Mon 27 Jul 2009
You Don’t NEED To Know About Your Competitors Backlinks
Blurb by Shaun Anderson (Hobo)While looking at your competitors backlinks can give you an idea of the content that attracts backlinks, and the type of sites that will link to you, if you’re actively adding content to your site, and building links in an intelligent manner over time, you don’t need to know a thing about your competitors backlinks to compete with them.
And you don’t ever need to get the same backlinks as your competitors.
If you’re adding content to your site or supplying a particular service, somebody out there will link to your site, or you can manufacture links yourself.
It might even serve you better to go outwith your niche and get better backlinks from trusted sites.
Sometimes all you need to know is:
- You’re adding content to your site
- Which is useful to certain types of individuals or organisations or groups
- And you can use Google to find out the sites these people are attracted to / hang out
- And you can then find out how to contact these sites and tell them about your content
Then, you win some you lose some in terms of actually succeeding in getting these trusted sites to link to you.
Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)
Quick, simple and to the point. I think that if your niche, is really your niche, then you will attract visitors organically..
Yup, Jim – I didn’t do much competitor research in the beginning at all, and got the results I aimed for. Especially for small businesses with small websites, it’s just about getting the head down, making content and telling the world about your site.
Sometimes I think there’s far too much information to digest. I only use competitor research to cherry pick links and spot opportunities, but only when I’d covered the basics anyway.
Afraid that approach in my niche won’t get you very far at all. What choice do I have other than to buy inbounds to an online casino info site?
Organic link advice is all well and good but it doesn’t apply to all web content. I am trying to offer a useful resource for existing and potential casino players but still my site gets bundled in with the pharma/adult crowd.
Ho hum!
Note how I’m a casino affiliate and didn’t try to spam your comments section!
Keep up the good work
Chris
Yes. I would say the same thing about PageRank. You don’t NEED to know what PageRank a certain link is to achieve success. But there is one thing I would recommend.
Identify the serp dominators for your keys and check about how many links to domains (domain pop) they have. What is this useful for? Just as a very rough estimate on how much link building you have to do to achive a similiar kind of success.
If you have a domain pop of 100 but everybody else has 10,000 domain links you can determine which strategies (manual link building vs link building systems) is more appropriate in your case.
This can be done freely on majesticseo.com at the time of writing this.
-sasa
Wow. Short but sweet. It sometimes seems that “getting link from trusted websites ” isn’t always the case.
Sometimes people can get so desperate that they wouldn’t mind if they got a link from a suspended site from google.
“you don’t need to know a thing about your competitors backlinks to compete with them.
And you don’t ever need to get the same backlinks as your competitors.”
This looks extremely naive to me. If competitors have extremely easy to replicate backlinks it would be crazy not to copy them. Sure go for links from elsewhere, but why not take advantage of someone elses hard work and scoop up all the easy links that the competitors have already found? You get a far better ROI time wise by spending an hour or two going through the top 10 ranking sites already and buying/acquiring all of their best links that are available.
My first link acquisition plan is ALWAYS shadowing what my competitors have already done. If you are new into a niche, or working on a site that has not had any link building done, it is a quick way to catch up some of that lost ground before you unleash some link baits and nepotistic links to overtake them.
Howdy Phil
Consider this ranking strategy and lets discuss my naivity
I launched a site 2 months ago. It has no incoming links in Yahoo. It has a PR of 4. It ranks top ten in Google for “keyword keyword” – a product, not geographic or an easy term to get – (one of my client’s primary targets). I never used any redirects or cloaking or any questionable tactic at all, it is a brand new domain, Traffic is building week to week. I’m just about to linkbuild to it using anchor text etc…..
I’ll be in the top 3 before I even look at the competition but before I do I’ll make sure i get some crappy link directories threw in their to keep the linkbuild hunters shadowing me thinking oh so that’s how he’s achieved that….
Without seeing the domain its pretty hard to estimate. I just think you are leaving a lot of easy links on the table. Maybe if you’d taken them right off the bat you’d already be ranking higher than wherever you are right now.
If its a competitive niche then I would assume you have links from somewhere – perhaps another domain 301′d into it. You mentioned client so I doubt you are cloaking!
I’m guessing Yahoo is just having issues recognising your links, but Google sees them just fine and is ranking you accordingly. If this is the case then examining your backlinks is going to be tricky, since we all know link: in Google shows next to nothing, and pretty much every backlink checker like LinkDiagnosis is based on Yahoos api.
I sent you an email Phil – I hate being secretive but it would be wrong of me to publish client info – and I am certainly not cloaking. I’m not doing anything fishy!
PS the ironic thing is tho the links appear in Yahoo, they appear in Google. Go figure.
Note how you get past my spam comment filters Chris
Have you considered creating a site that shows people how to play cards etc than just promote affiliates and things – that’s what I would do in that field.
We do have a blackjack strategy section which will be added to once the redesign goes live in a couple of weeks. We also have some roulette strategy articles in the pipeline. Even with relevant helpful content you have to see that natural/organic links are still not an option because the only people who might link to it are players themselves and how many casino players have their own blogs etc? Few if any. Unlike your niche, our competitors do not link to us or anyone else, even if we have the greatest game guides online.
Your audience is vast. It comprises seo’s, associated lurkers and a huge amount of hobby webmasters (non-professionals), many of whom would be happy to link to your articles and share them on Twitter etc.
As I said before….ho hum! Thanks for not having casino in your spam keyword filter!
Regards, Chris
I really disgree about this. I think you should know what your competitors are doing to do better than they. You can find some good sources of links by spying their backlinks. You must know more about your competitors.
Fábio – Cool
It’s easy to look at competitors work and try and get the best links – I advise that too in my recent post how to get quality links your competitors have. It’s useful in very competitive industries.
But in a lot of industries you don’t need to even bother, the competition is so poor. I EXPECT to bring to the table better links over the course of the project.
This is supposed to be a beginners guide to linkbuilding…. it would be wrong of me to tell newbies you NEED to know your competitons backlinks. You don’t if you are passionate about your business, comitted to networking and adding useful content to your site.
Chris, I do, I just keep digging your comment out.
Yup, my industry links out a lot…. why its tough to rank for a lot of stuff in it! ESPECIALLY when a lot of seo companies use unrelated links from client sites to rank for major terms (which I don’t do any more – only with web design clients do we take a link and I think almost every one recently is nofollowed.
To be sure, you’re in a tough industry. I have been asked to get into it a great many times the last year or two and I’ve declined. why would I? Nobody could afford me. It would be very hard work… I may as well do it for myself
I’d be thinking of everything I could to attract links. You know there are sites out there who think they are stopping PR juice flowing, and they are not. News sites etc… I’d be taking advantage of that.
I’d be sending out free game tickets to bloggers, power bloggers with a lot of subscribers who would blog about it. I’d be on social networks for a year getting people to digg stuff etc, I’d really be trying to target a very specific type of player on the site…. I’d spend a lot of time like this putting ideas down first lol – a long time….
Most importantly though I’d be trying to build a brand and a community through all this. I’d try and have some USP. …. I’m going to stop thinking about this it would drive me nuts.