Search engine optimization (SEO) is a race. And in any race learning from your competitors makes you a better racer. Even when you are leading it is sometimes good to look back and check the runners-up. And if you are not the top dog, you absolutely should examine the leaders: their gear, their training, their strategy. In SEO the most interesting thing about your competition are their links.
Whether you like it or not: SEO is still pretty much about links. A good link profile can make up for almost any lack of optimized content and other onpage flaws. Love or hate, the best thing you can do about it is embrace the fact and run with it.
Therefore, I am going to show you some tricks that will enable you to look deeper into your competition's link profile, granting you access to restricted areas: their locker room, their laundry and even the briefing hall where they plan their link building strategies.
Competitive Link Research
Finding out where your competitors' links come from is not that difficult. You just need to go to Google or Yahoo! and type in:
link:www.your-competitor.com
to get a list of inbound links to the site.
Yahoo is much better in that respect as it tends to provide more extensive and accurate data. The only problem here is that there is a limit of 1,000 links per website which is often not enough as the fattest link sources get left behind the limit fence. Here are a few tips to break through to the other side.
Note: If you are lazy like me you might want to skip to the end of the article where I'll share a tool that does it all a lot quicker.
Trick 1: Search for Links to Particular Web Pages of a Competing Site
Alongside with
link:www.your-competitor.com
search for
link:www.your-competitor.com/products.html or
link:www.your-competitor.com/services.html
and so on.
Trick 2: Exclude Internal Links
You may want to examine the internal linking structure of your competition if you want to gain some insight on their navigation and marketing steps. But since we want to find more external links, let us exclude the internal ones.
You can do this by adding the
-site:site.com
operator to your search query. Type in:
link:http://www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com or
linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com
and you will get a list of external backlinks only.
There is a dropdown option in Yahoo! site explorer that does just the same.
Trick 3: Exclude Links Coming from Certain Domains
The -site: modifier lets you exclude links coming from specific sites. So, whenever you see a large chunk of links coming from the same domain add the
-site:thisdomain.com
modifier to your query and the links from this site will get replaced with new ones.
You can add -site: multiple times in one query so that you will get something like this:
link:http://www.nfl.com -site:nfl.com -site:en.wikipedia.org
Trick 4: Check Links Coming from Certain TLDs
This is a little known trick. The site: modifier actually lets you get a list of links coming from domains with certain TLDs (Top-Level-Domains): .com, .org, .edu, .co.uk, .gov and so on. Just type in
link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.org or
linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com site:.org
and you will be shown a list of .org sites linking to your rival.
Note: Do this in Yahoo! regular search, not site explorer!
Trick 5: Exclude Links Coming from Certain TLDs
This is an even lesser known trick. You can exclude certain TLDs from the results with the -site:.tld modifier. Usually the biggest chunk of links comes from .com's, so add a -site.com modifier and you will get lots of new link data.
Trick 6: Use Different Combinations of the Previous 5 Tricks
Try
link:http://www.your-competitor.com/page.html -site:your-competitor.com -site:.com
or
link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.org -site:wikipedia.org
If you give it a little thought you will surely come up with lots of ideas. Feel free to share your findings in the comments.
Trick 7: Use the Prvious 6 Tricks in Different Search Engines
Do not limit your searches to Google and Yahoo!, include AltaVista, Alexa, (Bing does not give you link data, so forget about it), and then there are Exalead, Excite and vast numbers of regional search engines. Search them, get rid of the the duplicates and you will have a goooooooooooooooogol of competitor's links to study.
Important note: Some search engines have a different set of operators so you may need to type domain: instead of link:
Getting It Done the Fast Way
This sure seems like a lot of work - and it is. Moreover, getting the links list is only the beginning and the easy part of competitive link research. Once you have the list together you need to analyze each link, weed out poor quality sites and only leave the ones you can get a link from. Now THAT is a lot of work.
As I admitted before, I am too lazy to do this all by hand, besides I value my time too much to waste it on this kind of work. That is why I use SEO SpyGlass, an advanced link analysis tool that makes use of all the tricks described in this article (plus some more advanced ones I do not know the first thing about) to get up to 25,000 links per domain, which is much, much more than any other tool can get.
SEO SpyGlass also finds all the data one needs to analyze the links:
· Google PR of the domain and linking page
· The URL as well as the title of the linking page
· The anchor text and description
· Whether the link is still on the page (sometimes the link gets removed but search engines will think it is still there till they reindex the page).
· Whether the link is no-follow or dofollow
· How many other links are on the specific page
· How much link value the link has
· And a host of other data like TLDs, domain age, country, etc.
If you want to do competitive link research seriously, I'd strongly recommend trying SEO SpyGlass out (there is a free trial version available). And of course you can always use the tricks described in this post whenever you want to run a quick background check on that fantastic new site in your niche.
Good luck!
Related articles:
Tips for Free and Easy Link Building
Using Web Directories to Build Backlinks
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