SEO Update

Check your back-links as Google knows them

There are at least three ways how you can explore your back-links in Google:

Google Webmaster Tool (specifically the Links to your Site-section) gives the best and most complete overview on how Google sees your back-links. However it is important to note that only the webmaster/owner of a website who has been verified can see these back-links. For your convenience you can even download all the links in a spreadsheet format and process them on your own computer.

The Link-operator in Google Web Search (link:yourdomain.com) shows anyone a number of the back-links of any website. It is very important to note that this overview is just a sample from a much larger set of back-links. The Link-operator in Google Web Search will never give you the total overview, just a number of back-links and even the total of this number can change every time you submit your query to Google.

Since the Link-operator only gives you a limited view of back-links, several people have found that you get a better (and more complete) sample of back-links with the following query: “yourdomain.com” -site:yourdomain.com. So let me translate this query for you: the first part means you are looking for any reference to yourdomain.com (note that the quotes are important), and the second part means that you want to ignore any reference to yourdomain.com from the domain yourdomain.com (more information on the Site-operator and other advanced operators can be found here). If a SEO or competitor performs an analysis of the back-links to your website, and does not have access to your Google Webmaster Tool account, then this will be one of the queries they will perform.

via Explore Your Back-Links. Here’s How! — Fili Wiese.

Duplicate content detection tools;

Here are some of the best duplicate content tools on the web that will not only check for other copies of your content on the web, but will identify internal issues you may have with your site.

1. Copyscape

Copyscape is probably the most popular duplicate content tool out there. This free service detects copies of your web pages across the web. The free version only returns no more than 10 results for any search, and you are limited to the number of searches you can perform. However they do offer two other premium services for users who need to be able to gather more in-depth duplicate content research. Copyscape premium offers a more comprehensive search for plagiarism detection along with features like batch search (up to 10,000 pages), copy and paste, manage cases of plagiarism, exclude certain sites, compare two urls, and automatic checks using the API.

copyscape-screenshot

2. Plagiarism Checker

This tool will allow you to enter a keyword, phrase, or sentence into the search field and it will return Google results of any other sites that have the same words entered. One cool feature the tool will allow you to do is set up a google alert, so it notifies you if someone copies your content.
plagiarism-checker

3. Plagiarism Detect

Plagiarism detect offers a free and premium version, similar to Copyscape. The free version of this tool will allow you to upload text and word doc files for analysis and will return detections found. The premium version has many other features including comparing two documents side-by-side, a more advanced algorithm and a Microsoft Word plugin, so you can check for plagiarism directly from word.

plagiarism-detect

4. Plagium

This plagiarism tool will display a visually pleasing diagram of detections of other websites that have copied your content. Plagium will show a calendar of when it was discovered. This tool will allow you to search over the entire web or strictly news sources. You may also refine by language and only check for duplicates in a specific language.
copy-usage

5. Virante

Virante offers a different type of duplicate content tool, that checks more for internal duplicate content issues. The issues it will check include www vs non-www redirect issues, similar pages on your site, issues with index.html vs /, properly returning 404 error pages for any pages that are missing, any PR issues between the www and non-www.virante

6. WebConfs

The WebConfs tool will take two urls and determine the percentage of similarity between the two urls. The lower the percentage the less similar the two pages are. webconfs

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