Competitive Link Research

Below is an article on obtaining the best and juciest links in the market from Issue 18 of the iGB Affiliate Magazine written by Chris Cemper of Cemper.com and LinkResearchTools.com. Chris can also be sen speaking at our affiliate events.

USUALLY, A ‘ME TOO’ strategy is something that either sucks, or works out after a very long time – but only if done right and by Microsoft. But in one case – the competitive link research, ‘me too’ can be done right by every SEO and link builder to reach top organic search positions.

The serious question that all online marketers have is: “How do I become number one in the search results?” The typical fi rst answer to “what does it take” is, “I don’t know. Nobody does, not even Google.” But the truth is you just have to look at your competitors, the top ten ranking websites and try to copy their strategy and link power. If done correctly, and efficiently of time and budget, the victory will be yours.

Every website in every industry has different competitors. In fact, you will have different competitors for different products within your industry. Think Poker versus Blackjack! When looking at your competitors you are trying to gauge why Google (and co) rank them well, and you have to take measure for a set of different dimensions, which are:

● Keyword Set (Poker, Blackjack, etc)
● Country (USA, UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland)
● Language (English, German, French, Italian – with the latter three all spoken in Switzerland)
● Time, Seasonality, Context

Now, looking at those dimensions the first question is “who are my competitors?” The answer is that your  competitors are those that rank above you or in the top ten for your keyword set, and not necessarily those that you compete with in the ‘old markets’.

Those competitors can be reference sites like Wikipedia (a classic), newspapers and agencies or, of course, affi liates for the operators and vice versa. In any case, they rank above you in the top ten because ofone dominant reason: their links!

What is needed here is a boiled down view on which of those gazillion links that each of the pages and domains have you think are the most important to approach first to get a link. For this we know two different strategies – first the ‘common backlink’ research for fi nding those hubs that power your competitors. If you get links from those sites that link to a multiple of your competitors, you should be a winner too soon (see figure 1).

The second strategy is called ‘common outbound link’ research to find those authorities that even your competitors link to – how great would it be to get a link from there? Getting links on those sites is also called ‘indirect linking’ by us, because you indirectly inherit all the trust from the authorities you picked (see figure 2).

Finally, you are trying to emulate natural link growth (you should be – see our video post about the -50 penalty link 3)¹ and natural backlink and anchor distribution. So the next question is: “what makes a ‘natural distribution of anchor texts?" The answer: “right, I don’t know – look at your competitors.”

Anchor Text Distribution – keep it natural to avoid penalties!
So the first way you analyze your competitors’ and your own website is by the backlinks and anchor texts. Thereby, you will already identify links which power your competitors. You can do this by looking at various search engine related analysis parameters for each of their backlinks – e.g. the number of Yahoo! backlinks,
the number of Google backlinks, maybe even Google PageRank (don’t trust that at all!), Google Cache dates (again, don’t believe it!), Alexa ranks, domain age, domain registration length, the number of natural phrases the domain ranks for and many more.

This can be very time consuming and hard to track, but what is even harder to track is the anchor text distribution and whether the anchors look natural. The top ranking companies will definitely have a natural anchor text distribution, but unnatural anchor texts might be a reason why you are not within the top ten rankings.

As you can see above, the number of occurrences for real money keywords is pretty scarce. In fact, one might envision why keyword domains work so much greater now – since linking to them with the domain name involves a huge amount of ‘keyworded’ links. Simple as that.

You all have to be very careful about the anchor texts that they use for linking. I still hear that all the time – many people still believe that linking with one and the same keyword to a website improves the rankings for the specifi c keyword. This was true, but Google learnt the lesson of how it was gamed and realized that these links where
unnatural and are, therefore, not valuable and even negative for your rankings (as shown recently).

A typical natural anchor text distribution could look like this:

Needless to say, you need some automation to do such analysis for a page, a dozen pages for a dozen competitors. But fi rst, the question “What is even worth analyzing?” will finally be answered!

Common Backlinks of Top Ranks or Competitors
Coming back to the question: “What do the top ranking pages have in common?” or “What do your competitors do have in common?”

If you want to compete with the top ranking sites, you have to find commonalities between them. Every backlink that the top ranking pages share is a backlink that you have to get to your website. Why? This is the principle of cocitation, or good neighborhood: if one site is linking to the top ranking web pages and to your site then your website is seen as one of the ‘good ones’, too. Sounds simple no?

Now we will play the same game with your competitors: you should know exactly what makes your competitors strong. You compete with them for the same keywords and wouldn’t you be happy to fi nally find out why your competitor is always one or more ranks above you? Or, you could, for example, just analyze the top three ranks
of the five most important keywords. This would give you an overview of your top competitors and your target keywords – and the backlinks that you have to draw your attention to for those top spots. The possibilities are as endless as the web.

Those common back linking sites are also referred to as ‘hubs’, as they power your competitors like a link hub. If you get links from those sites you should be a winner soon (see figure 1 that illustrates the concept).

Find Common Outbound Links of Authorities to find the Super-Authorities
When looking at the top ranking sites you should have a look at their out going links as well. If you find a page that has backlinks from the top ranking websites for your specifi ed keyword then you have to get a backlink from this super-authority, as we refer to it. The more backlinks this authority has from your targeted top ranks
the more important it is for you to get a link from that website.

You might think “why would I want to get a link from a website my competitors are linking to?” You have to see those web pages as co-citations and what can be better than getting a link from a website my competitors consider as important? In fact, it’s even better than if your competitor would link directly to you. The strength
is similar to getting links from university or governmental pages – endless trust! The higher the commonality the more important this website is, but the harder it will usually be acquiring links from this webpage. But sometimes it’s just a piece of cake! Just try it!

But Where to Get Links From?
I shouldn’t be telling you anything new when I say that spam links weaken a website – that means when your domain usually has more than 50% non relevant footer links, sidebar links, side wide or links from link farms, link broker networks etc, you won’t ever achieve a good ranking – or even lose your current rankings. Nevertheless, it is definitely very hard to get backlinks from strong web pages – and this is especially true for markets like online
gaming. As mentioned above, a lot of people still think of Google PageRank as the most important factor when it comes to link acquisition and, therefore, getting Nofollow links is as useful as getting no link at all. But that is not true! It’s said that Nofollow links do not transfer Google PageRank but they are indispensable for every website
that wants to rank for a specifi c keyword. Nofollow links are great, simply because they transfer theme, relevance and are counted as a vote – more often than not – if placed right. But please don’t think
‘Guestbook Spam’.

Find Link Worthy and ‘Juicy’ Pages
So how will you fi nd important sites that are easy to link from? You can go two different ways. Either you start looking for pages that are ranking for the keyword you want to rank as well, or you can analyze your competitors and their backlinks as explained above. When starting from scratch you might fi nd very simple looking websites that look unprofessional and don’t show Google PageRank – but don’t forgetthey are still ranking for the keyword you want to rank for. That’s what counts – and that means they are important for your backlink profile.

Measuring if a Page is Juicy
But what do you do if you don’t know if a site is ranking with its content or not? You might get a proposal for a ‘link partnership’ or another way to score a link on a page. We have this situation – many times a day – for our clients. By verifying that page in the so called ‘CEMPER.COM Juice Tool’ you can easily fi nd out if that page is worth pursuing for a link. This tool analyses the URL you entered and tells you if the webpage is actually ranking in Google for its content. So, if the target page has, for example, Juice/25, you can be sure that it is ranking for that whole content and therefore, your keyword as well.

Be Efficient!
For each of the aforementioned tactics to analyze your own website or those of your competitors there’s one important golden rule to remember – be efficient. That’s why we developed our own ‘Link Research Tools’ for our daily work. They help us to do common backlink and outbound link analysis on a daily basis and crawl
dozens of detail analysis parameters for the thousands of links we look at, daily. We recently made those tools available to the public, so we encourage you to try them too at www.LinkResearchTools.com.

About The Author
Christoph C. Cemper has been building links and affiliate sites since 2003, the time he founded his very own
Link Building Company and worked his way up to become a well-respected guru in the SEO industry, especially
when it comes to getting real juicy links on trusted domains. Before starting his own business, CEMPER.COM, in the online marketing industry, Christoph was building large scale transaction platforms for online betting and other e-commerce ventures for 15 years as a developer and project manager.
With his team Christoph just launched a new powerful toolkit at LinkResearchTools.com a set of tools that the CEMPER.COM team has developed and been using for link building for two years already.

Article originally published in iGB Affiliate: Issue 18

¹ Link 3 -50 Penalty http://www.cemper.com/seoknowhow/ google-minus-50-penaltycure