Using Blekko for Backlinks Research	4.0/5.0 (1 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Navneet Kaushal August 13, 2012

Blekko (http://blekko.com/) – is a search engine that calls itself ‘the spam free search engine’ and uses slashtags to help users to filter and customize their search queries. All this said, Blekko has emerged as a great SEO tool for checking backlinks, copied content, crawl details and what not.

You can use Blekko to check your backlink profile. You can easily get detailed information on the number and origin of backlinks and more. This also makes Blekko a great tool to know what the competitor has been up to.  Now, when one speaks of backlinks research and gathering data, here is what you need to find the answers for:

• The number of unique root domains linking to the site? For your site, the more high quality backlinks, the better. If you have one link from a number of good domains you are in a better position than someone having a number of links from a single root domain.
• You must also find out the number of backlinks which are nofollowed ? You should have a healthy percentage of nofollowed backlinks too, unless you want to catch the suspicious eyes of search engines for not having any nofollowed backlinks.
• The research will tell you whether you have a natural anchor text distribution or not. With the Penguin, it is recommended that you do not have many of your site's backlinks as an exact match of the anchor text.
• You should find out whether you have backlinks from relevant and related sites. This is important to raise your authenticity and authority in front of the search engines and make you stand out as a good source of information about your industry.
• You must find out the number of backlinks from authoritative root domains. It will also help you identify the links from poor quality sites and you can get rid of those links then.

Using Blekko as a Backlinks research tool

You can use Blekko to track down links either by using the slashtags- “/links” and “/domainlinks” after the URL and you will find all inbound links to the site.

Simply click on the SEO option below the search results, and you will get a data of inbound links to the competitor’s web site. You can see two pie charts of inbound links from across the various US states and from across the globe and different countries.  The pie chart shows regional link distribution quite clearly and you can further research on why certain pages rank in particular countries. This will also help you in finding out the rankings for queries where location is important.

As you can see in the image, there is a number of ‘inbound links- 2,852’. Now we can assume that this number – 2852 is the maximum number URLs shown in the report. Click on the number and you will arrive at a table laying out the host name, rank, number of links, last crawled and actions to take. The rank here signifies the host’s rank and the actions include three choices:

1. Compare the site with the site linking to the site being analyzed

2. The hosting information of the site where the inbound link is coming from

3. To check the SEO profile of the site where the inbound link is coming from

Further delving into the report allows you to see graphs of data that you can examine as per any anchor text. You can see the number of links with that anchor text and Blekko will also mark the number of links it considers as ‘good’.

Now, as it is with any third party research tool, there can be doubts about the indices used by the tool and their closeness to the indices of the major search engines. But, overriding such concerns, we can say that Blekko suffices as a backlinks research tool and even more so for keeping an eye on the competition.