Previously known as LinkRisk, which was a name that told you quite a lot about what the product did, Kerboo now gives you no clues whatsoever in the name so you will have to dig a little deeper if you want to find out.

Let me save you some time, Kerboo is a suite of link management tools that is right up there with the market leaders when it comes to identifying and dealing with links to your website which are less than desirable. This is how Kerboo see’s its role in an agency context:

All of this Link Management stuff is really about making Google happy and not trying to game the PageRanking system with links from sites that are not worth the cyberspace that they occupy. Kerboo helps you to evaluate the links to your site and, if they are likely to be a problem, it helps you to deal with them, mainly by submitting them to Google’s “Disavow” process. Good luck with that.

Of course, if you really want to make Google happy you will avoid acquiring dodgy links in the first place but, let’s face it, it’s an imperfect world and a product like Kerboo is probably a necessary investment for any website that’s been around for a while.

Now, I’ve done a fair bit of backlink manipulation in my time, going back to the days before anyone ever dreamt that it would be considered bad and wrong. Those were the days of “pile them high and sell them cheap” and, for a while, it worked – sites with lots of links, even crappy, spammy one, climbed up the rankings. The work could be outsourced to freelancers in far off lands and you never had to look your future website assassin in the eye. We now know that cheating the system like that was never going to be acceptable in the longer term – hence the need for backlink management services like Kerboo.

None of that means that links to your website are no longer important – they definitely are – but they have to be from sources that are relevant to your own website content and have clean link profiles themselves. Kerboo has a role to play here as its various modules help you to identify sites with top quality content that could be worth tracking down and forming a relationship with.

Kerboo is sold on a subscription basis, with a number of useful modules included, take your choice from Backlink Analysis, Site Hunting (which lets you delve deep into the workings of sites that might be of interest to you), Prospect Gathering, Link monitoring and several others. I didn’t feel that the website explained some of these options in sufficient detail and I am still unsure as to what some of them are really for.

At some point soon we will try to negotiate a trial period for review purposes and our Kerboo Review will be published on this site.

I am pretty sure that most people who use this service will be doing so on agency or consultancy basis – most small to medium sized organisations would be well-advised to leave it to people who know what they are doing. Acquiring good quality backlinks, and dealing effectively with bad quality backlinks, is a time consuming and thankless task, even with a supertool like Kerboo to help you. Larger organisations will probably want to take this in-house or assign it to an agency who can give them ongoing specialist support. Kerboo also offers a “done for you” service if required.

Larger companies will not be deterred by the price but I suspect that many smaller ones will. Your entry level for Kerboo is going to be £149/month and the next step up is a steep one, £499 for the “Plus” Plan which is targeted at “medium” agencies, whatever they are. On the other hand, if you think you have a problem with your backlink profile then this is small potatoes compared to the business you could be losing as a result. If, however, you really are in that position I’d definitely get someone in to sort it out or else it could all turn into a money drain.