The Link Explorer allows you to analyse links and anchor text within Sitebulb's user interface, which offers an extremely powerful and flexible mechanism for performing link analysis.
It looks like this:
You can jump straight into the Link Explorer itself, through the top navigation:
Or alternatively, the Links report itself contains a number of 'data insights' which you can click through to view a pre-filtered list in the Link Explorer, for example:
This table splits out internal links based on where the links are located on page. Click on the black underlined numbers to jump into the Link Explorer.
Using the 'Unique' links, in combination with the link location, can make for a powerful combination.
For example, look at the top row, this shows that we have almost 9,000 internal links that live in the header. However, there are only 34 unique links, since every page on our site uses the same 'header' template.
We can click on the '34' to see open these header links to view in the Link Explorer. Since we are only looking at unique links in this case, the list will only show one example link in the 'referring URL' column:
Along the top of the Link Explorer, there are a number of pre-filtered dropdown lists, a Target URL search and an Advanced Filter.
If you hover over the dropdowns you can see all the pre-built filters along with the number of links for each one, and clicking through will bring you to the list of links in the explorer.
This allows you to jump into Internal or External link data, or into Internal or External Anchor text data.
The target URL search enables you to quickly filter the list you are in, based on a full or partial match of the target URL. When doing internal link optimization, it is the target URL that is important, so being able to filter on this can surface the most relevant data very quickly.
By clicking the Adv. Filter button you will open up a panel that allows you to filter on any column with multiple different rules.
You can click the green buttons to Add Rule or Add Group to build nested filters, as below. This allows you to mix and match the AND/OR statements for much more fine-tuned filtering.
By selecting one of the dropdowns related to anchor text, you turn the Link Explorer into an Anchor Text Explorer instead.
It brings you to a view which is very similar to default links view, but focused around anchor text.
The 'Links' column joins up with the link data, so if you wish to explore the links for a specific anchor text variation, you can click the underlined value and this will show you a list of links that use this anchor text:
