LINK BUILDING IN 2015: HOW TO LEARN FROM COMPETITORS
Despite what some SEO bloggers would like us to believe, link building is far from dead. It is, as we’ve discussed in the past, a different strategy than it was even five years ago. If you’re still paying for links, guest posting for the sole purpose of getting a link, or even posting to unrelated directories, you are certainly open to a manual penalty from Google Penguin.
However, link building is still one of the most crucial aspects of a well-rounded SEO strategy—after all, there still isn’t a more proven method of getting a page to rank than having several links pointing to it. So what our job is now is to redefine link building for 2015 and see how past strategies can be re-tooled for a post-Penguin internet.
As any experienced link builder will likely tell you, when starting a link building campaign, it is extremely helpful to look at the links that are pointing to a competitor’s website, as well as what sites a competitor is linking to. Why? Because this gives you a starting list of quality websites that are linking to sites in your vertical from which to build out your own link outreach efforts. It also shows what their organization and editors are inclined to link to and the type of websites they will link to.
So what are some tools you can use to extract this information? One useful tool is Bing’s“linkfromdomain:somedomain.com” search operator that allows you to get a selection of outgoing links from a certain domain.
However, if you want to get into more detail, a paid tool, like Searchmetric’s “Outgoing links” function is an excellent option that will let you see a comprehensive list of all the incoming and outgoing links from a competitor’s website, giving you a full picture of the type of sites you should be going after, as well as the type of content you should be creating to get links.
If you don’t wish to pay for a certain tool, but still wish to get as in-depth of a picture as possible, scraping a website yourself is a time-consuming, but effective way of isolating all of the links present on a site. Free tools like Xenu Link Sleuth can help speed up the process.
Once you have all of the incoming and outgoing link information, you can start targeting sites similar to your own with similar content to what they have linked to in the past in order to get a link. While no one is contesting the large amount of time ethical link building requires in 2015, the results are that you can improve your site’s rankings without having to worry about getting penalized by Google.
