We will soon be releasing the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for a powerful new feature that we have been using for a while now for both Notifier and some of our other projects that are more media and content marketing focused.
That is backlink monitoring.
Why Monitor Backlinks?
Several years ago I was doing outreach for another project of mine. We reached out to a high DR site and they agreed to give us a link if we provided a 1500 word guest post for their site. My writer wrote an amazing article and the high DR site posted it.
A few months later I was reviewing things in Ahrefs and I clicked on their lost links feature. I saw no important lost links. Great!
Then I changed the time frame to greater than 60 days back.
Nothing looked important except…wait…I thought I recognized one of the domains. I looked at the full url and realized it was to the 1500 word guest post we had setup! The link was no longer in the post!!
Ahrefs had not notified me!
When I finally reached back out to the site it turns out they had been going back through old posts and cleaning up formatting. One of their virtual assistants unknowingly removed my link from the article.
Ahrefs and other tools will not notify you quickly about missing links
Without paying a lot that is!
So listen, I love ahrefs and have been a paying user for years now.
As I have said before I got started with entrepreneurship through content marketing and driving traffic through SEO.
But their Pricing structure is not setup to make it affordable to monitor links and get notified quickly when something happens to a link.
In fact, you would have to pay $400 a month before they would start alerting you daily of any missed links:
And of course Ahrefs actually doesn’t capture every link.
And it also does not allow you to define a list of links to monitor.
Finally you also cannot store and capture important other attributes about the link such as contact email, etc.
We built Our own tool and soon you will be able to use it also!
All of that is why years ago we built our own link monitoring tool that ran off of a spreadsheet.
Now, we have decided to add that functionality to Notifier!
Works with Google Sheets
Notifier’s link monitoring will work with a Google sheet or a public csv url.
Above is an example of what the structure of the spreadsheet could look like.
And below is a mock up we have live in production today of what the MVP will look like.
Or define links individually in our Dashboard (post MVP)
Post MVP we are going to be adding a nice dashboard where you can add and keep track of links individually.
Storing a copy of the page
Post MVP we are also going to be storing a copy of the page that we can render for you at any time.
The idea behind this is that it’s good to know what text, etc was on the page in case the entire page suddenly goes missing. This also helps you in talking to the site so you know exactly what was there and has now gone missing.
We can contact the site for you when we detect missing links
We are also going to be working on an option where if we detect a missing link we can immediately email the site for you (copying you of course) and notify them of the missing link.
That way they can rectify or reach out to you for explanation.
What do you need to do next?
Create an account for Notifier and we will let you know when the MVP of this feature is available.
But when?
This is software development, the answer is always two weeks:
