I was recently, well this week, asked to compare the SEOMoz Linkscape tool with InfluenceFinder. In order to do so I need to go back to basics and objectives.
Lets deal with objectives. For many many marketing reasons finding sites that have influence is hugely important. But influence is only one element of a 4 axis set of dynamics. The next one is performance – how well does at site peform from a traffic perspective? Then there is relevance – we believe it to be a strong ranking factor for Google. And then the big one is opportunity. Countless times in SEO I’ve found a fantastic partnering opportunity to discover it’s not an opportunity at all. It may look good but then you discover the last time it was updated was a year ago – oh and there’s not contact details.
So, how do we compare? Well Moz looks at influence well (although with a much smaller link map that we have). But’s that it.
We look at influence, performance, relevance and opportunity. In a link map of 1 trillion links.
More on this post later as I break down how we deal with each axis.