Competitive Link Analysis Tips Using Open Site Explorer - Whiteboard Friday

Key Takeaways

Hi everyone. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to talk about competitive link analysis tips. Now, the thing is that a lot of people when they're trying to uh build up the reputation and authority and the rankings of their website, one of the big things that they do is they look at who's linking to my competitors and can I get some of those links? This is a great practice, but there's a lot of pitfalls and there's also a lot of great areas of unexplored opportunity, right? People typically do a very simple thing, which is just to look at who's ranking in the top 10, see who's linked to them, try to get links. There's a little more depth. So, a tool that a ton of people use is Open Site Explorer. It's a tool that that we here at SEO use uh and tons of people like it, but there are other opportunities. There's things like uh Majestic, there's link diagnosis, there's obviously Yahoo site explorer, which is very popular uh and a few others that are uh well known as well. But open site explorer is pretty simple, has a nice easy to use interface. And you can see here I basically search for a a URL up at the top and it shows me all the places that open site explorer that the linkscape index knows about that link to that particular page. And then there's some filters up here in some different tabs. But basically I get a list that looks like this, right? So here's the page uh here's the anchor text that's linking uh here's the page authority and domain authority. If I'm on the linking domains, it'll also show me the number of linking root domains. Gives me some title information, that kind of stuff. So great, I can get some prospects here, but I want to be careful about a few things when I'm looking through here. Number one, whose links are you looking at? One of the problems that we see a lot of the time is that the people who rank in the top 10, particularly in a shortterm uh time frame, sometimes can be spammers or manipulative folks uh who have earned links that get them into the top 10, but only very briefly. And by very briefly, I mean somewhere between 30 days and, you know, three even six months sometimes. So, if you're examining sites and you're, you know, looking at their links and you think to yourself, "Boy, these are these are really scummy sites and the site quality is low. I don't know any what why anyone would organically want to link to this page." Looking at their links may only help you in a really short-term scenario. And you might find a ton of kind of junky stuff, stuff you have to pay for, stuff that's manipulative, stuff that requires you to reciprocally link back to them, jump through all these hoops. You don't necessarily want those. What you do want are folks who are longlasting in the top 10. Right? If I look at a list of top 10 folks and I see, oh wow, you know, this is a domain that's that's very well trusted and uh I've heard the name of the brand before. It's a it's a popular brand, good brand, right? Then I'm really interested in who's linking to this guy. But if I see sort of, you know, three-phenomain.info, info. Yeah, maybe I maybe I don't need to investigate his links or maybe I want to look at them, but I don't necessarily want to pursue them or I want I just want to be more careful about how I interpret those. The other thing is that folks will be really simplistic about this. So, as opposed to just looking at the top 10 of who's ranking here, I could go deeper into the results. I could go into the top 20 or 30. I could look at different keywords. I could look at keywords that are more broad. Let's say I'm trying to rank for uh you know, used Toyota cars. I might look at used Toyotas. I might look at Toyota in general. Who's ranking in the top 50 or 60 for a super competitive phrase like Toyota? Who are those big important sites? There might be a bunch of places that are linking to other listings that could link to me, right? Or the people who are uh in the results themselves could be link opportunities. There's also the issue that when you do that kind of expansion, you'll just find that many more places that have diversity of links. Earning those can give you a a step up on the competition because when they look at your links, they're going to go, "Wow, where'd they get all those? How'd they find all those? It's amazing." The other thing I want you to pay attention to is are these the links that are that matter? Right? So the same scrutiny that you give the websites in the top 10, I think we should all be giving that same scrutiny to the links that point in here. A lot of the time uh there will be links that are fairly manipulative and lowquality and temporary, but they will appear in here, right? Because Open Sight Explorer and Linkscape doesn't have anything like the sophistication of Google's web spam algorithm, right? Google web spam has, you know, a whole team working in a a big building down in Mountain View and there They're some of the the best paid and uh and most highly talented scientists in the world and they're working on this problem of solving spam. Open site explorer has a few simplistic things, right? So PA and DA, page authority, domain authority, use some metrics to calculate uh how important we think it is, but we get fooled all the time by spammers, right? So the links that you see in here might not necessarily be the ones that count. So you've got to use good judgment. There's two good great ways to do this. Number one is does it rank right? So what I want you to do is look at this page itself the the linking page go to that page figure out the keywords that it's trying to target in the title or or grab a snippet of you know seven to 10 words in a sentence there put them in quotes and put it into Google does that page rank if if it's not ranking in Google I'd be very suspicious about how it's doing. Number two, who does it link to? If it's linking to reputable sources, who does it link to? I'm doing some messy writing, but but that's okay, right? Uh if it links to really good places, that that's a good very good sign. If it links to places that are very suspect and th a lot of those places aren't ranking very well for their keywords, I'm I'm usually a little more concerned. Uh those two things will really help you see whether this is the right link or not. do pay close attention to another thing, the page and domain level metrics. So if you see something that's like, wow, this is a very low page authority but high domain authority, that might be a really good link opportunity. In fact, that domain might be a great link opportunity. I worry when I see folks who are like, oh, you know, low page authority, I'm not interested. I I wouldn't go that route, right? If domain authority is high, that means it's a big important powerful domain. And I would much rather uh in my SEO have a link from a powerful important domain than from a uh powerful or a less a powerful page but on an unimportant domain. Right? So if it's the homepage of you know Mike's house and hyphen house hyphen of hyphen viagra.info eh I I totally don't care. I don't care that it's homepage. I don't care he has a page rank of four or five on his homepage. I'm not interested. But if it's some super deep deep page way down on uh you know the Scientific Americans website. Wow. Yeah. I mean PA may only be a 35 or a 40 or something, but the domain authority is going to be like an 88 or a 90. I I'm looking for those links. And so I'd encourage you to do the same thing. You can actually resort in Open Site Explorer by DA. There's a little arrow there. You can resort your links if you want. Uh you can also export. there's an export to Excel function and you can get the top 10,000 links and then you can sort however you want inside Excel. Uh the last thing I'm going to talk about is that do be cautious. A lot of people will go right up to here and they'll use the filter that lets you exclude followed uh exclude no followed links. I I wouldn't be be too worried about that. Some of the time, you know, maybe you only want to care about the followed links, but a lot of the time, what we've seen is that no followed links present link opportunities of their own, and they're often social opportunities, opportunities in social media or on social sites, uh, for social profiles. Some of their are engagement and interaction stuff. So, you know, blog comments, uh, forum participation, and those can actually be great places to do inbound marketing, right? get people aware, pay attention to the community, uh get opportunities for content, get opportunities to interact, and that will lead to good SEO things uh in the future. So, hopefully you've got some good competitive link analysis tips out of this, and we look forward to seeing you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.