Provide SEO Audits – Large Scale Link Evaluation

Soft Eyes – Rapidly Identifying Unnatural Link Patterns

So how do you do link evaluation in this scenario? What’s the best way to ensure you really have identified the bad links? Personally, I just use the same “soft eyes” approach I have always used in all my audit work (and referred to in an article I wrote in 2011 over on SearchEnginePeople.com on how the approach helped me discover criminal activity during an audit).

Many years ago, while on a meditation and visualization retreat in the Santa Cruz mountains, attendees were taught the practice of “soft eyes”.  The technique is not unique to meditation – in fact, it’s used by military personnel, high performance athletes, race car drivers…   There are a wide range of uses and benefits of the technique.
The primary concept of this technique lies in the notion that as humans, we’re usually either focused on a lot of things, objects, thoughts, feelings at once, and by nature or upbringing, we tend to “miss” or otherwise “drown out” most of it as we go about out lives.  Driving on a highway, we fail to absorb the beauty of the surrounding landscape.  Sitting in a two hour meeting, we fail to observe the changing weather right outside the conference room window.
In worst case scenarios, this problem can be deadly. That highway driver fails to notice the driver next to them drifting into their lane of traffic, or the soldier scanning the horizon fails to notice the commando low-crawling up on their entrenched position.
Of course, those are extreme examples of how our power of observation usually works. Yet the same concept happens during the SEO audit process.  And can translate, during an inbound link review, into our feeling overwhelmed with all the data. Or becoming lost in the vortex of reviewing thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of links…
Start With The Raw Data
The first thing I do during a link evaluation audit is to go to Open Site Explorer and perform a data export.  For sites with hundreds or thousands of links, I just go directly to the “Inbound Links’ tab, then export a CSV file.  For sites with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of links, the export needs to come from the “Advanced Reports” functionality OSE provides, or that you can generate from BrightEdge or another source. (Although most rely on OSE data anyhow).
The key is that I want to get access to as many links as possible, across as many domains as possible.  Even this isn’t going to be enough if you’ve got millions of links, but it’s definitely the first big step to take. One of the audits currently on my plate has over 5 million links.  And though the data I was able to get hold of at this point is a limited portion, there are over 750,000 links in the CSV file.  That’s a pretty good start.

Relaxing Into Unnatural Pattern Identification

So how do I apply “soft eyes” techniques to link evaluation?  It’s a matter of taking several steps in a sequential process.
Thinning The Data
Note – when you have 750,000 links, your Excel program may blow up on you.  When that happens, you’ll need a more powerful program.  For this current project, I am using MS Access, because it can actually open the entire file at once, and then even crunch and sort the data where Excel would choke.
If you have exported “all” links, be sure to refine that down to only show external, followed or 301 links for this process. (Or just limit the export to those in the first place)
After refining down, the first thing I do is delete (or hide) all columns except URL, Title, Anchor Text and Target. While you may want to keep other columns, I find that by completely hiding other columns, I have that many fewer potential distractions visually.
Sorting Links To Scan For Patterns

Once I have thinned the data and hidden unneeded columns,  I sort alphabetically by Anchor Text, with a second sort factor on page Titles, and domains. Alternately you can switch it up and group by domain, then sort on the other columns, to give you another way to scan for patterns.  I usually run through a couple sort variations to be sure I didn’t miss anything obvious.
With my spreadsheet in front of me sorted by anchor text and domains, I can rapidly jump through the list to go right to those phrases associated with important keywords, or phrases you know the site was hammered on in rankings.
Then you begin scanning the domain and page Title columns for patterns.  And here’s an example of what can jump out at you: (NOTE – the site I used for this example is a site that offers a particular product type for sale within the automotive market)…