URL Profiler: Link Building, Link Audits, Content Audits & More

URL Profiler is a software based link auditing tool that can analyse large numbers of sites at both URL and domain level. Unlike a lot of its competitors URL profiler is software based, which means it is pretty quick and won’t get slowed down by high server demand like web based products. Patrick Hathaway, director and developer of URL Profiler, describes its evolution: “As I guess most tools start out, URL Profiler started out life as a simple tool to help us with tasks we were performing on a day to day basis… We basically sought to replicate the manual processes we were doing again and again in Excel, and just automated them. As we’ve developed the tool we have tried to maintain the focus on speeding up common tasks that internet marketers find themselves doing.” The tool pulls data in from various sources like Mozscape, Majestic, Ahrefs, Alexa, SEMrush, Wayback Machine, Copyscape and uClassify, pumping out a huge variety of data that you can then filter and analyse to your hearts content in Excel. URL Profiler’s uses can broadly be split into three distinct areas.

Unnatural Link Audits URL Profiler probably excels most as a backlink auditing tool, allowing you to pull in a huge number of links across multiple csv files at once and analyse them all en masse. This is perfect for dealing with Google manual penalties by rapidly identifying bad links or proactively trying to avoid ever getting a penalty in the first place (recommended) by doing a spot of housekeeping on your backlink portfolio. Setting your domain and anchors will allow you to specify what the tool goes to look for and how it classifies each link. Dodgy links are then classified in one of several categories (such as suspect, optimised or unnatural). Links are then further split out by location (advert, bio, comments, content, footer, header, etc), live / dead links, text / image links and anchor text types.
Link Prospecting One of the great selling points of URL profiler is the volume of links it can churn through and this makes it a very powerful link prospecting tool. By pulling in API keys from Mozscape, Majestic and Ahrefs you can quickly sort prospects by individual domain level metrics and Alexa and SEMrush allow you to sort prospects by traffic stats. Finally uClassify helps you quickly sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of prospect relevancy.
Content Audits Conducting a content audit and building a content inventory is a powerful way to analyse your own site and identify thin or duplicate content (great for avoiding any dreaded Panda algorithmic penalties from Google). For this you want to set your connections low to around 10 max and utilise the uClassify options in the settings to pull in information about topic, tone and sentiment (see below for more on uClassify).

Settings

Connections Configuring the max number of connections that URL Profiler will make is key to optimising the tool for speed. The more connections, the faster the tool will run but the more likely it is to crash. Max connections are dependent on the processing power of your machine, the speed of your internet connection as well as the size of the dataset you’re going to import.
Link Analysis This allows you to set maximum retries which tells the tool to retry if the URL times out or returns errors. It will do this every ten minutes up to the maximum number of retries you set it (up to five retries at an extra 50 minutes processing time). This is useful to make sure you don’t miss any links for sites that are temporarily down.
Link Metrics This option allows you to tweak how much API data you want to retrieve from URL Profilers three major API keys; Majestic SEO, Mozscape and Ahrefs.
Social Another brilliant function is the ability to scrape social shares and social network links for each URL you put into the tool. This is particularly useful when link prospecting as it allows you to sort sites that are active on social media from those that aren’t.
uClassify uClassify analyses the content of each URL to assess a number of different factors. These are topics, tonality, language, sentiment, mood and age. Whilst uClassify Public Classifiers are far from spot on every time, they do help you build up a picture of each URL and when filtered intelligently in Excel can become a very powerful link prospecting feature.

Pricing URL Profiler comes with a two week free trial after which you have four price options to choose. These are as follows:

Solo £9.95 + VAT per month 1 machine license and 5000 max URLs per import
Pro £12.95 + VAT per month 2 machines licenses and 50,000 URLs per import
Server £19.95 + VAT per month 1 machine license for any Windows server and Desktop) and 250,000 URLs per import
Agency £29.95 + VAT per month Unlimited machines licenses (users must have agency email address) and 150,000 URLs per import

For a free trial of URL Profiler just visit this link. Data Options The level of data that URL Profiler can pull from various APIs is undoubtedly impressive. Below are a list of the options available on each import (these can be selected or deselected as required):