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Hey,

For the keyword you want to rank in top 3 I get: Home Depot, Amazon and Overstock. All of these 3 websites are big authority websites. It won't be easy to outrank them and it will require a lot of time and linkbuilding.

Hey Tanja,

I had the same question as you when I first got started here on SeoMoz... What does difficulty number mean? (me looks at Rand :P) There seems to be no explanation on here. So I had to ask myself is 40% high, what about 50%, 60%? In reality, these numbers don't mean much. The best way to assess competitivness of a keyword is to look at the chart shown below the difficulty score. In essence if you can match number of root domain backlinks/backlinks/authority as the number 1 guy then you have really good chance of ranking well (not always the case, but generally that holds true)...

Also, keep in mind that Google Adwords metrics is derived from paid ads, which very often doesn't necessary correlated with the difficulty of ranking organically.

Hey Pedro,

I am in the same boat with you. It is annoying not to see OSE update my link stats.

You might find this tool helpful: https://ahrefs.com/, you can use it as a free version (limited quieres) and it will show you up-to-date link count and their locations.

I wouldn't pay anything. If you have good information to share people will post it for free.

I use SemRush for that. Simply type in competitor's url and see results for their traffic. See how much % traffic they are getting for each keyword compared to the total amount of traffic they are getting.

Very often people do have killer content, but they still don't get traffic/backlinks... Link buying is not a bad idea in itself if done properly. However, having 40 edu backlinks done over a short period of time with no educational relevancy with your site will do more harm than good in the end.

I agree with Marisa, I had similar experience... In the end my domain was blacklisted and I had to move my site.

Well... if you build more junk links than quality links to your competitor they will eventually lose rank and there is not much they can do about that. It's really not that hard to game Google after all.

I think I used all of them at some point and yes they do work. I no longer need them since I rely on different SEO tools. However, you might find them helpful for discovering new backlink sources/partner sites.

I bought a few facebook likes and it was a waste of money. Users who "liked" my page were fake... I wasn't expecting much from these likes and I did it because I wanted to make my brand new fb page more likeable. You need to start somewhere, right? No one wants to be the first person to "like".

There is no real benefit of having an exact match domain, because it is single web pages and not domain names who are competing for SERPs.

Google Analytics says that one of my client's load time is 4 seconds. Alertra says it is 1 second in the USA. I don't think Alertra is accurate.

I set up a profile for a site with many pages, opting for setting up as a root directory. When SEOMoz crawled, they only found one page. Any ideas for why this would be?

Thanks!