. Majestic automatically default to select Nofollow, Deleted, AltText, and Mentions, which means they won’t analyze any of those links in your report.

Reclaiming Removed Links

If you sort by FlagOldCrawl, this will show you which links Majestic has found before and on what page, but then a later crawl found the links to have been removed. You can use this to visit the page, see if it was a quality link and decide if you want to contact the site owner to try to get your link back.

Alt Text Reclamation

Sorting by FlagAltText will show you links that have been placed on images that have used the alt attribute to describe your link. Alt text works similarly to anchor text, but has less value. You can contact the site owners to see if they will change it to something more descriptive if possible.