Struggling to manage your link building strategy? Don't worry, because today we bring you the solution with our complete FuSEOn Link Affinity tutorial.
If you are not entirely clear on what backlinks are, we recommend that, before reading this post, you take a look at our guide on backlinks. It will help you understand this post a lot better.
All set? Let's get to it, then!
Table of contents
What is FuSEOn Link Affinity?
FuSEOn Link Affinity is a tool that allows you to:
- Find websites that are semantically related to yours in order to get quality backlinks
- Manage relationships with the domains and media outlets you want to get backlinks from
- Buy posts directly from the tool
- Keep your link profile under control
Here we do have to point out that Link Affinity is not a link buying/selling platform, but a management one. Purchases are handled directly against the databases of other platforms, but they do not charge a commission for it.
Looks good, right? Well, wait, because you are going to love this…
Reminder: This article has not been sponsored by Link Affinity. We could just as easily have skipped it and carried on working with our clients. If we have written it, it is mainly for two reasons: first, to congratulate Sico and his team on this incredible creation and, second, to thank him for all the training he has given us and for the small wins we have achieved thanks to him and his team in the field of Link Building.
(David Kaufmann (CEO of SEO Alive))
Phases of a Link Affinity project
Below we will go through the different parts of a project inside this tool:
Search
In this first phase, the tool focuses on finding all the prospects or domains where it could be interesting to have a backlink.
Visibility Prospects
In this section we can find all kinds of sites that are already ranking on Google and that are related to the most important keywords on your site. To find these sites or domains, the tool offers us two options:
Standard search
Standard search in Link Affinity
In this search box we have to enter generic terms or keywords related to our product or website, the country and, if we want, the TLD of the domains. With this information, the tool will use different footprints to run searches on Google and find media outlets or sites related to the keywords we entered earlier.
At the bottom we will have a table storing every term we have searched for:
Previously saved searches in Link Affinity
If we enable the recurrence option (Add recurrence), the tool will run the query again every month to detect new media outlets or domains related to those terms. If, on the contrary, we want to disable it, all we have to do is click on the red X. If there are no new ones, it will add others it has not shown you before (for example, domains sitting in positions 30-40 for the searches carried out previously).
Advanced search
Advanced search in Link Affinity
If you are a footprints pro and you do not want to let the tool use them for you, this option will make Link Affinity run exactly the queries you have entered and add all the domains and sites it finds after that process.
Remember that you can complement standard searches with advanced ones, since all of them will be stored at the bottom.
Import Prospects
Import Prospects section in Link Affinity
In this section the tool lets you manually import any site or database you want to have analysed. On top of that, for more efficient management, it lets you add tags that will later appear on the links. For example, you can add “client database”, “old sites where links have been bought”, etc.
It also lets you import your backlink profile so that it moves on to the evaluation phase. And if you have Majestic or Ahrefs, you can use their API to import it directly.
Category Prospects
Category Prospects section in Link Affinity
In this case you will have to enter the general topic of your product or site and the system will take care of searching the databases of various platforms (such as LEOlytics, Unancor, Publisuites, etc.) for prospects that could be interesting for your project.
Competitor prospects
Competitor Prospects section in Link Affinity
This is a pretty interesting section. Here you can enter your competitors' domains and it will gather the links they have and acquire in order to add them to your list.
You also have the option of adding several competitors at once and looking for the links they have in common, or simply all of them.
Every search you run will be saved and Link Affinity will update their link profile monthly to find new domains.
Evaluation
In this phase the tool analyses the spam level of every prospect. In other words, the tool will automatically discard any domain with a high level of spam. As we will see below, all of this can be configured from the settings so you can choose how much spam you are willing to tolerate among your prospects.
Sections in this phase
So as not to make this post too long, here is a quick rundown of what you can find in each of the sections of this phase:
- All. Here we will find every site the system has considered to have a minimum level of quality as far as spam is concerned.
- Visibility Prospects. All the prospects found in the search part of the previous phase.
- Import Prospects. All the prospects from the import in the previous phase.
- Study Prospects. Any prospects you want to examine closely can be saved in this phase.
- Category Prospects. All the prospects extracted from the category feature in the previous phase.
- Competitor Prospects. All the prospects imported from your competitors.
- Nulls. All the discarded prospects.
As you can see, the content of each section is fairly intuitive, so you will have no trouble finding the information you need.
Let's move on to the good part:
Automation
This is where this tool's automation comes into play. To adjust it you have to go to Settings > Configuration > Automatize > Level of automation and there we raise the automation level to the maximum by dragging the bar.
It is worth noting that the Fuseon Rank metric combines several factors, although the main ones are Ahrefs' DR (Domain Rating) and Majestic's TF (Trust Flow) and CF (Citation Flow).
Within the settings, for the evaluation phase, we recommend adjusting these options:
Recommended settings for the evaluation phase in Link Affinity
In the third option you can choose the minimum quality level you want for your links. The higher it is, the fewer prospects you will have, but they will be of higher quality. Alternatively, you can set a lower minimum so that you are the one manually discarding or approving the sites the tool has found for you.
The fourth option will let you send straight to analysis every site with a Fuseon Rank above the level you have set.
If you do not want to leave everything on autopilot, a good option might be to set a low minimum so that anything below it (for example, below 20) is deleted directly by the tool, and then a minimum of 40 so that those are sent straight to analysis. That way you would be leaving every site between 20 and 40 for you to review manually.
We will leave the fifth option for the next phase.
Analysis
Once all the prospects have passed the spam filter and have a minimum level of quality, the tool goes on to analyse the semantic affinity between the prospect and our website.
This is the phase where the Link Affinity magic happens, because if you automate it, the tool will automatically discard every site or domain that is not worth considering within your link building strategy because of its low semantic affinity with your project.
Sections in this phase
- All. You will find all the prospects that have passed the spam filter.
- Analyzing linking. Here you will find all the prospects that are already linking to you.
- Bad linked. This lists all the sites that are linking to your project and are considered low quality.
- Analyzing. All the prospects in this status are the ones being analysed by the tool to calculate their level of affinity with our site.
- Dismissed. This is where all the prospects that are discarded after the affinity analysis end up.
Automation
Before we explain how this phase can be automated, it is important that you know these metrics.
- Risk level is a metric that takes into account, on the one hand, the domain's spam level from a much more meticulous perspective and, on the other, if you enter your Sistrix API, the visibility trend over the last three years (checking that there are no odd drops or spikes in a short space of time).
- Affinity is a metric obtained through a process in which up to 10,000 URLs of the site whose affinity you are evaluating are crawled and, using a machine learning system, it evaluates the affinity between your content and that of the analysed site.
Within the Affinity column, if you do not have it automated, a button will appear so you can trigger it manually. Once it has been calculated we can decide whether or not to send this prospect on to the management phase.
Now let's get to the fun part: automation
Within this phase, the tool lets us set up two more automations that we will again find under Settings > Configuration > Automatize > Level of automation. This automation lets us clean up the Analyzing linking section, that is, all those domains that are already linking to us. To do this you have to choose from which level you consider a link to be bad (linking bad) or good (linking good).
Automation settings for the Analysis phase in Link Affinity
This is the second automation in this phase. With this filter, as well as being able to automate the move of prospects from analysis to management, we can add affinity keywords. That way we can focus our link building efforts on the keywords we consider most appropriate.
Management
This is the phase where you should concentrate all your work, thanks to the automation of the previous phases.
All links management
Here you will find a list of all the prospects that have already passed the spam, quality and affinity filters.
Within this section you can carry out various actions that will take you to each of the following sections:
Self-management
If you see a link within the All links management section and you want to manage it manually, you have to choose the Self-management status:
Flow for switching a prospect to Self-management in Link Affinity
Within this section we can handle all the contact and management with the selected media outlet or domain ourselves. Once the negotiations are finished, you can set how the link ended up and move it to whichever category you want. For example, you could move it to won if you got it for free, or to buyed if you ended up having to pay for it.
Within the tables in the management phase, we will find a new column that will show us the recommended landing page for that backlink. On the other hand, remember that if we click on the affinity keywords button we will also get a word cloud with the words our site and the one we are analysing have the most affinity for.
FuSEOn Manage
If we do not want to go for “self-management”, the tool offers us the possibility of using FuSEOn management. If we enable this option, it will be the Link Affinity team that handles the link purchase and takes care of requesting a price:
FuSEOn Manage in Link Affinity
As you can see, we have several options:
- Ask for the price of a new post
- Ask for the price of being included in an existing post (plus a field to enter the URL of the post)
- Ask for the price of another marketing action (plus a field to describe that action).
Once you have decided what you want, the Link Affinity team will get in touch with them personally and negotiate with the media outlet to get you the best possible price.
On this point, it is worth noting that there is an automation within the settings that lets you send links from the analysis phase straight to FuSEOn management automatically. That way the Link Affinity team would request the price directly as soon as the conditions you set are met:
Automation for Fuseon Manage in Link Affinity
As you can see, this automation also lets you choose which of the FuSEOn management options you want them to carry out by default.
Remaining sections
Finally, in this phase we will find two more sections that come from the decision we made in the Analysis > bad linked part:
Bad Linked options in Link Affinity
- Contact to delete. It moves it to this section so you can get in touch with them and have the link removed.
- To disavow. It sends it to the section where the tool automatically generates a disavow file for you.
- Let it be. To do nothing with that backlink for now (remember that every domain has junk links in its link profile).
Monitoring
Finally, we reach the monitoring phase, where we can keep track of the outcome of all the previous phases.
Link Affinity monitoring panel, where we can see the real status of our links and prevent certain media outlets from switching them to nofollow, sponsored, etc.
The statuses we find within this phase are:
- All. Here we will have a list of every link we have.
- Won. This is where all the links we have obtained on our own will appear, that is, the ones that are of good quality and that we have not had to pay for.
- Deleted. All the links we have contacted the site about to have removed and successfully got taken down.
- Disavowed. All the links that have been disavowed.
- Buyed. All the links that have been bought and their current status (very useful for knowing whether the follow has been removed or the link has been deleted).
- To Review. Here we will have a list of all the prospects that have already published the post with your link. That way you will know which ones you need to check.
Within each of these sections, the tool will show us the status of the link and whether it still has the follow. What's more, you will receive an email for any kind of change within these sections.
Other useful Link Affinity settings
Now, before we finish, we will go over a few final settings that we think could be very useful to you:
Automatic link profile analysis
Within the tool's settings, in the automation section, we will find the Analyze automatically my link profile setting:
Link Affinity option to automatically analyse the project's backlink profile
Once enabled, the tool will automatically start analysing our link profile once a month and will start sending every spam link it detects pointing to our domain to the To disavow tab within the management phase.
What's more, within that same tab we will be able to generate the disavow file to upload straight to Google, including all the domains listed there:
Link Affinity button to generate a disavow file
If you have already uploaded a disavow file before, you can upload it to the tool as well so that it does not take those links into account, from Settings > Configuration > Disavowed File:
Option to upload previous disavow files in Link Affinity
Once the file has been uploaded, all those URLs will appear in the Monitoring > Disavowed tab as disavowed.
Automated post orders
Imagine you want to do link building for a category, a section or a group of products on your site, but you want to leave it completely on autopilot. If you have already checked how reliable the system is with your project and you trust it, you need to know that you can take it one step further.
With this automation option, which you will find under Settings > Configuration > Scheduling and automatic post:
Automatic post order settings in Link Affinity
Within this section you can schedule the tool to buy posts automatically according to the conditions you specify: maximum posts per week, the price of each one, the maximum amount you want to spend per week and the minimum affinity level (we recommend you leave this one on high).
If you create a new group, you will be able to choose the anchors you want, the landing pages, the affinity keywords your site shares with the domain you are buying from and, finally, any detail you want to add.
Once you have set everything up, the system will automatically pick an anchor, a landing page and a domain matching the characteristics you have set, at random, and make the purchase. If you have added several anchor and landing page options and you use this automated, randomised system, you will end up with a fairly natural link building strategy.
Reports
If you need any kind of report, the tool lets you export in detail every change in your link building strategy or link profile between the dates you select. You will find this option under Settings > Reporting:
Link Affinity reporting options
As you can see, you can choose the phase and the statuses within it that you want to export in the report.
This way you could provide detailed information about the current status of the strategy quickly and automatically.
Our experience
“To finish, I would just like to congratulate Sico and his team on the creation of this incredible tool. Link Building is probably one of the most complex areas of SEO if you want to do it well and efficiently. From the very first moment, Sico has offered us training, help with the setup, support… and that is why we have decided to give him this small review as a gift. First, so that the whole SEO world gets to know his wonderful tool and, second, to support the SEO professionals who decide to start doing quality link building.” (David Kaufmann, CEO of SEO Alive)
Conclusion
From our point of view, this is the definitive backlink and link building management tool, since it saves you hours and hours of repetitive work so you can focus on the strategic side.
As always, if you have any questions, we are in the comments :)
