Competitive .edu Research via Open Site Explorer
-
I was using open site explorer and trying to figure out how my competitors are getting so many .edu links. Now I won't mention any names here but I am trying to figure out why almost all their links point to downloads of documents. Here are a few of the examples of sites I keep finding...
faculty.unlv.edu/jensen/CEE_468/GISTutorialWorkbook/tutorial11/LandUsePgh.lpk?arrow=nws&read=24922
<colgroup><col width="3111"></colgroup>
-
I like the opensiteexplorer method. The difficulty is what to do once you create the list of .edu's. We're using some of the other blogs on the subject on seomoz.
-
Hey John,We have made some updates to our crawling so it will go deeper into sites, and this is the first launch including the new metrics. We've discovered a bug, however, in the updated crawler. The first issue is the crawler is counting a binary file as a link, but the larger issue, is that the crawler doesn’t really know how to handle these types of files. This bug is causing some links to be improperly associated with certain domains. This is probably why you’re seeing your competitor have these .edu links - they're probably incorrectly associated with their site.
There are two steps to addressing this issue: changing how the crawler sees these file types and then fixing how the crawler handles these file types. We have made improvements to our algorithm so that we will be able to handle the majority of these files correctly, however, this update will need about a month to propagate. The fix for this issue probably won’t be seen for two more updates, meaning late September. Our improvements should catch most of the issues, but there still could be a few cases we haven't addressed. If this happens, don't hesitate to let us know; we love feedback since it helps us improve and make our index even better!The next step is to fix how our crawlers handle binary file links and prevent them from being improperly associated with certain domains. We are in the process of working through that issue right now. We’re doing everything we can to resolve this bug as we know it is alarming to see these “questionable” links associated to either your site or your competitors sites.
I hope this helps answer your questions around these .edu links, but let me know if you have any more questions!
Thanks,
Carin -
Hi John,
I think you might be seeing a known bug in OSE about links coming from documents. I'm going to ask one of the Linkscape people to come in and comment, but these might not be real links.
-
hi,
It seems the competition is just syndicating documents via education facilities to acquire links. to be honest links on low end tutorial sections where documents can be syndicated are not that great, they will hold some value yet it will not be that strong. I have seen this with competitors it is the same as paying off students to make blogs on edu blogs about your brand their are soo many un ethical things in the market which I wouldn't advise people to do ever.
You can be smart about it and acquire far better links for example if you do free work for a uni or you sponsor a university event, you just need to brain storm quality ways to achieve links on edu sites.
Regards
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Keyword Research: Page Authority and Keyword Difficulty
A speaker at a conference suggested using your Page Authority (of home page) number as a benchmark in keyword research to compare against keyword difficulty number. So if you had a Page Authority score of 60, you would look for keywords with a difficulty of under 60 (using the MOZ metrics for keyword difficulty). Has anyone used these metrics in this way? Any success?
Moz Pro | | BLRmedia0 -
Web Site Migration Testing and SEO-QA Automation?
Hey Mozzers, Are there any good Migration-SEO-QA Tools out there? Given a prioritized list of URLs and prioritized list of Keywords, is there a tool that can compare basic SEO factors, old URL vs. new URL, and identify all the specific gaps that need to be fixed? Here is a basic SEO-QA acceptance checklist, for porting any website. . . . Until the porting work is completed we cannot accept the new website. Givens: 1. A list of the Top 100 URLs from the old site, prioritized by conversion rates, landing page traffic, and inbound links. 2. A list of the planned 404 - mapped URLs, old to new site, from the porting team. 3. A list of the current Top 200 Keywords, prioritized. 4. A good amount of SEO work has already been done, by several professionals, for the current (old) site. **How to evaluate if the new site will be acceptable to Google? Check ON-PAGE SEO Factors... ** **. . . that is, the NEW site must be AS GOOD AS (or better than) the current (old) site,
Moz Pro | | George.Fanucci
in the eyes of Google, to preserve the On-Page SEO work already done. ** Criteria: URLs ok? :: Is the URL mapping ok, old to new, best web page? LINKS ok :: Are all internal LINKS and keyword Anchor Text ported? TEXT ok :: On-page content, TEXT and keywords ok? TITLE ok :: HTML Title and title keywords ok? DESCRIPTION ok :: HTML Meta Description ok? H1, H2 ok :: HTML H1, H2 and keywords ok? IMG kwds :: HTML IMG and ALT keywords ok? URL kwds :: URL - keywords in new URLs ok? Potential porting defects: Keywords in URL missing: Keywords in HTML Title missing: Keywords in Meta Description missing: Any internal LINKS or Link anchor text missing: Keywords in Page TEXT missing: H1, H2 missing keywords: HTML IMG alt-text, IMG file URLs, any missing keywords: Notes: Until the porting work is completed we cannot accept the new site, or set a target date for potential cutover. There are eight (8) data items per URL, and about one hundred (100) URLs to be considered for SEO-QA before going live. We were expecting to cutover before the end of February, at the latest. There is no point in doing full QA acceptance-tests until the porting work is completed. QA spot-checks have found far too many defects. About 60% of the landing-page traffic comes via the top 40 URLs. With over 100 URLs to look at, it can take more than a week or two just to do SEO-QA in detail, manually, item-by-item, page-by-page, side-by-side, old vs. new. Spot-checks indicate a business disaster would occur unless the porting defects are fixed before going live. _Any Migration-QA Tools?_Given a prioritized list of URLs and prioritized list of Keywords, is there a tool that can compare basic On-Page SEO factors, old URL vs. new URL, and identify most of the specific gaps that need to be fixed before going live with the new site? _ *** Edit: Any comments on the SEO criteria, tools, or methods will be appreciated!_0 -
Get into Google : New Sites
I have a brand new website. It was created 10 days ago. How long would it take for it to show up in search results? I understand that since the site is new, there are no sites sending it backlinks. Also, i have optimized the page for my keyword "xyz" and it received an A grade. The site does not figure even in the top 50 results. Please help me out. It is a one page web application that needs to drive traffic to survive.
Moz Pro | | dl_s0 -
How do a run a MOZ crawl of my site before waiting for the scheduled weekly crawl?
Greetings: I have just updated my site and would like to run a crawl immediately. How can I do so before waiting for the next MOZ crawl? Thanks,
Moz Pro | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
20000 site errors and 10000 pages crawled.
I have recently built an e-commerce website for the company I work at. Its built on opencart. Say for example we have a chair for sale. The url will be: www.domain.com/best-offers/cool-chair Thats fine, seomoz is crawling them all fine and reporting any errors under them url great. On each product listing we have several options and zoom options (allows the user to zoom in to the image to get a more detailed look). When a different zoom type is selected it adds on to the url, so for example: www.domain.com/best-offers/cool-chair?zoom=1 and there are 3 different zoom types. So effectively its taking for urls as different when in fact they are all one url. and Seomoz has interpreted it this way, and crawled 10000 pages(it thinks exist because of this) and thrown up 20000 errors. Does anyone have any idea how to solve this?
Moz Pro | | CompleteOffice0 -
How to force a recrawl of a site?
Hi, I made changes in my site. I would like to see the result of the crawl diagnostic. I know the crawl is happening every week, however, is there a way to force a re-crawl in order not to have to wait 5 days? Cheers,
Moz Pro | | nuxeo0 -
What percentage of total backlinks are shown by "Open site explorer" tool?
What percentage of total good quality back links are shown in the "Open site" or other toolbar. I was checking backlinks for a spammy sites which ranks in #3-5 for a competitive keyword.But could not find nothing more than 10-15 PR4-5 in content backlinks and rest are just forum/profile signatures. 24% Trust/Authority of the Host Domain
Moz Pro | | RyanSat
22% Link Popularity of the Specific Page
20% Anchor Text of External Links
15% On-Page Keyword Usage
7% Traffic and Click-Through Data
6% Social Graph Metrics
5% Registration and Hosting DataI0 -
Domain and Submain : which choice ? (open explorer tool)
Hi, 1/ Please could you tell me why Moztrust and Mozrank give not similar figures for subdomain and root domain ? 2/ Which is the best way for Google webmaster tool for configuring : Sub or Root domain ? 3/ Finally, regarding anchor text, Sub or root domain ? Tks for links or knowledge base about it....
Moz Pro | | mozllo2