Competitor analysis and broken links

[Deanknight]

I have just been looking at a competitors links and have discovered some of the links they have obtained dont actually exist when clicking through to the directory or blog in question, although still appear in opensiteexplorer.

Is this common? and is it just a sign of bad link building practices?

[DougRoberts]

Well open site explorer is your friend! The best way to get a feel for evaluating link profiles is just to dive in and look at the link profiles of lots of sites - sites that rank, sites that don't and sites that should! Remember to take a good look at the sites themselves to get a feel for their layout, relevance and and high level feel for their authority. (humans are pretty good at evaluating this!)

There are tools out there that will help you profile backlinks (such as Link Detective (http://www.linkdetective.com/) (which seems to be down at the moment)

Here's an articles from the SEOmoz blog to get you started::

How to Check Which Links Can Harm Your Site's Rankings

I don't know if you've got the SEO Toolbar installed (http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar), it's a great way to keep an eye on sites as you surt and an easy way to jump into digging into a sites ranking factors.

More than anything else, I would say that the most important thing is to develop an inquisitive nature!

Good luck!

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[Deanknight]

Thanks Doug

I guess I need to do some more homework on evaluating links. Whats the best way of going about this?

[DougRoberts]

Open site explorer is a snapshot of the web as seen at a particular moment in time.

You can't count on any links being permanent. The URL of the linking page can change over time (especially true where you have paginated comments and your/your competitors comments drift down over time.)

I don't think you can automatically assume that disappearing links are a sign of bad link building practices, but I suspect it's a reasonable warning sign to dig a little deeper.

If these links are all blogs / directory links then I'd say that can be a good indicator of low value/risky link building.

You need to look at the nature of the links, their authority and value. Do they exist solely to provide a link or is there another reason. Is the site on which the link existed related to the target site and is it reasonable to believe that a link would belong there. Is there a reason why you'd want to remove them if they were your links.

Especially when you've got a competitive niche, it makes sense to keep an eye on your competitors ranking and then look at reasons behind any changes. I've heard of anecdotal stories of site moving from page 2 to the top of page 1 just by tidying up their link profiles.

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[Personnel_Concept]

That particular competitor might have made the link a while back before the recent Google updates and after the update they might have implemented link removal campaigns removing the links that might harm the site's ranking. OS explorer's data is refreshed once a month, and in some cases more than that. So If you click on those link, they might have been removed already by your competitor.

Hope that helps !