An Inside Look at Competitors Backlinks with Open Site Explorer

Posted by fabioricotta This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Hi SEOmoz folks, Sometimes we begin a new SEO consulting job and do not to know where to start our Link Building. We have a lot of options but the first thing I really like to do is to analyze what my competitors are doing. As we know, one of the best ways to analyze backlinks is by using Open Site Explorer (OSE) . With this tool we can submit a domain and see which pages on the web are linking to it and some awesome metrics. We can use it to begin our analysis. The first thing you need to do is to create a competitor list. Then you need to go to OSE and insert your competitor(s) domain(s). Then you will filter by links from “External Pages Only” and “All Pages in the Root Domain”, as you can see below. With these filters, we guarantee that we will have an overall look at your competitors’ website backlinks. After the above steps, we need to export all this data by clicking on “Export to CSV”. After that, you will import this data to Excel: Next, you will remove the 6 first lines, as they are only comments. Then you need to select the first line, click on the Data Tab and select “Filter”. This will give you the ability to sort every column by some filters. Now we can begin our competitor analysis. For this part, I have chosen 9 commonly used link building strategies that you can use OSE and find what your competitors are doing. So, let’s take a look: Finding Directories As some SEOs know, using Directories as part of your link building strategy can provide a good value to your backlink profile. If your competitor is using any directory strategy, we can find it using OSE data, filtering the Title column by the text filter “directory” or you can filter the URL column with text “directory”. The good part of that is that you can see the Page Authority and Domain Authority of each directory page that your competitor is listed in and figure out to which one you should submit your website. A “bonus” filter you can use is filter by PA above 5 and DA above 20, so you will remove all the bad directories from your list. Niche Forums One thing that I really like are forums, maybe it’s because most of my knowledge came from there. Well, thinking about link building and SEO, when you find a niche directory, you find a community that talks about the same thing (or related) as you. If those members recommend your services you can get really good leads. So, one thing you can do is to investigate which forums your competitors were recommended in, so you can interact with those people. The idea here is to filter the Title column by the text filter “forum” or you can filter the URL column with text “forum”. Using it will retrieve all the forums that provide at least 1 link to your competitor. You can use the same tip here that I gave in the last topic. Powerful Profile Pages Sometimes when we do a link building strategy we use some profiles to post and interact with customers and people about our website. And sometimes, those platforms that we use for it provide ways to drop a link (eg. user website). Based on this idea, one cool idea is to check which social networks your competitor is working. You can do it easily by filtering the URL column or Title column by text filters “user” or “profile”. After identifying those profiles check how you competitor is working with it, like how is he interacting with the community, check if he is creating new content, check which keywords he is using on that new content. A good tip here is to check the backlinks to that profile page. We noticed that some competitors are buying links for that profile page, so they can get more juice and spread it to their content. I am not telling you to do the same, but maybe you can file a spam report. Tag Pages A common and cheap link building tactic is to submit your website to social bookmarking websites. Sometimes, social bookmarking does not provide a strong enough value, but many SEOs use it as a base for their link building strategy. So, you can find which social bookmarking websites your competitors are using. The good thing (tip) here is to find a niche social bookmarking website. Those kind of websites can provide you some good leads as they are related to your niche. So, be careful when checking this. To find the tag pages and then the social bookmarking websites, you can filter the Title column by text filters “tag” or “tagged”. Another filter you can use is “tag” in the URL column. Where They are Submitting Articles As Rand pointed in a previous Whiteboard Friday , if you create a good Article Submission strategy you can get some good links and traffic. For example, you can filter the URL column with some already known article directories (“ezinearticles.com”, “amazines.com”, “articlealley.com”, “articleindex.net”, “goarticles.com”, “articlesltd.net”, “365articles.com”, “articletrader.com”, “articlesbase.com”, “thebestarticles.com”, “mycontentbuilder.com”, “thinkarticle.com”, “articlerumble.com”, “gsarticles.com”, etc…). The idea here is to find where your competitors are gaining links and then find their profiles. After that, grab a list of all articles that they posted and run a OSE report for each link (you can do it using the SEOmoz API). Check which ones have a large number of backlinks. Then you need to check why they attracted so many links and just use that idea to create some new content. A bonus tip here is that some article directories enable comments with link… so, try to comment in your competitors’ best articles. Resource Pages as Good Backlink Sources Some years ago, one of the common things that webmasters did was to create pages listing some useful links as resources. Nowadays it’s not common but the point is that there are a lot of resource pages out there. So you can check if your competitor is listed in any resource page and then ask the webmaster to include your valuable website. It’s really easy, but don’t forget to be generous and really show that your website can help their visitors. To find the resources page, you can filter the URL column using the text filter “resources”. I’ve tried to filter the Title column but I didn’t like the results I found. Competitors Press Releases When we talk about press releases we need to be careful about our objectives. The first thing here is to identify which company your competitor is using to distribute their press releases. So you can filter the URL column by the common PR Distribution companies (“prweb”, “send2press”, “prnewswire”, etc…) and since those companies sometimes publish the press release inside their domain, you can find your competitor’s press releases. The second step is to grab a list of all press releases they published and do the same thing I told you about article directories’ profiles. Find which are the most linked press releases and why. This will give you some advantage in your next press release. Linkbait with InfoGraphics One of the latest link building tactics is to create amazing InfoGraphics . The cool thing for link building is that if you create a good infographic it can go viral and provide a lot of backlinks. So the point here is to see if your competitors are using infographics to get links. To check it, just filter the Title column by text filter “infographic” and you will find the list of infographics that give links to your competitors. The point here is that you can tell me “Hey, when I create an InfoGraphic I post it at my site, not in someone’s else blog”. You are right, but the point here is that some websites can’t use / post those kind of images inside their structure, so they need to publish it as guest post. A tip here is: if you find an infographic inside a blog, don’t forget to comment in the comments area. You can get some value there. Trusted links: Any .EDU or .GOV links? Most of the linkbuilders love .edu and .gov links. They are strong, they are trusted and they really rock. Based on that, you can check if your competitors have any link coming from any of those TLDs. You can find it filtering the URL column by text filter “.edu” or “.gov”. You need to check why your competitors have those links and then try to find a way to get them. Don’t forget to avoid those .edu crap networks. Wikipedia Links Worldwide known, Wikipedia is a great source of visitors and leads. We can’t count their backlinks because of nofollow, but they still provide value by sending you traffic. We made some Wikipedia strategies for some clients and those links are just growing our referral visitors. You can find the Wikipedia pages that link to your competitors by just filtering the URL column by text filter “wikipedia.org”. One thing to remember is that Wikipedia (moderators) does not like spam or commercial stuff. So the easy way we find to get a link from them is by adding some valuable content, specially when you adds notes about statistics that you published in your press release. This really rocks and in most cases they allow you to reference your data source (you). Conclusions We saw in this article that using a SEO tool such as Open Site Explorer could help you to find what our competitors are doing, providing us some insights on how to create our SEO strategy. It is important to highlight that I am not telling you to get the same backlinks that your competitors had, but I am trying to show you is that you can begin your strategy by getting the best of what your competitors did, and then, improve with your own ideas. Hope you liked this post! Fabio Ricotta is the Co-Founder of MestreSEO , a brazillian SEO company. Do you like this post? Yes No

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An Inside Look at Competitors Backlinks with Open Site Explorer

International CRO – Choosing the Wrong Colors and Other Mishaps

Posted by Sam Crocker Good morning Mozzers! Today we’re going to walk you through some rather basic but far-too-oft overlooked conversion factors specifically for international SEO. Anyone who has had the pleasure of using ecommerce sites in multiple countries may have noticed that as a general rule the sites look pretty similar if not identical. Today we are going to walk you through some of the pros and cons of this approach and how you might actually benefit from mixing things up for different audiences in different countries. WARNINGS: 1. There is something to be said for having a similar site, brand, and feel that can be recognized all over the world. 2. Some CMS systems do not allow for easy changes to be made for different versions of the site. 3. With Google Translation, many folks are becoming less interested in having multiple sites anyhow. 4. More sites mean more potential problems and things to worry about. Now, with these warnings out of the way let’s first jump into some of the potential benefits, and then look at some examples.

[Twitter] Super Junior and Inkigayo Trends ~ Daily K Pop News

And not to mention, both these kpop related topics are beating the strong trend of ‘Bieberfever’ so well done ELFs and kpop fans! ABOUT THE AUTHOR : Hello my name is .I am an active author of this blog.If you like this article,Help us …

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[Twitter] Super Junior and Inkigayo Trends ~ Daily K Pop News

Search Engine Marketing in Arizona: Monitoring Keyword Trends in …

Search engine marketing in Arizona, or SEM, is one of the most cost effective internet marketing strategies. This article will provide you with information.

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Search Engine Marketing in Arizona: Monitoring Keyword Trends in …

Wall Street Journal Throws A Softball To MySpace

I’m sort of scratching my head at the Wall Street Journal’s article (mostly behind a paywall) that MySpace is in negotiations over some kind of new search advertising deal. “News Corp. is in discussions with Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. about replacing MySpace’s crucial search-advertising partnership with Google, which expires next month, according to people familiar with the matter,” says the WSJ, which is also owned by MySpace parent News Corp. Well, yeah. Their deal with Google is ending. Supposedly in August, although the Google agreement I read said it ended in June 2010. Everyone knows MySpace has been trying to figure out a way to replace that $300 million/year in revenue. And everyone knows it isn’t going to happen. But anyway, here are some interesting things that the WSJ left out of their article: First, Fox Audience Network, which serves most of the ads on MySpace, is supposedly on a tear with their self service platform. Our understanding is that News Corp.’s goal is to grow FAN to the point where MySpace doesn’t need an outside partner for search advertising. Second, FAN is definitely up for sale by News Corp. , and at least one bidder – Silver Lake Partners (they own part of Skype, and made a failed bid to invest in Facebook) – has made an offer. If FAN is sold, it’s a solid bet that MySpace will quickly be sold, too. The two companies live off each other. Third, the WSJ says MySpace thinks it can carve a niche for itself by exploiting Facebook’s privacy weakness ( good idea , but way too late now). Apparently there will also be a new logo. MySpace is apparently still counting on artists and bands to keep users happy – “A band, for instance, could use MySpace to share music with fans and get feedback, as well as adjust their touring schedule to add concerts in Texas, for example, if the musicians see their MySpace fan base is heavily from that state.” But sometime this year, probably sooner rather than later, MySpace is going to turn off their free music streaming and move to a subscription model. A related point – MySpace Music was driving most of the searches that made up the massive page view obligations that MySpace had under the Google Agreement. With free music going away, those page views will go away, too. Meaning a search deal is even less lucrative. There’s no real news at all in the WSJ article, although it will certainly help ensure that Microsoft, Google and Yahoo all know that the other guys are maybe looking at a deal, too. I think the far more interesting questions around MySpace have to do with what’s going on with FAN, and what will happen to their music business, none of which was addressed in the article. Far be it from me to say that there’s a conflict of interest in this story given that the WSJ and MySpace are owned by the same company – I’ll let others say it instead . A more critical approach may have been a better choice. CrunchBase Information MySpace Information provided by CrunchBase

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Wall Street Journal Throws A Softball To MySpace

Woot To The AP: Nice Story About Our Sale — You Now Owe Us $17.50

Gotta love those guys at Woot . They just sold to Amazon for $110 million , but that’s not stopping them from calling anyone out as they see fit. In this case, we particularly love it because they’re calling out the AP — and they’re doing so right on their highly trafficked homepage. You see, Woot noticed that the AP covered the story of their sale five days ago. But in doing so, they also noticed that the AP used a number of quotes from CEO Matt Rutledge’s blog post about the sale. According to the AP’s own ridiculous rules for using quotations, Woot figures that the AP owes them $17.50. The AP has been banned on TechCrunch for two years now because of this ridiculous rule. In fact, we’re breaking our own rule here by acknowledging they even exist. But this is too good to pass up — and it’s actually similar to something we did a couple years ago, trying to charge the AP $12.50 for their usage of quotes from us. To my knowledge, we’re still waiting for that check. But Woot is more forgiving than we are. They’re willing to cut a deal: But, hey. We’re all friends here. And invoicing is  such a hassle in today’s paperless society, are we right? How about this: instead of cutting us a check for the web content you liberated from our site, all you’ll need to do is show us your email receipt from today’s two pack of Sennheiser MX400 In-Ear Headphones, and we’ll call it even. Yes, Woot is letting the AP skip out on the money they owe if they simply buy a couple of the featured products today on Woot. Good idea. And they’re backing it up: “ Don’t force us to pass this matter to a collection agency, ” they write. Best of luck with those jokesters, Woot. Below, find the key blurb from Woot’s message to the AP, which hopefully they won’t charge us for since we don’t try to enforce the same ridiculous rules the AP does: The AP, we can’t thank you enough for looking our way. You see, when we showed off our  good news on Wednesday afternoon, we expected we’d get a little bit of attention. But when we found your little newsy thing you do, we couldn’t help but notice something important. And that something is this: you printed our web content in your article! The web content that came from our blog! Why, isn’t that the very thing  you’ve previously told nu-media bloggers they’re not supposed to do ? So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your  very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we’ve figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create. [thanks Anurag ] CrunchBase Information Woot Associated Press Information provided by CrunchBase

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Woot To The AP: Nice Story About Our Sale — You Now Owe Us $17.50

How Steam Stopped Me From Pirating Games And Enjoy The Sweet DRM Kool-Aid

Note: A reader sent us this interesting take on Steam and DRM, but requested to stay anonymous due to the nature of the article. We of course obliged. Up until a few weeks ago, the last PC game I purchased and didn’t pirate was Team Fortress 2 via the digital download service, Steam. The last PC game I purchased in a retail box was Half Life 2. Yet like many, I’ve still managed to play every PC hit over the last decade. I simply couldn’t justify spending $50 on a game when pirating offers so many real benefits verses owning a legit copy. Part of my motivation was that it’s just so damn easy to pirate a game. It’s like three clicks of the mouse to download a torrent and even less on Usernet. The files download as fast as my cable modem allows and I have the full game with simple cracking instructions a few minutes later. Why in the world would I want to drive to a store and give them $50 for the same thing?

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How Steam Stopped Me From Pirating Games And Enjoy The Sweet DRM Kool-Aid

Boy Do I Love Linkbuilding – And You Should Too

Posted by Seoteric This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Link building is always a hot topic because it is really what makes an SEO campaign work.

Foursquare Fixes, Responds To “Who’s Been Here” Privacy Hole

Yesterday, Wired published a report detailing an issue with Foursquare privacy, whereby a program could effectively harvest Foursquare checkin data by constantly refreshing venue pages and looking to see which users were showing up in the “Who’s Been Here” section, which shows a grid of users who recently checked in at that venue. According to the article, white hat coder Jesper Andersen was able to log around 70% of all check-ins in San Francisco — or 875,000 checkins — over the last three weeks. Today, Foursquare has addressed the report with a post on its official blog outlining the issue. As data breaches go I’m not sure this one was especially “sophisticated”, as Foursquare keeps calling it, but they apologize and explain what they’ve done to fix it. From the Foursquare blog: A little over a week ago (on Monday the 21st), our developers were alerted to a problem that enabled sophisticated users, by continuously scraping venue pages from our website through anonymous gateways, to capture private check-in information that users didn’t intend to share with the general public. Three days later, our team began rolling out a number of solutions to this problem. First, we ensured that any user that had opted out of appearing in the “Who’s Here” lists no longer appeared in the “Who’s Been Here” photo mosaics on our site (this fix went live last Thursday). Second, we updated the language on our “Settings” page to clarify what opting into the “Who’s Here” feature entails. Third, we randomized the order of the photos being posted under the ”Who’s Been Here” headings on our venue pages to prevent anyone from scraping this data to try to estimate check-in times of various users. This won’t be the last time we hear about privacy issues with location-based services, where security and privacy are going to be key. That said, the privacy concerns for Foursquare, where users are explicitly checking into venues, are less worrisome than if this had happened with one that constantly monitors your location, like Google Latitude. And privacy hasn’t really been Foursquare’s big selling point, either — don’t expect to see much of an uproar from its users over this. CrunchBase Information Foursquare Information provided by CrunchBase

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Foursquare Fixes, Responds To “Who’s Been Here” Privacy Hole

Million Dollar Business | Millionaire Mindset | Small Business Trends

To get your small business to a million-dollar business, you must cultivate a millionaire mindset. This article explains how, by using the Law of Attraction.

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Million Dollar Business | Millionaire Mindset | Small Business Trends