Intro, Journey and Vision

What's up, fellow SEO? Daniel from Linxact here. Besides being responsible for our company's blog, I'm also the CEO and founder of Linxact.

Intro

Let's go straight to business. Linxact is a new boutique Software as a Service (SaaS) that develops innovative software solutions for professional SEOs and agencies. We're a small group of experts (less than 5) with the vision to provide competitive SEO advantages to the top SEO professionals and agencies worldwide.

Linxact Lens is our first service offering and the only PBN backlink checker that has ever been built. Lens will enter an exclusive pilot phase with a 250 paid subscriptions cap and new pricing as soon as our data scope is complete:

Hidden PBN backlink data hidden by crawler blocking (included)
Visible PBN backlink data (included)
Hidden PBN backlink data hidden by link cloaking (ETA 05/2024)

We aim to keep Linxact Lens a very exclusive service, but at this point in time, we don't have enough market data to decide which subscription limit is best. This is why we'll start with a limit of 250 and reevaluate it if demand is exceptionally high. Any limit increase would be implemented with care to maintain high exclusivity.

With 184,705 SEO consultant businesses in the US in 2023 alone, we will only supply less than 1% of the US market at any given time. The market share would be even more exclusive with a worldwide view.

It has to be noted that many of those professional SEOs and agencies aren't into highly competitive niches where Linxact will create most of its impact. However, even with taking that into account, Linxact Lens is highly exclusive.

Keeping our services exclusive isn't a marketing, but a business decision which we'll also leverage with our marketing. The more people that have access to our PBN index, the smaller the competitive SEO advantage per subscriber, as well as other negative impacts that we want to prevent.

To enable this, the company needs to be built with very few but highly experienced software engineers and data scientists while demanding premium prices. Linxact is processing huge amounts of data which requires a lot of computing resources and sophisticated optimizations. E.g. running complex heuristics over large amounts of web data is very expensive.

In exchange, our subscribers get access to our exclusive PBN index through Lens. This enables them to find all PBN backlinks pointing to a particular website. Many PBN backlinks are hidden from common backlink checkers like Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic and Moz etc. Even many visible PBN backlinks are usually unnoticed with popular SEO tools as they blend in with regular websites.

With a Linxact Lens subscription, this hidden SEO strength is visible at first sight. Lens allows any SEO professional to correctly estimate the real SEO strength of competitor websites in combination with regular backlink data of common SEO tools.

Without access to PBN backlink data, most backlink analysis in competitive SEO niches will be highly skewed, as the hidden SEO strength will go unnoticed. Despite that, PBN backlink data also allows for the detection of certain types of negative SEO, which are facilitated through PBN backlinks, and the easy detection of abused expired or auction domains.

Linxact Lens is crucial in highly competitive SEO niches for making the right SEO decisions in SEO planning, budgeting and execution.

There are many more relevant and interesting problems to solve in SEO that haven't been solved yet. If you have an idea or feedback, feel free to contact me. You can find my contact details in the author card below this post.

Journey

Let me introduce you to our journey. I've founded Linxact in 2017. It has been a long journey since then. From 2017 to 2021 Linxact has been in the trial-and-error phase, where we gathered a lot of experience with extracting, transforming and loading (ETL) big data (buzzword alarm). We tried to build a rented on-premises infrastructure that could handle our use case of creating a PBN backlink checker. Spoiler: It didn't work out, as it turned out that an on-premises infrastructure isn't the right fit for our use case and our current state of growth.

Our infrastructure for processing and storing data back then consisted of 15 dedicated servers rented from Hetzner. Combined, the server cluster had:

15 Gbit/s symmetric network bandwidth,
960GB RAM,
60 physical x86 Intel CPU cores,
120 virtual threads and
120TB of HDD storage.

Those servers were configured in an Apache Hadoop Cluster with Spark and Hbase running on top. The server cluster was more than enough for data storage and access through Apache Hbase, but by far too slow for processing our large and nested datasets. Besides not having enough computing resources, our software was much more error-prone, less optimized and automated back then.

The time-to-market of a fresh dataset took 8 months. By the end, the data was processed and ready to be accessed; it was already outdated. Maintaining a Hadoop Cluster was a real pain.

That cluster was even hacked once as malicious actors occupied our computing resources. For a few minutes the VLAN was incorrectly configured, which resulted in the exposed network port of a vulnerable service being exposed to exploit scanners and a sweet malware injection. Just this incident set us back few weeks.

That’s why in early 2022 we started to build Linxact with all the gathered knowledge and experience from scratch again. We required a holistic state-of-the-art solution without managing our own infrastructure.

most infrastructure managed by AWS
highly scalable data extraction software,
optimized data processing scripts (filters, heuristics and transformation),
fresh and professional UI/UX design,
new website built with modern web technologies with a
boring but very reliable backend.

This transformation took 1 year and 8 months, but it was well worth it:

We can now just spin up as many computing resources as we need when we need it and let our scripts chew through our raw data in a few hours instead of few weeks to deliver you fresh data.
Great UX
Practically no downtime anymore
Minimal technical debt that allows maintenance and new features

The gained flexibility, reliability and security allows us to save a lot of costs that would occur with an on-premises infrastructure. Updating our data requires massive amounts of computing resources, which we would need to pay 24/7/365 with an on-premises infrastructure.

We launched Linxact by end of August 2023. Since September 2023, we've gathered insights from about 100 subscribers. In addition, we've gained a lot of feedback and support from our subscribers. Linxact has evolved a lot since last year. Not to mention since 2021. Every aspect has been improved:

Extended data scope to support the detection of more hiding techniques
Improved filters to reduce non-PBN backlinks (false positives reduction)
Improved heuristics to find more PBN backlinks (false negatives reduction)
Significant cost reductions to be able to continue this operation
Complete revision of our website to offer a smooth user experience

We're about to finish the integration of hidden PBN backlink data hidden by link cloaking into our PBN index very soon. We're working non-stop on it. We will keep you updated.

Vision

As Linxact Lens will reach a state of high maturity by mid-2024, we'll enter the exclusive pilot phase. During this phase we'll focus on technical optimizations, customer acquisition and market feedback.

As soon as we near our goal and limit of 250 active paid subscriptions for the exclusive pilot phase, we'll start to solve the next SEO issue. This time, we will be much quicker.

The current SEO tool market lacks solutions targeted at SEO issues that are connected to so-called Black Hat SEO. SEO methods that violate the Google Search Essentials (formerly Webmaster Guidelines). This term is liked by Google as it demonizes highly effective SEO methods, whose effectiveness is denied by Google and all of those who believe that.

According to Google, PBNs don't work. The reality is much different. By looking into our PBN index, it's obvious that highly competitive but non-corporate niches are completely dominated by PBN backlink usage. Well-built PBN websites are very hard to distinguish from regular websites and therefore hard to penalize without too much collateral damage.

Linxact changes the SEO tool landscape with a new angle as we focus on solutions that help you solve SEO issues outside the realm of Google's Search Essentials. We've started with Linxact Lens - the PBN backlink checker. We won't stop here. Our vision is to provide competitive SEO advantages to the top SEO professionals and agencies worldwide.

Let me know if you found this blog post interesting. Feedback keeps everything at Linxact rolling. In the future, I might go deeper into select topics.