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
-
Unsolved Keyword Rank History chart has missing data for periods of time
Hello, When I look at the rank history for a particular keyword, there are missing gaps in the data. For example, the keyword was fluctuating around rank 10-20 from Jan 2022 to July 2022. Then suddenly the line on the graph disappears. It starts tracking again in Oct 2022 starting at rank 16. It almost appears as if Moz lost track of the keyword for some time. Other tracked keywords did not experience the same issue during this time. Then as a result, Moz reporting will say the tracked keyword moved up in ranking 40+. What is happening here? I'm unsure how to explain this activity to my clients.
Moz Pro | | celsiusmarketing0 -
Links to Your Site: No Data Available in Google Search Console
The site I am working on did not have their site submitted to Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools). I submitted the site and a sitemap that auto updates. Google is crawling the site daily (about 30 pages a day). Under Search Traffic > Links to Your Site it shows no data is availible. I thought it was because it was a newly submitted site, but it has been two months now. Moz seems to have the same issue. Moz does show inbound links, but their are some that we think should really help us that are not shown. For instance, the Dallas Morning News wrote this article. They have a high DA and PA. Also, iliveindallas.com has an article about us that is still on the front page. That was a few weeks ago but also does not show up on Moz or Google SC. We are trying to be selective about the links we are getting. That they are follow links from reputable sites. Worried that both Google and Moz are not showing them.
Moz Pro | | TapGoods1 -
A competitor's SEO firm is building spammy links to my website.
A competitor's SEO firm is building spammy links to my website. I know the disavow link process, but even this can be time consuming. Is there a better way to protect my website? Any and all ideas appreciated.... Are there any cool Moz tools that can help me manage this assault? Sorry, just a follow up from me... It appears that many of the spammy links (referrals) I see in Google Analytics are not present in Google WebMaster Tools. Does this mean that the spammy ones that I'm concerned about have already been discounted by Google, or are the spammy links no-follow? Any input on this would also be appreciated.
Moz Pro | | BVREID0 -
Ecommerce tracking for campaing keywords like traffic data in SEOMOZ accounts
Hi, i want to track revenue for individual keywords in SEOMOZ Campaign like traffic data is it possible ? please provide me any firm solution for this
Moz Pro | | pulseseo0 -
Discrepancy in OSE data
When I look up a domain in OSE, it shows that there are 3K+ links from 349 domains. However, when I download the CSV, I only see around 1,500 links. Why the discrepancy?
Moz Pro | | inhouseseo0 -
Where is the keyword difficulty tool data sourced from?
I also use Market Samurai, and I've noticed what seem to be big discrepancies with the keyword data presented by this (data comes from Majestic SEO) and the Keyword Difficulty Tool. To take just one example, I analyze the term "how to remove tea stains" In the Keyword Difficulty Tool, this returns the following: Root Domain Linking Root Domains: 2,233 Page Linking Root Domains: 4 When I use Market Samurai, however, the data returned is: RDD (Domains linking to this domain): 19,911 RDP (Domains linking to this page): 19 I thought that these two metrics were the same for both tools, but I've written them out in case someone sees a difference. As I say, Market Samurai data is sourced from Majestic SEO - a reputable SEO company - but I have no idea where the Keyword Difficulty Tool data is from, nor why these differences are so pronounced? Are they indeed the same metrics in both cases, or am I missing something? Any insight would be much appreciated.
Moz Pro | | ZakGottlieb710 -
A suggestion to help with linkscape crawling and data processing
Since you guys are understandably struggling with crawling and processing the sheer number of URLs and links, I came up with this idea: In a similar way to how SETI@Home (is that still a thing? Google says yes: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/) works, could SEOmoz use distributed computing amongst SEO moz users to help with the data processing? Would people be happy to offer up their idle processor time and (optionally) internet connections to get more accurate, broader data? Are there enough users of the data to make distributed computing worthwhile? Perhaps those who crunched the most data each month could receive moz points or a free month of Pro. I have submitted this as a suggestion here:
Moz Pro | | seanmccauley
http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20458998-crowd-source-linkscape-data-processing-and-crawling-in-a-similar-way-to-seti-home1 -
Toolset Q.) Re. Linkscape - How is the External Links (link juice) calculated in the API?
Re. External Links (link-juice) - I really need to know what this reflects.Ie. linkdiagnosis.com divides the PR by external link factors to get an idea of link juice or power - how does Moz calculate this scoring?
Moz Pro | | Turkey0