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
-
How to deal with fake review posted on ripoffreport.com by a competitor.
In 2010 we launched a product update (physical product) that was really good for us in sales and we were taking a lot of business from our main competitor. To stop the bleeding they posted a fake ripoffreport (completely made up pretending to be a former employee, we are a family business and employ few people with almost no turn over in the last 10 years). They also posted fake reviews on Google's local product at the time for any store that used to use their product but that had switched to ours. We were able to get google to remove the fake reviews as there was no way one user visited over 100 stores and purchased the same service on the same day in all these locations around the US. But they would do nothing about delisting the report page without a court order. So the fake google reviews went away, but the ripoffreport has become immortal. The reviews were originally posted anonymously and then commented on by another anonymous user. These same two anonymous users then filed ripoffreports against a couple of our mutual customers as well. Since they are anonymous we cannot sue anyone to get them to remove it, since it is passed the statutes of limitations we cannot do a john doe law suit to get a judgment by default. So the report is there to stay. We have worked to get more content up about us, we have great product reviews on facebook and other outlets that have sold and spotlighted our products, and we are partnering with industry specific bloggers and traditional media content sites to get links and reviews (all white hat stuff, great public relations stuff), but we cannot get our interior pages, facebook pages, or the other reviews to rank higher than this report when searching for our brand name and even worse when you search for our "brand name reviews" it is the first result on google. Can anyone help me understand how I can use MOZ to help me identify how to outrank this page with interior pages so that it falls off the front page of google? Sorry if that is a newbie question but I have done a lot of things and it has worked some but not as much as I need it to. And it seems that in the last few weeks the report has become stronger in the rankings again. Any suggestions you could offer would be greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | erickcalderon0 -
Latest Moz Data Update 2 Weeks Ago?
How often is the data supposed to be updated for our Moz campaigns? Mine have been updated on 07/15/2013 the last time. Isn't it supposed to be updated weekly?
Moz Pro | | sbrault740 -
Keywords rankings compared competitors not working
Hello, My keywords rankings compared competitors is not working : http://screencast.com/t/x88Z6tXB2r For months I've never have any stats in the competitors columns, why ? Thank you
Moz Pro | | JeanlouisSEO0 -
My followed backlinks tab is not showing any data?
My followed backlinks tab is not showing any data for any of my campaigns. other tabs are shwoing data like top pages but nothing under followedbacklinks. Is anyone else having this problem?
Moz Pro | | Dataken0 -
Limit of 3 competitors per campaign
Hello, Can I just check why the number of competitors per campaign is limited to 3? ie. We have up to 20 URLs we want to monitor for the same keywords as us. I understand I can add another campaign to track another 4x URLs, but this will not show those in relation to our main URL/campaign. We would prefer to have space for 12 competitors rather than 12 campaigns. If we upgrade to Elite is the number increased? Might be missing something here, as we are new to SEOMoz, so grateful for any advice. SEOMoz is really great, we have learned so much already. Rich
Moz Pro | | STL0 -
Changing the Timeframe of Historical Crawl Data
Hello, Just read a great post about the implications of duplicate content for sites after the most recent Panda update: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+seomoz+(SEOmoz+Daily+Blog) In the post is an image or crawl data history that shows months, not days or weeks, worth of trending data as it relates to duplicate content. So my question is this: How do I change my view/date range on my own campaigns so that I can view the trailing months of data rather than only what seems to be the past 4 weeks or so? This would really help me identify the impact of some on page changes we've recently made for a client. Many Thanks, Jared
Moz Pro | | surjm0 -
Open site explorer - Analysing competitors links
When using open site explorer to analyse my competitors links, when going through them, I would click them to have a look at them. Almost all of the ones I clicked on something started to download on my computer and would be a blank page or the tab would disappear when the download begun. What is this? Why have they done this? Is this bad practice? Thanks
Moz Pro | | CompleteOffice0 -
Analysing competitors' backlinks?
I am doing some competitor analysis and one thing that I want to know is how many links my competitors have and how many different domains link to their sites. I got some figures on this both from the SEO Moz toolbar and from Majestic SEO. My problem is that the figues are massively different. E.g. SEO Moz says 9657 links from 95 domains, Majestic says 4895 links from 1722 domains. Who do I believe? And where do each of these tools get their data from?
Moz Pro | | mascotmike0