Link Harvester Updated

I think I have updated Link Harvester twice since I last posted new source code. It now allows you to grab link data via Yahoo! or MSN.

On top of allowing you to search for links at a specific page or links to anywhere in a domain it also has a third function called deep links which allows you to get a sample of deep link data without grabbing links pointing at the home page. The theory is that many good sites get deep links. Looking through the deep links may give you a better view of how they were acquired or if they are all garbage scraper links, etc.

By looking through the deep links you can

• check the quality of links pointing at inner pages.

• know what URLs you really need to redirect if you are changing your content management system.
• know what URLs are important to redirect if you buy a site and want to modify the content or gut out pieces that were causing duplicate content or other problems

Another useful feature of looking at the deep link profile is that if you look at the links pointing at sites that were not actively marketed via SEO techniques it can help you see what natural link profiles look like.

MSN tends to give some weird numbers with their backlink count sometimes and typically shows fewer backlinks than Yahoo! so by default when Link Harvester gives link counts like

Showing 421 unique domains from the first 250 results of 1129 total results

it means that between Yahoo! and MSN there were 421 unique results returned in the query. The of first 250 means that the link search depth was set to 250 per engine. The 1129 results is the number of links in the Yahoo! database (although they don't return 100% of what they know of they return most of them). If Yahoo is turned off the third number should be from MSNs database.