Monitoring exact link acquisition numbers is not something that i have had to look into with to much detail before but i was recently asked by one of my clients to report on the exact number of links we had each month. Although for many reasons this is not strictly valuable data (because you really want to know what links you have, the quality of them and of course the anchor text) i decided to do a bit of research.

I often find that Yahoo Site Explorer fluctuates the numbers pretty heavily so decided this was not an ideal solution. I then started looking in to a few options and asking people in forums. Two big suggestions came from it. The first being Linkscape which is of course SeoMoz’s high end link and site evaluation tool. I love this tool for many reasons and the metrics are extremely powerful but i found with out paying the huge custom reporting fee’s it didn’t output data in a friendly manner. This was important as the client is not particularly technical.

I then, one day while reading ‘the google cache‘ blog came across a post about a tool or i should say i Firefox extension which integrates with webmaster tools. This seemed ideal as Google although doesn’t list all the links to a site (like Yahoo) delivers reliable data. In delving into the extension further i found it deliver one crucial thing. That was an easy to understand interface. It shows a nice graph, which of course all clients can appreciate, especially if its heading in an upwards direction. Having a graph and the links in a table below make it a joy to use.

In essence the tool is pretty basic but if you want to share those basic numbers with clients this could be the one you were looking for. Being embedded in webmaster tools means it can also easily be used by your clients. I have been using the basic version but a more in depth pro version is available.