About Hub Finder

Hub Finder is web based software which looks for hub pages using the Yahoo! API. It allows you to find sites which link to common resources that you manually enter, or resources that rank well in Yahoo! for a specific term.

• You can manually enter sites you want to cross check, or grab the top ranked results from Yahoo! Search.
• The depth limit acts as a noise filter since Yahoo! places some of the better backlinks near the top of their results.
• Hub pages which link to related resources may provide powerful links which are given a relevancy boost in community, topic, or authority based search algorithms such as TrustRank, Teoma's Topic Distillation [PDF] (Topic Distillation available less academically in this Mike Grehan PDF), Hilltop, and Topic Sensitive PageRank [PDF].
• 403 errors means the API queries are used up for the day. Please contact us if this becomes an issue.
• Questions or feedback? Please ask in the forums.

Why is Hub Finder Powerful

Many links are simply nepotistic or spammy or hard to replicate. But a site that links to many competing sites in the same field stands a good chance of having editorial integrity and being willing to add new links to other related sites. As this TouchGraph image shows, search engines see the relationships between topics and ideas.

Some algorithms (like LocalRank) may give a boost to links from websites which are well linked to amongst their community.

There are a lot of ways to use a tool like Hub Finder. For example, if a website related to yours moves, you can contact anyone linking to them and competing sites and let them know to update that link. While you are sending them that email you can pitch your site (and other related sites, to look less self-promotional).

The Hub Finder Interface

The sole goal of Hub Finder is to help webmasters find co-occurring links. Hub pages that link to multiple competing sites are also likely to link to your site.

This means you can enter in the URL of two to ten competing websites and wherever their inbound links overlap, it will return in the search results. On-topic links may carry more weight than off-topic links in some search algorithms. Here is a quick visual run through of how it works.

You can enter in a relevant topic to grab the top results from the search engine. You can choose to grab the results from Yahoo!, or manually enter them.

The tool then queries Yahoo! to look for what pages are linking to each site. By default, the tool searches through the top 50 inbound links for each domain. You can adjust this value from 50 to 250.

The sites that rank at the top of the search results for competitive phrases in your field are called authority sites. For the term SEO, the following eleven sites are authority sites.

After the tool grabs the links pointing at each of the domains, it compares where they overlap and returns pages that link to two or more related websites. The pages that link to two or more authority pages are called hub pages.

The numbers at the top of the results coincide with the numbers next to each site listed above. I clicked on #4 (SeoBook.com). You can see that TopRank and Search Engine Watch both linked to my website.

Sometimes this tool will return a few useless or spammy results if you are not searching for a well-established topic, but most of the time it will show some of the best sites you should try to get links from.

After the results show, you can click the Download CSV button if you want to save the results to view them later in a spreadsheet.

Use Hub Finder

To use Hub Finder, please click the following link: