Behind the scenes: Link Insight Beta

Posted by Richard Stokes on March 8, 2010 to Beta, Features, Link Building

After many months of prototyping, development, testing, and debugging ... Link Insight is about to come out of beta.

As some wise person recently said, "If you're satisfied with the v1.0 release of your software, you're too late to market." (I'm paraphrasing from memory. If you know the source and original quote, send it to us.)

Maybe I don't know who coined this, but it's totally true. I am not at all satisfied with the current state of the product. However, after giving many demos over the past few weeks (including some in sunny Maui last week at the Perry Marshall conference), I have been repeatedly surprised at just how far things have come. The data has surpassed my wildest expectations. But there are some things that I'm waiting impatiently for.

Note: Apologies to everyone who requested a beta account but didn't get access. We were slammed. We received nearly 6x the number of requests that we expected and our sales team has been working excruciatingly long hours to bring you on (they doubled their quota). I realize that will be of no comfort to those of you who wanted beta accounts, but there it is.

First - for those of you on the beta, there are some major changes that will be coming this week:

CuratorSignal renamed to SocialSignal

Some important curator models have been recategorized to the "Trust" signal category. We've consistently found that these rules are far higher in importance than social signals. Also, many people found that "CuratorSignal" was confusing. This signal type was dominated with social media models, so the name change makes a lot of sense.

Major overhaul of the setup wizard

We saw many different types of use cases during the beta period, ranging from tiny companies all the way to big, brand-name companies that everyone has heard of. Their approaches to link building vary significantly as does their awareness of the competitive set in their category.

To meet the needs of everyone, we've designed a new setup wizard that includes a variety of tools both for finding your dominant organic competitors as well as finding deep links on their sites.

Improved report load times

We're installing some serious iron this week in the data center (if you ever see our network admin, Brad, be sure to buy him a beer. He needs one after these past few months.) So everyone will be seeing a nice improvement in reporting speed this week. We've identified some other areas for improvement, but these will not likely hit until May.

Training videos

Training videos for this product are in the works and should be released this week! Expect three videos: one on theory, another on properly setting up an account, and the third on how to fully use the product.

Cosmetic changes

And finally, expect to see some cosmetic improvements in the reports. Minor tweaks here and there, but they really make a difference.

Ok, so what did we leave out?

There are some features we were not able to get to, but plan on including in the v1.1 release (May timeframe):

Domain Strength

Everyone wants to know how well they're doing on the search engines, but there really is no good measure for that today. So we created our own, called Domain Strength.

Domain Strength is a logarithmic scale which ranges from 1 to 100. It not only measures the number of keywords that a site is indexed for, but also reflects the traffic for those keywords. A megasite such as Google, eBay, or Apple will end up around 100. Tiny B2B sites (such as ours) will likely fall in the 40ish range. The important thing isn't to get hung up in the absolute number, but rather the relative domain strength for yours and your competitors' sites.

Domain Strength is exposed in the setup wizard, but it's not overlaid on the reports... yet. When it makes its way there, it will become immediately obvious which signals are the most important in any particular industry.

Follow/Nofollow links

This has been widely requested and it will be in the reporting interface very, very soon.

Improved workflow features

The workflow popup today is rather elementary. But soon it will allow you to track a history of of your link building efforts, share information for all links on a domain, and give you the ability to add your own custom steps.

A parting word...

If you've read this far, then the least I can do is leave you with a payoff. On Monday, I will announce a special offer on Twitter - a full 24 hours before we announce to the general public. If you're thinking about subscribing, then you will definitely want to keep an eye out for it. Follow me: @adgooroo.

-Rich