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Link Building
18 Jul

5 Ways to explore and exploit your Competitor’s Links

June 28, 2019

As you know link building is an integral part of SEO. We love it and hate it. Researching your competitor’s links and building the same or similar links can take some of the tediousness and hassle out of link building. Here are 5 ways you can steal your competitor’s links.

But before we begin, make sure to compile a list of your competitors. An easy way to do this is to do a search in Google for each of the keywords you are targeting (or at least your major keywords) and then copy down the top sites into an Excel sheet.

  • Use Their Link Profile – Look up your competitor’s link profile using sites like opensiteexplorer.org and majesticseo.com. Then simply browse through their links and pick out links you can get. Sort of a tediousness job but sometimes you can find some real gold nuggets. You may also want to sort links by anchor text to determine what links might be more beneficial, for example an anchor text of PSD to WordPress Theme Conversion would be better than click here.

  • Guest Blog on the Same Sites – Guest blogging can be a great way to build links. So why not guest blog on the same sites your competitors do. To find out what sites they blog on export their link profile from a site like opensiteexplorer.org and majesticseo.com. Then place this into an excel file. Now place a filter over the column so as to only show those links that contain “/blog/”. In Excel 2007 you can do this via Select Column Header > Data > Filter > Click filter dropdown arrow > Text Filters > Contains > type in “/blog/”. Now you’ll have a list of links that from blogs. This list may contain more than just guest blog posts, but at least it will narrow down the list a little for you. With that list you’ll have to browse through and pick out links that look like guest blog post and contact that blog to see if you can submit a guest post.

  • Use a Link Hub Tool – Using a link hub tool you can find links that your competitors share/are form the same source. Usually if a few of your competitors have the same link source you can normally get the same link. It’s also thought that there may be some correlation to that link and their positive rankings, so getting these types of links might be more beneficial than other links. That’s totally theory though and I have not seen any data to back it up, but doesn’t hurt. [Tip: You can also compile a list of links from opensiteexplorer.org or majesticseo.com and sort them to see which ones are the same for your competitors]

  • Report Competitor’s Links -Although this method doesn’t get you a link, it does take one away from your competitor. This can be a little bit controversial so I’m only suggesting you do it in an ethical honest manner. When browsing through your competitor links you may stubble across a few links that are of low spammy quality. You could go and report this as spam to Google. Now to clarify, what I’m suggesting here is to report the site linking to your competitor as spam and only report the site if it’s actually spam. I’m not suggesting reporting a legit website to Google as spam. You may think your competitors are not being linked to by spammy sites, but honestly I’ve found many of the more aggressive competitors send to have at least a few links from spammy sources.

  • Use the Same Social and Networking Sites – Most of us are familiar with the social sites Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, but what we don’t always realized is there are also many industry specific social and networking sites. Using your competitor’s link data from opensiteexplorer.org and majesticseo.com browse through and to discover some of these industry specific social sites. Then register with those same sites and start be active in their community. Not only is it great for getting valuable links but can be an excellent way to engage with your industries community. You know your competitor is already doing it so you should be too. And best of all this strategy so simple it doesn’t require you to pay anyone for SEO services.