Day 28 - Part I - Backlink Analysis | Mike Mindel

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Day 28 - Part I - Backlink Analysis

By Mike Mindel | August 28, 2007

This content is summarized from Day 28 Training - Link Research (aka Backlink Analysis) for the Thirty Day Challenge, presented by Rob Somerville.

This post/video all about backlink analysis of your competition using the search engines.

The SEO For Firefox Plugin

Let’s turn on the SEO For Firefox plugin

Let’s do a search in Google for ‘free speed reading’ (the keyword we have been using throughout the Thirty Day Challenge

We get plenty of useful information about each site. One of the useful pieces of data is the number of Yahoo page links for each site. For example take a look at the first result.

The first result has 88 Yahoo inbound page links (Yahoo is more
reliable than Google for determining inbound page links to a site).

We also get to see the Google PageRank

Note: By default you see a question mark (?) just click on the question mark to get the result. Otherwise each page would be sending hundreds of extra requests and slowing down your connection.

But you can pop over to Firefox Tools

and choose which data you want ‘on-demand’ or ‘automatically’. I keep Google PR, Age and Y! Links on automatic personally.

(Note: I accidentally selected Y! Links there. I actually wanted Y! Page Links)

The Quality of the Links

You can see that studyhall.com has 88 backlinks but we don’t know what the quality of those links are. Are they niche relevant links? Do they have the keyword in the anchor text?

Unfortunately there isn’t really any tool that isn’t a paid commercial tool that allows you to do that. So I can’t offer you a suggestion that’s free. (Mike’s comment: There is a way to do this for free. I will show you a tip shortly).

But there is a certain amount we can do using freely available information from the search engines. The first thing I’m going to do is copy the url of the number one ranked site and paste it into Google.

Comparing Links For Google vs. Yahoo

If we do the same link search in Google you only see 26 links compared to Yahoo’s 80 (the Yahoo numbers sometimes vary)

This is quite common. Google always returns fewer backlinks than Yahoo. Doing a backlink analysis in Google isn’t really effective as you don’t get a good indication of what backlinks exist. You only really get that with Yahoo.

Yahoo Backlinks

Back to our search on Google

If we click on ‘Y! Page Links’ we go straight to Yahoo so we can see the inbound links for ourselves

By using the link: modifier Yahoo shows you all the links pointing into the site.

Mike’s Comment: Removing Intrasite Links

Notice this -site in the search bar

This means show the links for studyhall.com but exclude those links from within studyhall.com itself. We’re not interested in internal links in the site itself.

Getting a Sense of Backlink Relevancy

If we turn off the SEO plugin and refresh the page then we see a larger number of links

We also get a sense of the web page that contains that link. Some links are niche relevant like this one

and some are not so relevant like this one

So there a mix of relevant and non-relevant backlinks for the www.studyhall.com domain.

Getting Candidate Pages

Whilst this is a fairly cumbersome thing to do, if you are stuck for some candidate pages to build some backlinks, then check out some sites that links to your competitors. This should give you some ideas for links back to your own website.

You should be looking for websites with some web 2.0 functionality. i.e. functionality which allows the user to comment on the content or place an active link. I noticed when I was reviewing this page before the video that assortments today has a ?p=11 at the end of the url so it’s probably a blog

If we click on that page we see that it is indeed a blog

At the moment there is one comment on this post so far

and a space to add a comment

We can now add a name and a website and submit a content that relates to the copy on the blog.

Important Point About No-Follow

The reason that these two names are in red is that each is a no-follow link. I have the no-follow links turned on in the search status plugin so I can see them.

Search Status can be seen in the bottom of the browser

Right click to show the options and select the ‘Highlight No-follow Links’ to show the no-follow links. Repeat the same process to turn them off if they start to become annoying!

On this blog we see a no follow link for each of Joanne and TuMahler which means that those search engines that actually take notice of this particular tag will not follow this link and no page rank will be credited from this website to the website that it links to.

Not all websites take notice of that and Yahoo will still register this as a link so it’s still worth doing often, even though you might not get as much credit as if it wasn’t a no follow link.

This fellow TuMahler is linking to a blog, probably his own blog

So TuMahler has made a post, a comment and linked through to his blog. You can do the same, as long as you’re adding value and relevant. If it’s not niche relevant then avoid! In this particularly example you should probably leave this one alone as the content is not related to ‘free speed reading’. Don’t forget to include the keyword you are trying to rank for in the comment link.

Remember What You Are Trying to Do

You are trying to find the links that your competitors have, then go through and see if you can put a link on any of these websites back to your own website. This is a very slow manual process done this way and very few people would actually do this. There is some high end software that allows you to do this much more easily but it’s quite expensive and outside of the scope of the Thirty Day Challenge. But if you want to explore techniques for doing this in a more efficient manner then there is software available.

How Competitive We Need to Be

If we go back to the link analysis for the SEO Firefox plugin we really get a sense of how competitive we need to be for our page to get any solid ranking for this page.

In the first position, StudyHall has a PR 4 with 88 Yahoo backlinks which is not particularly high. The 978 is for all links in Yahoo - not the same thing. This page is coming up top because of a high number of backlinks and high PR but it is not optimized for the keyword at all.

By the time we get to position three we see a niche relevant website with PR of 3 and 9 backlinks.

This is outranking a site with PR 4 and 137 backlinks lower down the page.

Why? Almost certainly the reason for that is that Google sees the top page as more on topic (or on theme) as the bottom page. This lower ranking page does mention ‘free speed reading’ in the body copy but it doesn’t have the keyword in the title or the url. So Google has taken the view that this page is not as relevant as the one that ranks above it in position 3.

By the time we get to position 10 we see the site has a PR of 2 and 0 backlinks

This position 10 site has 0 links associated with it according to Yahoo but is getting a position 10 purely on on-page optimization. We would look at this page and think with a certain amount of effort we should easily outrank that website in position 10. Over a period of time we should begin to outrank websites that are ranking higher as none of them have significant volume of backlinks pointing at those sites.

This is what I mean by looking at your competition. We are checking out the backlinks, the websites that point back to them to see how relevant they are. We want to see if there are any websites that point to these sites where you can create a link that points to your site. Overtime, as you build the authority of your website your site will start to outrank the websites on page 1.

But it does take a bit of time.

Summary

Find backlinks in Yahoo using link: www.domain.com e.g. link: www.thirtydaychallenge.com
Use link: www.domain.com -www.domain.com to avoid including web pages inside the domain itself which isn’t helpful in our pursuit of backlinks.

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