Linking Strategies

Building a Backlink Profile of Your Competitors Eric Enge , Stone Temple Consulting - Jul 20, 2010

One of the best ways to get started with link building is to obtain a backlink profile of your competitors and other major players in your space. There are two major reasons why this is a great approach:

1. You can ask some of the people who link to your competition to link to you.
2. You can discover the types of sites that are likely to link to sites like yours.

Capturing the Backlink Data

I recommend two major tools for obtaining backlink information:

• Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz
• Majestic SEO from Majestic-12 Limited

Both tools are great -- and I recommend using both. If you were to think of a kind of virtual map of all of the interlinking between websites (known in the SEO field as a "link graph"), you'd find it incredibly complex.  No single tool is able to capture all of the link data, so using both tools allows you to get a fuller, more accurate picture of the link graph for a site.

You can also try using Yahoo! Site Explorer. It's free, but there are two major problems with it:

1. You are limited to extracting 1,000 links in a spreadsheet
2. It is reasonable to expect that this tool will no longer be available when the merging of Bing's results into Yahoo is complete, and this is expected to happen in the very near future.

Both Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO allow you to pull far more than 1,000 links. And they are both easy to use. For example, once you request the backlinks for a given domain, Open Site Explorer gives you a nice overview of the links that looks like the following:

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As you scroll down the page, you get into the link data itself:

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Majestic SEO provides great data as well. Both tools also include nice value-added features to help you quickly understand the data. Below you'll find a helpful report from Majestic SEO that shows a site's backlink growth over time:

Contacting Sites that Link to Competition

It's a great idea to contact sites that have linked to your competition. Of course, make sure that they are not owned by the same company or otherwise in a tight partnership with the competitor. Look carefully at the pages that contain the links to verify their applicability to your site. Then figure out who to contact at the site and request the link. Here are a few tips on contacting people and asking for links:

1. Keep your e-mail short.
2. Customize the e-mail for each site contacted, and make it obvious that you have looked at the page where you are requesting the link.
3. Lead with the benefit to them. Something like "I noticed that your website links to my-competitor.com, and thought your visitors might benefit from a different point of view. I am the founder of ...".
4. Be specific with your request. Explain the fit of your page to theirs, and how it differs from the competitor.
5. Keep your e-mail short.

However, this should only be one component of your overall link building strategy. When you backlink a competitor, even though you are using the best tools available, you are capturing only a portion of that site's backlinks. And when you send out e-mail link requests, if you're lucky, you'll only get 10% of the people contacted who ultimately link to you. Actually, 10% is an outstanding result; yours will likely be lower. Of course, your strategy  shouldn't be to become 10% of the size of your competitors. Nonetheless, this sort of direct contact effort ought to be one piece of your overall strategy.

Identifying Groups of Potential Linkers

Being able to identify groups of potential linkers is the best part about backlinking your competition. When you first start to think about gathering links to your own site, you'll probably come up with some great ideas about where links might be found. That said, successful link building is a journey. You'll learn a tremendous amount about the types of sites that link to sites like yours from looking at the sites that link to your competition.

For example, it may not have occurred to you that there were links to be obtained from major colleges and universities, yet when you look at your competitor's backlinks, you see that they have obtained a few such links.

Now the fun begins.

Take a look at the pages that link to your competition. See each page is about. See how each page implements its link to your competition's website. Pay particular note to the anchor text -- that is, the words that are hyperlinked -- and the text surrounding the link on that page. These may contain important keywords that make the link especially valuable.

Now, to blow by your competition, back away from the competitive backlink exercise and see if you can develop a list of colleges and universities with pages similar to the one(s) that linked to your competitor. Let's say three such pages link to your competitor. If you can build a list of 100 target sites to contact, the chances are that you can beat your competitor in getting links from this sector. Of course, your site has to be really high quality and deserving of a link to succeed here.

I have used the college and university segment as an example only. The same concept can be applied to many other groups or categories of sites.

Summary

There are many different components to a link building campaign. But backlinking competitors is a fruitful one. It'll help you pick up some links and link ideas that will help you get your link building project off to a rocking start.

Eric Enge is president of Stone Temple Consulting, offering search engine optimization (SEO) services for seven years, for companies ranging from the Fortune 25 to new online start-ups. He is also a co-author of The Art of SEO (O'Reilly, 2010).