Is competitive analysis only for high level links now
-
Hello,
Is finding backlinks through competitive analysis only for high quality links these days. It seems commonly thought that link building is dead.
If the site with a link section in my industry has a DA below 35 should I leave it alone? Or what's safe and future (update) proof these days?
Thanks!
-
Hi James,
Don't worry too much about visual aspects - Matt Cutts once said that Google doesn't pay a lot of attention to this themselves as there are some amazing white-papers out there with amazing work, but they are just pages of text and have none of the latest visual wizardry that we tend to see.
Have a look through the site. Does the content read well? Does SEMRush throw up any concerns? Does the content seem unique (check this through Copyscape or pull some sentences out and search for them through Google)?
Where you can, just try to get a feel for what the site has to offer and how you can envisage trying to get a link from them.
-Andy
-
So if I am doing competitive analysis on an important competitor, and I find a site that has a DA of 25 or 30, and has the same general topic as mine, but not a very good design visually, how would I know whether to add them or not?
Thanks!
-
Hey Bob,
Link building is far from dead, but it has changed direction hugely! You just have to be a little smarter about what you do.
Competition analysis is a fantastic way to find high quality links through a niche market. It helps you to track down opportunities that you might not otherwise find. For example, a high quality site links to a competitor who has written a useful blog post. Write a better version of that blog post and approach that site with it. Tell them that the link on there is out-dated now and hint that your article is much more relevant. Hopefully, the gears should start turning.
Also, don't worry too much about DA. Look more at the site itself and if it is a quality resource. It might not have a high DA, but that doesn't mean it isn't a trusted resource.
-Andy
-
Hi Bob,
Link analysis for a competitor's site is a very solid tactic for finding linking opportunities in our opinion. You can find a lot of relevant links by utilizing this strategy and use it for your site's benefit. Although DA is important, analyze lower DA links and question their relevance for your site. If the relevancy is high, then i would suggest going ahead and adding your site to it as well.
Couple of resources below to assist you with your query:
31 Link Building Tactics Discovered from Competitive Analysis
Cheers,
SEO5..
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
-
Should I disavow links to a dead sub domain?
I'm analyzing a client's website today and I found that they have over 300 spammy sites linking to a subdomain of their main site. So for example, say their site is clientsite.com, well they have hundreds of links pointing to deadsite.clientsite.com. That subdomain was used at one time as a staging site, and is no longer active. Are those hundreds of spammy sites hurting or potentially hurting my client's SEO? Or is it a non-issue because the links point to a dead subdomain? We believe that that staging sub domain site was hacked at one time, and thats where all those spammy links came from. Should I disavow them?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rubennunez0 -
Best practice to preserve the link juice to internal pages from expired domain?
This question relates to setting up an expired domain, that already has quality links, including deep links to internal pages. Since the new site structure will be different, what's the best practice to preserve the link juice to these internal pages? Export all the internal pages linked to using majestic Seo/ ahrefs etc, and set these pages previously linked to? Or 301 redirect these pages to home page? I heard there's a Wordpress plugin that 301 redirects all the 404 errors successfully preserving all the potential link juice.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | adorninvitations0 -
Is there any reason to Nofollow Internal Links or XML Sitemap?
I am viewing a new client's site and they have the following nofollow(S) on their site homepage. Is there a reason for this? Also, they people who originally built their site have a footer link on every page to their company (I guess to promote their work). They didn't "nofollow" that link lol... What are the thoughts on footer links? About Us Privacy Policy Customer Service Shipping & Returns Blog Contact Us Site Map Thanks James Chronicle
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Someone has built low quality links to my site - what should I do?
Hey guys, I was wondering whether you could offer me some help on something. One of the site's I'm working on has a blog attached to it and we sometimes accept guest posts from authors. A month or so back we published a blog that has been attracting a number of low-quality backlinks. Having looked into the matter further, it turned out that the client who had created the guest post was doing something called "tiered link building" and was building crappy links to their guest post content on other websites. I have subsequently deleted the blog post in question - will this devalue/cancel out the inbound links pointing to the original URL? Or do I need to do something extra? Disavow even? Comments appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Do legitimately earned links from unrelated sites help or hurt?
We have a few charity events coming up that have offered to link back to our homepage. While we do genuinely like the charities we are going to sponsor, I'm not sure how those links will look seo-wise. For example, one is for the local high school basketball team and another is for a Pediatric Care Mud Run. To a human, these links make perfect sense, but to a robot, I'm not sure if it differentiates these links from spam/some negative link. Granted, I understand that a small percentage of links probably won't do anything either way, but I'd like to ignore that for the purposes of my question. All things being equal, do links such as these help or hurt? Thanks for your time and insight, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Cross linking websites of the same company, is it a good idea
As a user I think it is beneficial because those websites are segmented to answer to each customer needs, so I wonder if I should continue to do it or avoid it as much as possible if it damages rankings...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mcany0 -
Forum Ping Back Links
Hi all, This will probably be a fairly simple question, however I'm unsure of the correct terminology to get a good answer via search. Some of my competitors have links in the comment section of highly respected websites, example of one occurrence on the mighty Wired: http://www.wired.com/bodyhack/2007/07/good-green/ Since Panda and Penguin I know Google has attempted to disregard any sort of link juice from such comment/forum spam - is this the case with comment links in sites such as Wired, as above? I'd like to hear that such comment spam actually harms the ranking of competitor sites..is there any truth to this also? I want to avoid all sorts of spammy approaches to SEO such as this - I've always been an ethical marketer, and would rather not stoop to these levels...but if they work and there is no chance of ranking penalisation.. Thanks for your time, dudes!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | paj19790 -
How do you remove unwanted links, built by your previous SEO company?
We dropped significantly (from page 1 for 4 keywords...to ranking over 75 for all) after the Penguin update. I understand trustworthy content and links (along with site structure) are the big reasons for staying strong through the update...and those sites that did these things wrong were penalized. In efforts to gain Google's trust again, we are checking into our site structure and making sure to produce fresh and relevant content on our site and social media channels on a weekly basis. But how do we remove links that were built by our SEO company, those of which could be untrustworthy/irrelevant sites with low site rankings? Try to email the webmaster of that site (using data from Open Site Explorer)?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | clairerichards0