Build A Free Link Clipping Alert Service
This column will focus on
how you can build your own free web link clipping service, which you can
use to track anything from mentions
of your site in print, to spotting new
links to your site. I know there are many paid web clipping services
available, some of which are very good, but they are also quite costly.
Before you pay an arm and a leg for clipping services, see what you can
do on your own. This column will focus on one of
the more popular things people like to track or clip online: new links
to your site.
Imagine this scenario: Anytime a
new link to your site is found, you receive a private email alerting you
to it and showing you the exact page where the link to you can be seen.
Now imagine this fabulous service not only exists, but also is free. With
a little ingenuity, you can create such a service on your own, right now,
in five minutes. I’ll show you how in a moment.
As a Webmaster or Web marketer, you
like to know when another site has linked to your site. With a billion
Web pages out there, that’s a pretty tall order. Many times you will be
linked to without even knowing it. Not everyone sends you an email when
they link to you. For example, directories, link lists, topical Web guides,
and even Web-based newsletters that review other sites do not send out
an email notifying every site they have set up a link to.
While there is no perfect notification
solution, there is one way to be alerted of new links. In fact, any site
owner or Web marketer can cobble together a service that will send them
an email anytime a new link to their site is found. It’s this simple: Use
one of the many Web-page-change-alert services.
Instead of providing a site with
a static page to examine daily for changes, go to your favorite search
engine. Once there, do a link search, take the resulting URL(s) (with your
search results), and then have the tracking service track those URL(s)
every day. It sounds harder than it is, but I know it works. How do I know?
Well, every morning I receive an email report that shows me the new links
pointing to my site.
What? Don’t believe me? Let’s try
it together right now. The following simple steps make it really easy:
Step 1: Open Two New Browser Windows
First, open two new browser windows
along with this column. In the first new browser window, paste in (and
then go to) this URL: http://www.trackengine.com
(an excellent free service called TrackEngine). Take two minutes to
create a new account. (It’s free.)
Now go back to your second new browser
window and paste in this URL: http://www.altavista.com.
You should have a total of three
windows open: this article, the TrackEngine
site, and the search engine AltaVista.
Step 2: Do a Link Search to Your
Site
Next, do a search at AltaVista for
links to your site by typing the following URL in the search-box link:http://www.URLwire.com.
(Remember to replace URLwire.com
with your site’s URL.)
Once you click the search button
and get your results,
you are looking at the number of pages within the AltaVista database that
have links on them to your site. Depending on the quality of your content
and the length of time your site has been around, you could have as many
as a couple hundred links or just a couple.
Step 3: Create a Bookmark and
Track
Here’s where we get clever. The AltaVista
search results have a very long URL string (over 70 characters long) in
the location area of that browser window. The long URL looks like this
http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/web?q=link%3Aurlwire.com&avkw=qtrp&kl=XX
This long URL is what we want to
track because it is actually nothing more than our original query (i.e.,
the original URL we typed in — link:http://www.URLwire.com,
now included directly in the location area along with our search results.
Go back to the TrackEngine
site, and once your account has been opened, click on “Create bookmark.”
Using your mouse, copy the
long URL from AltaVista’s search results into the “Track this page”
box at TrackEngine.
Follow the directions at TrackEngine
for the other two fields, and viola! You’ve successfully created a free
link-alert service.
In a nutshell, what you have done
is instructed TrackEngine to go
to AltaVista every day, run your links search, and email you the results
only when those results have changed from the previous day. And an added
bonus is that these changes will be highlighted in blue by TrackEngine automatically. You
have just scored a shiny, new links report in your inbox on a regular basis.
Builder Beware
Now the important thing to remember
is that this type of service is not comprehensive, so you shouldn’t base
any critical business decisions on it. Since you are searching only the
AltaVista database, your results will be only as thorough as AltaVista’s
findings. But (and this is a big but), it’s pretty darn good considering
it’s free. Since you receive email only when the results have changed,
you will find yourself getting excited when you see new email from TrackEngine.
The beauty of creating an alert service
is that it’s so simple you can do it yourself without examining server
logs or contacting your server administrators. And you can create additional
TrackEngine reports with other search engine results.
You could even create one to keep up with new links to a competitor’s site.
TrackEngine is one of many services
that you can use to cobble together a mini tracking system. Another one
is TracerLock, and the oldest one of all, Mind-it. Using a little
ingenuity and available free services, you’ll be amazed at the tracking
data you can have sent directly to your inbox, free of charge.
In the second part of this article,
I will discuss how to clip online news services, newsgroups, and discussion
lists.
Building your own online links clipping
service,
part 2
In part one of this column, I discussed
how to use free online tools to cobble together your own clipping service,
which you can then use to track anything from mentions of your clients
to spotting new links to their sites.
In part two of this column, I’m going
to focus on two other key areas you can monitor at no cost; print publications
and newsgroups.
Remember our old friend TrackEngine
at http://www.trackengine.com
? TrackEngine is the free service that lets you track any URL for
changes, and alerts you via email when they find one. As stated earlier,
TrackEngine can also track search results for changes, as long as the URL
generated along with the search results is unique. TrackEngine calls your
individual tracking searches “Bookmarks”.
With this knowledge, you can thus
check ANY searchable database on the web and be alerted to changes.
Here’s how to use this to track print magazine article mentions of your
clients. Most print magazines now post an online version of their
magazine content. Some purposely run about a month behind online,
so print subscribers still feel they are getting a subscriber “benefit”.
FindArticles.com
is a search service of archives of published articles that you can search
for free. Constantly updated, it contains articles dating back to 1998
from more than 300 magazines and journals. If your client is Nike,
and you want to track mentions of them in 300 magazines at once, you can
easily do so by using FindArticles and TrackEngine. Just search on
the term “Nike” at FindArticles, and paste the resulting
URL string into a new TrackEngine Bookmark. That’s it. Select
how often you want TrackEngine to check for new mentions, and forget about
it. The next time the word Nike appears in a printed article in any
of the 300 magazines FindArticles archives, you’ll be sent an email and
know immediately. Considering all of this costs absolutely nothing,
you can’t beat the price. And FindArticles found over 5,000 mentions
of Nike from PR Newswire to Packaging Digest.
One of the more elusive areas to
monitor/track has been newsgroups. For years newsgroups were the
hangout of the technically savvy. There were and still are thousands
of newsgroups on every imaginable topic, from the Civil War to Pac Man.
It used to be that you needed special software to post and read newsgroup
messages, but a few years ago, a service called Deja News changed all that
when they built a web based front end to thousands of newsgroups.
Once they did this, anyone with net access and a web browser could join
the newsgroup party. Deja nearly vanished, and was then rescued by
Google, who now runs their newsgroup interface at http://groups.google.com/
You probably know where I’m headed
with this. Imagine your boss tells you he wants to know anytime your
company is mentioned anywhere on any newsgroup, so he can address any potential
PR nightmares before they get started. You might think this would
take hours and hours and cost thousands of dollars. Not at all. You can
do it for free. Google provides a search engine of ALL past and current
newsgroup posts from thousands of newsgroups. Literally terabytes
of data. And it’s all available to you for free. So, simply
type your company’s name into the Google newsgroup search box at http://groups.google.com/
, and then paste the resulting URL into a new TrackEngine Bookmark.
Now, anytime your company is mentioned
on any newsgroup, you’ll know within days, and the exact post where your
company was mentioned will be right there in your inbox. You can
even forward them to your boss via email, and look like a genius.
You built a fully functional tracking service and didn’t spend a cent.
I should point out that even though
the above approach works, there are many online nooks and crannies that
you cannot track using this technique. The widely discussed “Invisible
Web”, for example, cannot be fully tracked this way. There are many
quality fee based monitoring services you can explore if your needs go
beyond the scope of this article. But before you pay for it, try
my technique above. It really works.
Until next time, I remain,
Eric Ward, Link Mensch
October 14, 2002
What is link popularity? How do you get it? In several ways, none of which are easy. There are no shortcuts to the process of building links. Eric provides credible information about the art of link building, and dispels/debunks the many claims and rumors regading link popularity, especially as it relates to search engine rankings.
Eric Ward founded the Web’s first service for announcing and linking Web sites back in 1994, and he still offers those services today. His client list is a who’s who of online brands. Ward is best known as the person behind the original linking campaigns for Amazon.com Books, The Link Exchange, Microsoft.com, Rodney Dangerfield, WarnerBros, The Discovery Channel, the AMA, and The Weather Channel. His services won the 1995 Tenagra Award For Internet Marketing Excellence, and he was selected as one of the Web’s 100 most influential people by Websight magazine in 1997. Eric also writes the Link Building column for ClickZ, the NetSense column for Ad Age magazine, and is a 4-star speaker for iWORLD, Fawcette, and CNet.
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