SpiralDB is a free, new Chrome extension that helps you evaluate a domain you’re visiting from the backlinks point of view. It’s a collaboration between LinkRisk, Majestic, Ahrefs and SEMrush.
Why use it?
When undertaking link building, link removal or doing outreach it is crucial to quickly evaluate sites to ensure you judge their domain authority and “naturalness” accurately.
This tool allows you to do it quicker by combining a set of stats on one screen instantly. This saves you a lot of time instead of jumping between tools to check all different metrics.
How to get it?
You can use it for free by going to http://spiraldb.com/ website and registering.
You will then receive the download link and the link to the Chrome plugin and your password via email.
Using SpiralDB
Now that’s even easier than registering. If you install the Chrome plugin – it will appear in your usual tools location to the right of the address bar.
- Go to the website of your choice
- Click on the SpiralDB icon
- Get awesome insights
Here’s what results for StateOfDigital.com look like:
LinkRisk – Peek feature
This feature shows:
- If there are any other sites on the same IP – if this number is high (more than 5) this may mean the site belongs to a network and you don’t want a link from it
- Same goes for ‘sites with same adsense’ and ‘sites with same analytics’ – this often indicates a link/content farm
- Counter of page indexed in Google – very useful for evaluating the overall quality of content. The higher the number the better.
- Whether the domain is monetized – is someone making money from ads on it
- Social shares – counter for Tweets, Facebook shares and Google+ of the domain homepage
Majestic
With Majestic you get a snapshot of the:
- Domain Trust Flow – how trustworthy is the domain
- Domain Citation Flow – how many backlinks it has
Ideally you only want to engage with domains with Trust of 20 or 25+.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs shows the domain rank. It measures how many unique linking domains this site has linked to it. The higher number the better. 50 is really quite good – 90 is extremely rare. If a site has zero – you don’t want to have anything to do with it.
SEMrush
The graph below is a search traffic estimate via SEMrush.
This is possibly the quickest way to see if a domain has been penalised. If that graph drops sharply – the site has some problems and you don’t want to be involved with it.
Equally if the graph is close to zero, it’s probably a dead domain (a link farm or a content farm) not worth bothering with.
SpiralDB in action
Let’s quickly compare two domains, homeinteriorsblog.com is the first site.
Within 1 second you can see the site has no shares, no trust flow, no domain rank, no visibility – you can discard it or mark it not to ever consider again in your lead management software.
Designmilk.com is the second one:
We can see that all stats are coming out clean:
- No sites featured on the same IP or with same adsense code
- Impressive number of social shares
- Good Trust Flow and Citation Flow
- High ahrefs Domain Rank
- Steady SEMrush Visibility
Over to you
I think this is a really easy to use and time saving extension that will not be part of my everyday toolkit.
If you’d like to try it, head over to http://spiraldb.com/ and grab a free copy.
