How Do You Leverage Linkscape Data to Overcome Your Competitors?
-
Hi everyone...I used Q&A a long time ago when my company had a paid subsription but I haven't used it in a while, so I'm excited! And since the Q&A is apparently addressed to the Moz community, I figured I would embrace it and ask all of the Mozzers out there:
How do YOU use Linkscape to reverse engineneer a competitor's website? I understand how to use Linkscape. What I'm looking for is specific filtering or "out of the box" uses of Linkscape to truly understand how a website has obtained it's ranking in the search results.
In particular, I'm really curious about how everyone (including those who truly know how Linkscape works, i..e the minds behind it) make sense of the "DJ Passed" #'s or "most important links" criteria. I realize Linkscape is wonderful, but what I've found is that often times the links that "pass the most juice" or the links that are the "most important" AREN'T actually the most important links on a site. For example, I often find that the links that have the highest "DJ Passed" are directories. I could be wrong, but my guess would be that directories actually pass very little link juice. If directories gave as much link juice as the linkscape metrics indicate, then they are by far the best linking source, which I think we all know isn't the case in most instances.
To be clear...My intention is not to "debunk" the value of Linkscape...On the contrary, I think it's a wonderful tool and I want to understand it's nuances so I can identify "false positives", use it to get a true picture of a website, and get any tips/tricks from those who've successuly used it to overcome there competitors.
Thanks ahead of time!
-
I agree with this wholehearedly. OSE is without a doubt the best tool for analyzing a competitors linking strategy. Seeing the competitors strategy is great, but another reason I really like it is because I can know how good the person is that I'm up against. If they have links that I have no idea how they obtained them, then they know something I don't, and vice versa.
Have you figured out a way to successfully use OSE or Linkscape to get an idea of how well somoene's onsite optimization is? I'm familiar with the "internal MR passed" but that's one of those metrics I don't trust as much as the others. Do you have any other strategies?
Thanks!
-
See...This is my problem though...I often find that the links in the top of OSE aren't the most powerful links. I think this is especially true because a the Page Authority seems to be manipulated relatively easily. For example, if a directoy has a DA of 70, the the internal pages of that directory will have a PA of 40 from internal links alone. To me, a link from an internal page of a site that's linking out to 30 other sites on the same page...and which is likely getting it's links decredited by Google because it's a direcotry...is not a particuarly strong link, althouth the numbers would indicate otherwise.
A trap that I've found myself falling into is using the PA and DA to determine how good of a job I'm doing in terms of SEO, when in actuality I've been using those metrics for such a long time that some of my tactics evolved around inflating those numbers to a certain degree.
What I'm trying to figure out is how...using Linkscape or OSE...to determine what are truly the most powerful links on site. The links that if you took it away, their rankings would drop. (Or if you added to your own site, your rankings would increase.)
-
I use OSE for competetive analysis. For me it's greatest benefits are in seeing how competetive my niche are, but more importantly what competitors are doign to get their links.
Once I have the link information I can find out where competitors are getting links, the types of links they are getting and how valuable these links are. I can decide which of these ideas are worth copying, which areas they don't appear to have targeted or whether they may have targeted an area but didn't get any joy. That last part comes with knowing your niche well.
-
For me, OSE lets me see my customers competitors back links that are related to their industry sector and go after them. Not always possible, but I have had great success with this in the past. It is a manual process for the most part for me but a great starting place - then the hard work begins
Regards,
Andy
-
Linkscape and OSE let me know where my competitors get links from. They hint me on the kind of links they are capable of obtaining, from what kind of sources, and how (what kind of content, etc.).
For instance, OSE let me know that my competitors get their best links through "dumb" link exchanges. They don't have great articles on big authority websites pointing to them.
OSE let you reverse engineer the kind of SEO work your competitors are doing.
-
I find the linkscape useful not so much in grouping but sorting competitor links by strength and priority leaving the least potent stuff at the bottom and focusing on the most juicy links at the top of the list. Often I'll split it up into two groups and assign different people to work on different link strengths.
-
The way I like to work with Open Site Explorer is to group the link data (after downloading it in a spreadsheet) by site types.
This is done partially by searching from certain strings within the URLs, page titles or even anchor text, and partially by manual review.A typical way of grouping the links would be into:
- directories
- partner sites
- forums
- article directories
- dofollow blog comments
- etc.
I also like to sort the links by country, especially if I'm trying doing SEO for a local version of Google.
I don't really look at how much juice a page passes, I haven't found the MozRank to be too useful when sorting out through the link data.
Cheers
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 Ranking Report: does the organic traffic data take into account visitors logged into Google?
Hi there In Google Analytics, if a visitor to your website is logged into Google at the time of searching, the referral keyword is registered as 'unknown'. So, I am curious as to how the traffic data for any given keyword in my campaign is calculated? Thanks Laurie
Moz Pro | | turnbullholdingsltd1 -
Perplexed - Errors increasing, moz rank dropping, conflicting data from other sources. Please Help.
Hi there, I'm in a bit of a bind and could seriously do with some help. For the past month I've been working with a client to resolve errors onsite. In that period my moz rank has plummeted and my errors (dupe title & content) have increased dramatically. The correlation makes sense, the increase - not so much. Here's why, screaming frog is reporting that the majority of duplicate titles have been removed or dealt with. I've also got the assurance of the developer that the suggested changes are being implemented. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the CMS - umbraco - and this is the first time I'm working with this particular developer, so I'm not sure how to gauge progress without using moz tools. So, here are my immediate questions: 1. Why would I get different results from Screaming Frog and Rogerbot? 2. Has anyone here been in a similar situation and could they recommend areas to watch for errors creeping in? 3. Is there a way of identifying which errors have occurred when? Narrowing it down to the week each error occurred would be good enough. 4. Is anybody aware of any inherent SEO flaws in umbraco or common SEO mistakes made using the CMS? 5. is there anything I could provide you with to help you help me? 6. Do you have a suggestion? I'm pretty stuck. Thanks in advance.
Moz Pro | | KJDMedia0 -
Data Update for RogerBot
Hi, I noticed that rogerbot still give me 404 for http://www.salustore.com/capelli/nanogen-acquamatch.html refferal form http://www.salustore.com/protocollo-nanogen even I made changes since a couple of week. Same error with one "Title Element Too Short" on our site. Any suggestion on how to refresh it? Best Regards n.
Moz Pro | | nicolobottazzi0 -
So noob while adding competitors, why i can't add sub-directory or specific url?
I try to add my competitors but failed, but there is only sub domain we can add to competitors, so how can i add a sub-directory or specific url to my competitors?
Moz Pro | | lfproseo0 -
Non search traffic in a report, user data etc
Are there any plans so we could add more data from Google Analytics to the seomoz reports? At the moment the reports are nice but my clients want to know the bigger picture than just the search traffic. They need to know the total traffic, the bounce rate, pages viewed etc - data in Google Analytics. There are other seo type tools which offer this information when you generate reports and if seomoz were to allow it then it would make life so much easier as I would not need to maintain a subscription here for the cool tools on offer and to offer websites at up to $100 a month just to generate client reports.
Moz Pro | | MegaFastMoz0 -
Conflict in reported link data
I have a competitor in a campaign - the campaign report shows 181 linked domains BUT - the site explorer report shows only 15 linked domains. Which is correct? And if the site explorer is correct - how do we fix the campaign report? [URL]]([URL=http://imgur.com/m9xFv][IMG]http://i.imgur.com/m9xFv.jpg[/IMG][/URL]) m9xFv open-site-explorer open-site-explorer competitive-domain-analysis-humphreys-assoc.com-seomoz-pro
Moz Pro | | robertdonnell0 -
Keyword tool: SEOMOZ spacific month ? vs adword tool 12 month average but same data ???
Running a keyword analysis in SEOMOZ it shows my the folowing information "Local Search Volume (Dec)". I compared the data for the specific country , language and keyword with the adwords keyword tool and it exactly showed me the same numbers. The adwords keyword tool shows: "Local Monthly Searches: This column shows the approximate 12-month average number of search terms matching each keyword" http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=25148 So if the numbers are the same in google keword tool and SEOMOZ why is SEOMOZ saying that for a specif month? If the data is the same one of both can not be right or probaly I didn't get the point. See screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/GyaaW7EkwV Thanks for help
Moz Pro | | n-media0 -
Open Site Explorer Data
Good afternoon SEOmoz, I first want to congratulate with you for the amazing new look and new features of Open Site Explorer, it's an amazing and valuable tool that I use every day and that has helped me build tons of links for my clients. I have been keeping track of the OPE data on a monthly base and I just noticed something strange. In May 2011, OSE was showing that my client's website had 12,624 links, in July 2011 the website had 14,157 links and today I just ran a new report that showed just 6,401 links. I don't want to believe that in 2 months we lost half of the links, so I was wondering if you guys can give me more insights about this data.
Moz Pro | | Aviatech
Did SEOMoz change the way they measure the number of links? Or is this just a bug or issue they are having with the new version of OSE? Thanks!0