Dig Up The Dirt On Your Competitor
Posted in SEO on April 20th, 2008 by SEO Pro
This post is geared more to the novice that is starting out in SEO and not for the seasoned veteran. I figured I would start by addressing some of the basic tasks in the day and life of an SEO.
If you are beginning to learn or getting interested in search engine optimization, chances are you are trying to beat your competitors ranking and in the process take over his spot. Whatever is your motive, in the SEO world analyzing your competitors back links is something you will find yourself doing quite a lot. While there are more sophisticated and automated tools available that greatly reduce the amount of manual work and will most definitely have to be part of your SEO arsenal, lets for now look at how you would research a competitor back links without using a paid tool.
First and foremost is the keyword. Understanding keywords is a whole chapter in itself and best left for another day. For the sake of this post I’m assuming that you know your targeted keyword. Let’s go one better and look at the contest that I talked about in my previous post. Here we know that the keyword is Asia’h Epperson. The goal of the contest is to rank as high as you can for the term “Asia’h Epperson”. While there are many that are trying their hand in the contest, in my previous post I highlighted the two sites that I believe are doing the best. Let’s do a little research by looking at one the top two in contention.
First thing you will need is SEOQuake. Yes I know we said no tools in the beginning but this one is free and sure saves some time. Download it from here and set it up on your browser. I’ve tested it on my Firefox and it works just great. Once you’ve done that our next stop is to go to Yahoo’s SiteExplorer.
Type in your competitor’s website url and hit “Explore URL”. Yahoo comes back with 2 sets of results. The first of results is all the pages from the website itself that Yahoo has in its index and the second is all the incoming links to the website in question. Look at the screenshot below that I’ve taken of one of the contenders for the Asia’h Epperson SEO contest to show things more clearly. After all, a picture speaks a thousand words.
Look at the first rounded rectangle highlighted in red. This gives me the total number of pages that Yahoo has indexed. By default it groups all the sub domains and gives you the total number. If you want to eliminate all the sub domains then simply click on the “Only this domain” link in the second higlighted rectangle.
So what does this tell me? 19 pages is really not bad for a website that started sometime in March. It tells me that the author is quite active which is always good from an SEO perspective. The bots love fresh content and the more you add content to your website the more they will visit you.
Lets proceed to look at the second part of the results. Right next to the first rounded rectangle you have a link that says ” Inlinks (5264)”. What does this mean? Yahoo is telling you that it has found 5264 incoming links to the website. Again by default Yahoo counts incoming links to the complete website including subdomains and internal links from the website itself. To see more details click on the inlinks link. I’ve once again attached a screenshot to make things more clear.
On clicking the “inlinks” link, Yahoo will display all the incoming links to the website. This is great because now you can see exactly where your competitor is getting his or her links from. If you have SEOQuake installed you will also get to see additional information that will tell you in a glance how strong the incoming links are. The red colored rounded rectangle bars in the above screenshot show you the output from SEOQuake. This is where SEOQuake is a timesaver. You can sort the entire results by PageRank or any other metric that SEOQuake allows you and all the results are sorted accordingly. I’ve sorted the results by PageRank and can see the highest PR on the link is PR6. I can now categorize these and then explore further to see the exact nature of the link.
Before you go about doing this make sure you apply these two filters.
- Remove links from the same website.
- Set to show incoming links to the entire website.
Doing this should help to clear up the results and you can begin your digging in earnest. Sort by PageRank and check each link to find out the exact nature of the link. Now before someone points this out in the comments let me say that Yes, I do know that visible PageRank is not the all and end all. But for a backlink analysis the worst case is some of the pages increase in authority and rank and the best case is the exact opposite.
While it is relatively easy to spot PageRank, spotting authority is a little more difficult. Just think of an authority site as a site that is trusted by Google. Google ranks such sites very high on the SERP’s. (Search Engine Result Pages) You can rank very high for your main keywords (primary niche) and for totally unrelated keywords and phrases as well.
Looking back at the contest, the site that everyone is trying to beat has a solid back link from Griz’s make money for beginners blog. This is probably the biggest factor that is still keeping Griz’s Asia’h Epperson site stuck like glue on second spot in Google.
Let me give you an idea of the kind of authority Griz’s money making site has. Recently Victor Franqui, one of the few bloggers that talks sense when it comes to making money online called out Caroline Middlebrook and questioned her knowledge and experience. ( Be advised the language in the video is a little graphic. Not safe while at work or in front of kids )
Anyway to cut a long story short, in the video Vic promises Caroline Middlebrook that he will overtake Caroline on the SERP’s for the term “Caroline Middlebrook”. Now I’ve got to believe Vic when he says something like that. I’m pretty sure he will follow up and actually do something about it.
Soon after Griz gives Vic the perfect link, the right anchor text and everything. Funnily enough, that post from Griz is now on page 1 in Google for Caroline Middlebrook. One single post from Griz on his make money blog is all it took and Griz wasn’t even trying. Today if you search for Caroline Middlebrook on Google you will find Griz’s site ahead of Vic’s, on the first page, ranked 4th or 5th when I last checked. Again guys, a single post from Griz and he makes the first page on Google. That shows some serious authority.
Boy I’ve really digressed now. Back to the SEO contest and the research we were doing. Once you have the incoming links sorted by PR, look a little deeper at the sites. Find out the following
- What is the Anchor Text?
- Is the site content related to the keyword in question?
- Is it a sitewide link? (Is it on the sidebar or footer that is common throughout the website)
- If the link is not sitewide, check if the link is part of the content?
- Evaluate the link neighborhood?
Here is a tip guys. The best kind of link that you can possibly get is from a virgin authority site using the right anchor and title text with the link buried as part of the content. The perfect link. Period!!
Now these tasks will cost you time. This is where having something like SEOElite comes in handy. But then SEOElite is a beast that is also best left for another day. Folks I’m going to end this post here. This is way too long already. I will continue in my next post. Do come back and keep reading SEOBlogPro.com for more SEO and related tips.
7 Responses
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April 20th, 2008 at 5:07 am
Well done, you are the first person I’ve come across that understands the power of an authority site. A link from a site with a lot of trust can provide a great deal of juice even when the anchored keyword is unrelated to the authority site’s main purpose. That was nicely presented and shows a good understanding of SEO basics. I see you have chosen to chase down the “SEO” rankings - one of the toughest but you have clearly been doing your homework. I wish you the best.
April 20th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Good job you don’t seem too impressed or worried by page rank.
BB
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:10 am
Thank you for your review of SeoQuake.
If you have any ideas or suggestions how to improve seoquake functions - let us know, please.
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Griz,
Coming from you that is indeed high praise. Yes, SEO is one highly competitive term but then nothing like a good challenge to spice up life.
I’ve noticed that the recent PR changes have affected rankings somewhat (eg: make money online). I guess it’s too soon to draw any conclusions until a few weeks pass for Google to get it all sorted out. I hope you get your second place back.
cheers,
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Thanks Bill.
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:55 pm
G.Suvorov,
The recent adsense spy addition is interesting. How accurately do you predict? I’ve noticed that “2 Sites” seem to be the most common estimation.
cheers,
May 7th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
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