Whether you like it or not Best Seo Affiliate Program is still pretty much about links. Good link profile can make up for almost any lack of optimized content and other onpage flaws. Love or hate, the best thing you can do about it is embrace the fact and run with it.
So let’s go through some tricks that will enable you to look deeper into your competition’s link profile granting you access to the restricted areas: their locker room, dirty laundry and even the briefing hall where they plan their link building strategies.
Let’s Talk Competitive Link Research
Finding out where your competitors’ links come from is not all that hard. You just go to Yahoo! or Google and type in link:www.your-competitor.com to get a list of inbound links to the site. Yahoo’s much better in that respect as it tends to give more extensive and accurate data. The problem here is that there’s a limit of 1,000 links per website which is often not enough as the fattest link sources get left behind the limit fence.
Here’re some tips to break through to the other side.
Note: If you’re lazy like me skip to the end of the article where I’ll share a tool that does it all much quicker.
Trick 1: Search for Links to Particular Web Pages of a Competing Site Alongside with <XMP>link:www.your-competitor.com</XMP> search for <XMP>link:www.your-competitor.com/products.html</XMP> or <XMP>link:www.your-competitor.com/services.html</XMP> and so on.
Trick 2: Exclude Internal Links
You may examine the internal linking structure of your competition if you want to gain some insight on their navigation and marketing steps. But as we want to find more external links, let’s exclude the internal ones.
You can do this by adding <XMP>-site:site.com</XMP> operator to your search query. Type in: <XMP>link:http://www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com</XMP> or <XMP>linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com</XMP> and you’ll get a list of external backlinks only. There’s a dropdown option in Yahoo! site explorer that does the same.
Trick 3: Exclude Links Coming from Certain Domains
The -site: modifier lets you exclude links coming from specific sites. So, whenever you see a large chunk of links coming from the same domain add <XMP>-site:thisdomain.com</XMP> modifier to your query and the links from this site will get replaced with new ones.
You can add -site: multiple times in one query so that you have something like this: <XMP>link:http://www.cnn.com -site:cnn.com -site:en.wikipedia.org</XMP>
Trick 4: Check Links Coming from Certain TLDs
This is a little known trick. The site: modifier actually lets you get a list of links coming from domains with certain TLDs: .com, .org, .edu, .co.uk and so on. Just type in <XMP>link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.gov</XMP> or <XMP>linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com site:.gov</XMP> and you’ll get a list of .gov sites linking to your rival.
Note: Do this in Yahoo! regular search, not site explorer
Trick 5: Exclude Links Coming from Certain TLDs
This is an even lesser known trick. You can exclude certain TLDs from the results with the -site:.tld modifier. Usually the biggest chunk of links comes from .com’s so add a -site.com modifier and you’ll get lots of new link data.
Trick 6: Use Different Combinations of the First 5 Tricks
Try <XMP>link:http://www.your-competitor.com/page.html -site:your-competitor.com -site:.com</XMP> Or <XMP>link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.org -site:wikipedia.org </XMP> Give it a thought and I’m sure you’ll come up with lots of your own. Feel free to share your findings in the comments
Trick 7: Use the Above 6 Tricks in Different Search Engines
Don’t limit your searches to Yahoo! and Googl