Finding affiliate links with opensiteexplorer
-
Hey guys,
I'm trying to develop lists of our competitors affiliates using opensiteexplorer using the following method
- When logged in to seomoz, go to http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
- Search for<rival company="" domain=""></rival>
- Select Show ALL links from ALL pages to PAGES ON THIS ROOT DOMAIN and SHOW LINKS UNGROUPED
- Click 'Filter'
- Click_ 'Download csv'_
- Open the csv in excel and filter the Target URL column for any known part of the affiliate link (example ?a_aid) - this leaves you with a list of the affiliate links
- Filter out duplicates
Is this the best process? I have a feeling I'm missing some as OSE truncates to 25 links per domain. It would be nice also if OSE could do the filtering for me.
Any better ways to do this?
-
Howdy Pilkster!
Sounds like your method is pretty good, and I don't have too many suggestions to improve it.
In my experience, lot of sites either cloak or redirect affiliate links, so I bet they can be near impossible to find, even for search engines!
OSE advanced reports can filter by anchor text and several other variables, but as you noted it can't sort by URL parameters. If you'd like to see this as a feature request, we have a forum for that - https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-SEOmoz-PRO-Feature-Requests
(it would be a pretty cool feature actually - I'd vote for it
As for only seeing 25 links per domain, this could miss some links, but I suspect the majority of the time if a domain links to another with an affiliate link, most of the links would also be affiliate links. There are plans to expose more of this data in the future, at least through the API.
Thanks for the feedback!
-
In fact when I shared the list of competitors with my client they are sure I'm missing a large proportion of the affiliates. Any ideas?
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
-
Open Site Explorer detects links from a site that redirects to it? How is this possible?
I was checking external links to a site: scte-brasilien.de/ and was wondering why there are so many links pointing from another domain (reisen-nach-brasilien.com/) although it redirects to scte-brasilien.de/? So when checking the redirecting domain OSE knows its redirecting... The URL you've entered redirects to another URL. We're showing results for scte-brasilien.de/ since it is likely to have more accurate link metrics. See data forreisen-nach-brasilien.com/ instead? How is this possible? best regards
Moz Pro | | inlinear
Holger0 -
No follow links also been reported in SEOmoz crawl diagnostics
Hi, Why does SEOmoz reports links which has been marked as 'nofollow'. I am getting 'Overly-Dynamic URL' reports on links which I have designated as nofollow which means Google will discount them. So why does SEOmoz still report them. Thanks.
Moz Pro | | malpani0 -
Link reporting.
Is there a way in the Pro reporting where I can see a summary of the number of incoming links by type (blogs / news / wiki / dir / forums etc)? Even better, could the report give me an average Page Rank for each link type? Thanks,
Moz Pro | | CarlDarby0 -
Canonical link on canonical url
This might seem a bit of an odd one, but we seem to be going around in circles on this when using the on page optimizer tool. We have an ecommerce site (magento) which by default is putting a canonical link in the header on every product page. For example; www.example.com/product1.html has the But when we run the on page optimiser tool, we're losing points on the critical section for not having canonical set correctly. If we remove the tag, we get the tick and the a grade, but then further down the report we lose a tick for not using canonical links. What are we missing here?
Moz Pro | | andyjsi0 -
Why is the linking root domains count not increasing
For the last month I have been tracking my backlinks thru open site explorer. Over the same period I have gone on a minor link building exercise via social media, some directories as well as writing fresh new content for the site. However, my backlink count has increased in the Rank Tracker tool but my root linking domains have remain at the same level. Is there a lag or is this because some of these site are not in the open site index? To be specific - I have personally setup follow links from sites like tumblr, posterous, stumbleUpon, delicious and other like these. Would really like to understand the limitations so I can take the appropriate action. Thanks
Moz Pro | | versinge0 -
No follow Internal Links
Hello, I am comparing my site with my competitors. According to Open Site Explorer, my site has 541 internal follow links, and a total of 1,286 total internal links, implying I have 745 no follow internal links. I tried to drill into these internal no follow links using the "Inbound Links" report in OSE. But I'm receiving an error stating that No Data is Available for this URL. Does anyone have any insight to this? I'd really like to understand where those no follow links are coming from. Thanks in advance. eh70
Moz Pro | | TheBOTWGuys0 -
Can someone explain why I have been seeing an increase in the number of Linking Page URLs in OSE that link directly to downloads?
Ever since the last couple Linkscape updates when doing competitive back link analysis I have noticed a large increase in the number of URLs of Linking Pages in OSE that result in an immediate file download. The majority of the time these downloads are not common files ie PDF, DOC files. For example, these were all in a competitors back link profile: http://download.unesp.br/linux/debian/pool/main/i/isc-dhcp/isc-dhcp-relay-dbg_4.1.1-P1-17_ia64.deb http://snow.fmi.fi/data/20090210_eurasia_sd_025grid.mat http://www.rose-hulman.edu/class/me/HTML/ES204_0708_S/working model examples/Le25 mad hatter.wm?a=p&id=145880&g=5&p=sia&date=iso&o=ajgrep These are just a few I came across for a single competitor. Is this sketchy black hat SEO, some sort of error, actual links, or something else? Any information on this subject would be helpful. Thank you.
Moz Pro | | Gyi0 -
What is the difference between the link count on OSE and Linkscape?
We notice a huge difference in the number of inbound links . Site explore shows 1,200 as an example and linkscape shows over 100,000 for the same site.
Moz Pro | | JamesBarry0