Traffic Marks: Terrific New Linkbuilding Tool

Filed in Link Building, SEO & Web Tools by Matt McGee on July 30, 2008 18 Comments

Traffic Marks logoThere’s no shortage of excellent link building in SEOville, and I’ve found another one to add to my own toolset. It’s called Traffic Marks, and I stumbled on it tonight while reading a post from Manoj Jasra’s Web Analytics World.

Traffic Marks helps you locate authority sites — sites that would make good places to acquire links. You supply a keyword and it grabs the Top 10 sites in Google for your keyword, and it crawls those sites’ first 100 +/- backlinks (I assume from Yahoo Site Explorer) to find sites/pages that link to the Top 10 most often.

Here are some screenshots using the keyword “canon digital cameras:”

trafficmarks screenshot 1

As you can see above, Traffic Marks has identified the top 10 link targets for this keyword — what it calls your “Traffic Marks” — and also shows how often those link targets link to the sites that rank in the Top 10. From this example, we see that khake.com links to four of the sites in the Top 10. If you click the “Show Details” link, here’s what you get:

trafficmarks screenshot 2

It shows you that khake.com links to the sites that are ranked #3, #4, #6, and #8 and tells you which pages those links appear on. Nice! So, if site #8, digitalcamera-hq.com, is your competitor, you should be looking to get a link on khake.com/page45.html.

You can also analyze the data by starting with the Top 10 ranking sites and seeing how many of the “Traffic Marks” links to each one. Here’s what that looks like:

trafficmarks screenshot 3

It’s the same data, just organized differently. And there’s also a matrix view that presents the top 10 “traffic marks” charted up against the Top 10 ranking pages.

Does it Work?

After taking Traffic Marks on a handful of test runs, I’m impressed enough to add it into my linkbuilding tool bookmarks. It presents relevant, helpful information in an easy-to-digest format.

It does break down a bit, however, when you get into local search queries and other queries where authorities and hubs are more difficult to find. For example, use “seattle restaurants” as your keyword, and only seven “traffic marks” are found; search for “seattle italian restaurants” and that number drops to four. For queries like these, you may need to dig deeper than 100 backlinks to find common link sources. Traffic Marks just so happens to offer a “Deep Search” option which does exactly that — at a subscription cost of $397/year.

At the moment, the regular (non-deep) Traffic Marks tool is free, although on the MindValley Labs blog post announcing the tool, author Amir Ahmad says you should use it “for free, while it still is.”

Here’s one vote from a satisfied user that the regular version of Traffic Marks always remains free. If so, I’ll be using it quite regularly. It’s a terrific linkbuilding tool.

Comments (18)

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  1. Programming Examples: Seo Link Building | March 21, 2009
  1. daniel says:

    hey, matt, how are you doing?

    I signed up for an account but sadly could not get it to work: Error messages only!

    How about a post listing of *all* of your linkbuilding tool recommendations!?

    I hope life’s good,

    daniel

  2. Thanks for this post about this new product. It looks like it could be a worthwhile SEO tool to test out…thanks!

  3. Ryan Rose says:

    Matt,
    This is a pretty good tool. Thanks for the heads up. I appreciate your daily delicious links.

    Thanks again,

    ryan

  4. Hi Matt, thanks a lot for this great review and for all the useful feedback.

    Just to clarify, yes, the non-deep search feature in Traffic Marks is indeed free. We still haven’t decided whether it will remain so or not. If we do decide to charge for it, it will obviously be cheaper than the Deep Search feature. However for now, it’s completely free and hopefully we’ll try and keep it that way.

  5. adia says:

    Another SEO tool that seems like a good idea but does not work.

    Error:Deep Search is not enabled on this account, learn more

    Click learn more about deep search = 404

  6. Erika says:

    It’s a great idea… kinda reminds me of link diagnosis. If the price of the DS is at $500, I’d only hope that the basic service remains free. Or if that, provide some sort of trial usage.

  7. Hey Matt –

    Thanks for posting this great find. I am having issues as well trying to get the account to work but look forward to giving it a try.

    Cheers –

  8. Donace says:

    sounds like a very useful tool; gonna give it a whirl while comparing to SEO elite results for its similar function.

  9. EH says:

    Thanks for writing about this new tool. I will definitely check it out.

  10. DJones says:

    I also tried to use the service after registering for free, but when I input a term it takes me to the “upsell” for Deep Linking service.

    Hope they fix it or tell you they are going to immediately upsell you (not appreciated).

  11. Matt McGee says:

    DJones — put your keyword into the search box, and then hit SEARCH. You’re hitting the DEEP SEARCH button, which takes you to the page that says you have to upgrade your account.

  12. Hi everyone, my name is Amir and I’m on the team behind Traffic Marks.

    If any of you are still having trouble getting signed up or have any questions, please do shoot me an email…

    amir AT mindvalley *DOT* com

    Cheers everyone and thanks again Matt for this thorough review.

  13. Matt,

    Great find and thanks for sharing with us. Can never get enough of useful tools for backlinks! Have you tried LinkXL.com?

  14. Sean Wiese says:

    @djones – i am having the same ‘upsell’ problem. Sent an email to the above listed Amir. Will update as the situation changes.

    Sean

  15. Sean Wiese says:

    update – not sure if this is a full answer, but in speaking with the above Amir. I have NOT had the same issue on my home computer (MAC w/ FF3) but have at work (PC w/ IE6)

  16. Arun Gangwar says:

    Nice one. But deep linking is not working.

  17. Robert says:

    Tried your software free trial and with a little more work I can take the top ranking sites and do link:www.website.com in Google and find the same info. Traffic Marks is providing. put it into a Excel Sheet and compare multi sites for free. also SEO for Fire Fox gives me all that information for free as well. I think you have a great service but your price is to high. When for a little more work I can do the same thing for free it may just take a little longer.

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