Mass link lookup tool

[Unknown Webmaster]

Does anybody know of a tool that let you put in a list of ca. 100 domains and then supply you with an overview of how many backlinks each one have?

I tend to gather these big lists of domains that I may want to buy, and a bulk backlink checker would give me a general idea about whether or not someone has been messing around with them before me, and to what degree.

[Michael Martinez]

The links may not pass value after you buy the domains if you change the content.

Also, if you don't control the links then whomever you buy the domains from may have the ability to change them, thus depriving the domains of any residual value.

I know domains are offered for sale all the time here. I don't wish to suppress what seems to be a viable market. But it sounds like you're looking to branch out into other verticals.

Be very careful out there. A lot of dirty tricks have been pulled on people thinking it would be easy to buy their ways to search engine success.

[Unknown Webmaster]

A bit of explanation of what I'm hoping to do may be in order. My original post may give the wrong impression - Okay, it sounded like I were about to do something really dumb

I'v kind of backed into a situation where I create these fairly big lists of potential domains when I'm doing keyword research for articles. Most of them turn out to be worthless, but once in a while I have stumbled across some decent ones that I want to develop.

At the moment I do a search for links to each domain to get a general idea of what the previous owner were up to - I also look for other things, but checking for links seems to be the easiest way to see if anyone serious has owned the domain in the past, and especially if I should be worried about any negative effects that may carry over to me (spammers and unethical businesses often leave footprints).

I obviously wouldn't mind if I could get some good links to keep passing value to a domain after I put my own site up on it (seems kind of unlikely to me), but my main motivation is just to get a faster way to do what I am already doing.

[Unknown Webmaster]

I have coded a tool myself - It basically just take a list of domains and add a little bit of extra information that I find useful, nothing fancy.

It is hardcoded with my own Yahoo Developer ID and would also make a pretty handy tutorial in screen scraping for a novice spammer, so I'm not going to upload it.

On the odd chance that anybody wants it, you can send me a PM (you will need to know a bit of Java to use it).

[Michael Martinez]

Yahoo! seems to report the most links of all the services but many of their links don't actually exist.

You would probably do well to compare link data from multiple services. Of course, which services will provide you that data? Google's link operator only reports a random sampling of links (and it will mix "rel='nofollow'" links in with value-passing links).

SEOmoz's Linkscape is popular with many people but it's not yet as fully robust as I expect it to become in say a year or two (I have no inside information on the tool, but SEOmoz updates the index on about a monthly basis).

Majestic SEO offers its own link research tool called Majestic 12.

None of the tools that I have tested provide what I feel are reliable data, but if you can build a large picture using data from multiple tools, you should be able to determine the strength of most sites that have large backlink profiles without having to worry about which links are passing value.

By the same token, you should be able to see if a site has a lot of spammy links by doing this kind of cross-tool analysis. It's a more advanced technique and is time-consuming (and costly) but it would be a better method than relying on any one service, as none of them can tell you what the other services know or allow to pass value in their own indexes.