• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 6, 2012

Worthless links drag down a Web site's ranking. Strong link profiles help a site build authority. Having a tool to find the links requires marketers to walk a fine line between black and white search engine optimization (SCO).

BrightEdge will soon announce it integrated Majestic SEO's backlink engine, which performs daily updates to its Fresh Index, into its S3 global enterprise SEO platform, allowing clients to optimize SEO strategies.

Jim Yu, BrightEdge CEO, points to Majestic's large link map, about 3.8 trillion URLs in its Historical Index and more than 150 billion URLs in its Fresh Index. He said the method the architecture uses to process queries and calculations works well with the S3 platform.

Backlinks, code that connects one Web site to another, remain a critical factor in achieving high search rankings, according to a Searchmetrics study released in June. The number of backlinks remains the factor most strongly tied to positive rankings in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

The site should not have a large number of perfectly optimized links with all the keywords it wants to rank, but rather have a proportion of nofollow’ links that do not convey ranking benefits, and links that contain "stopwords," such "here," "go," and "this."

The "transparent integration" drives a big data stream that helps process recommendations. Automation will force many of these integrations "under the hood." Marketers will simply use the tools built into a dashboard or process.

Other companies focus on improving backlink tools, too. Blekko Engineering Director Robert Saliba explains the improvements to the company's free SEO tools that now continuously update inbound link counts; provides hourly updates for top ranked sites; and revises SEO data like content, metadata, and duplicate text. The company touts indexing more than 4 billion pages and crawls more than 100 million pages daily. The crawler, Scoutjet, lets people see the Internet the way a search engine sees it.