You’ll probably also already have some quality inbound links coming to those pages. But, from what I’ve seen across a wide variety of sites, the need for purposeful deep linking efforts is definitely still there. Many websites will simply choose to link to your homepage when they reference you, whether or not your homepage is the most appropriate place for their purpose. The reasons for this range from not knowing the best approach to simple laziness.

Deep links serve a variety of purposes

1. Usability.Deep links can immediately get users to targeted information and thus decrease frustration (and site bounce rate, perhaps.) This, to me, is perhaps the most important point because (gasp!) it has nothing to do with either rankings or traffic. When have you heard that in a link discussion? This is about usability, and all the links in the world won’t make people want to use your site.


Just because users get into your site through a link on another site does not mean that they want to dig for the information that brought them there. If they clicked on a link with the anchor text “chalkboard calendars for kids” then they don’t want to go to a homepage and have to search to find the products. This also looks a bit…spammy. If I click on a link, arrive at a page where the anchor text isn’t immediately apparent in the content, I’m not happy, and most times I’ll exit very quickly.

2. Link Profile. Deep links can improve your overall link profile. As most anyone knows by now, a healthy backlink profile is not one-dimensional. It contains homepage links, subpage links, links with missing anchor text, links with “Click Here!” anchor text, links with fantastic anchor text, sitewides, footer links, in-content links, links from site you wouldn’t want to show your mother, etc.
   Organic link growth truly does happen in a somewhat random fashion, and if you have more than one decent page on your site, you should have links to those pages sprinkled here and there.




3. Traffic.Deep links can grab traffic from new and varied sources. Let’s say that a site mainly sells punk rock vinyl but the site owner happens to have an interest in ska. There are fifteen punk pages on the site and only one for ska records, so obviously he’s not going to clutter up the main navigation with the one little ska page.If the page has good content, then of course you could find it ranking for a ska search but it would obviously get more targeted traffic from some quality deep links on relevant sites (not to mention rank much higher with some inbound links!)




4. Rankings. Deep links can increase the amount of long-tailed phrases that you can rank for in the various search engines. Unless your homepage is cluttered with tons of long-tailed keyphrases, you’ll probably find that a lot of your long-tailed traffic is already going to subpages. Why not throw some links at those pages and boost things?




5. Avoiding Penalties. Well, this one’s more of an ‘I hope it does” than an actual rule, but it makes sense that if a site ONLY has backlinks coming into the homepage, it looks a bit unnatural.

How to improve your deep linking

First off, if you’re not sure of where you stand with regards to existing deep links, do a quick analysis:

How many current inbound links do you have? How many go to the home page vs. subpages? Do you need to do some work? If you’re totally happy with the way everything looks – read no more, but if you’re not…keep going.

Secondly, identify the subpages that you wish to promote. This takes a lot more time. Things you’ll want to look at in detail are:

• How many current inbound links do you have for each subpage?
• What are the main anchor texts?
• How are these pages currently ranking in the engines?
• Is the ratio of deep links to the homepage one that you think is accurate for the importance of these subpages?
• Can these subpages exist as standalone results in the SERPs? If so, great. If not, it might not be worth linking to. Why invest the time if a user is very unlikely to click on the result or, if a user does click, is going to leave in the first 5 seconds? You can use analytics data to check bounce rates for these pages also, to see if you need to improve anything.
• What are the filenames for these subpages? Can they be optimized? Is it even worth the trouble, since you’d have to do some 301s?

Next, evaluate your internal linking strategy

Finally, go out and get some links!

Whatever your link building strategy, just do it with the following two tips in mind:

1. Don’t neglect directories. Is your subpage listed in any directory? If not, consider it, as some niche directories are perfect for deep linking to good subpages.
2. Analyze your existing homepage inbounds to see if anyone that currently links to you might benefit from being alerted to a more appropriate page. If a website master cares about relevancy, he or she will definitely care about linking to the best page possible.

Troubleshooting

Obviously you can’t put a homepage link to every single subpage, so you do have to pick and choose your most important pages here. If you’re not very technical and don’t want to make a lot of changes, I’d certainly not recommend that you drastically overhaul your navigation just to get a homepage link (or an internal sitewide) to a subpage that may or not truly be that important.

Some subpages may not be able to hold their own in the SERPs. They may be worthy of some deep links simply to get a better inbound link profile and better rankings, but the downside is in turning off a user who might not return. Whether that is worth it or not is up to you.

14 URL factors in backlink profile analysis

The URLs of linking pages can tell you a great deal about a given site’s backlink profile. The URLs themselves can shed some light too when evaluating the quality of a given link prospect. Some of the link builders interviewed didn’t place value in URL analysis when investigating backlink profiles. Some did. Often, this comes down to differences in style and process.

1. TLD (if .govs or .edus have been linking it can indicate high-trust, high-value content)
2. Target keywords in the URL
3. Target keywords in the hostname
4. Number of URL parameters
5. Depth of the page on the site (as measured by /’s)
6. Iterations of ? and other extraneous characters
7. Excessive hyphens in a URL can indicate over-SEO’d content
8. URLS on blogspot or wordpress
9. Avoid https:// and ftp://
10. “links4free,” “getfreelinks,” etc…
11. The words “review” or “advertorial” (can indicate paid posts)
12. The linked-to site mentioned by name in the URL (can indicate a paid review)
13. Words that indicate content types (ie: “blog,” “news,” “forum,” etc…)
14. Excessive amounts of links.html and links.php indicates a weak profile

Key comments on URL factors

“Anything that indicates a news and information site is high on my list.” -Ken McGaffin, of WordTracker

“I’ll look for footprints that can help me find more link sources similar to that one.” -Gab Goldenberg, SEO ROI

“It is not something I spend time on. It is nice if their URL has keywords in it, but the link is valuable with or without that being the case. Other factors matter much, much more.” -Eric Enge, Stone Temple Consulting

“When reviewing URLs, one strict but useful criteria is to scrutinize any website that uses hyphens in conjunction with keyword phrases in their domain name. A little SEO knowledge can sometimes be like a sharp stick in the hands of a child. Hyphenated domain names can be an indicator that a webmaster is running around with a sharp stick.” -Roger Montti, aka MartiniBuster

“I’m looking for the presence of target keywords in file paths and names and at TLDs. I’m also looking to see if there’s an opportunity to purchase a similar domain name (in the case of exact match), with an alternate TLD.” -Ken Lyons, of Wordstream

“Even an ugly URL can get indexed, but you want to make sure that it’s the canonical URL for that page and that your link didn’t wind up on some duplicate page. It’s also preferable when the URL structure is clean and uses descriptive phrases.” -Jennifer Van Iderstyne of Search Slingshot

“To me, if a page is quality (i.e. relevant, has PR, dofollow, ranks well etc), then I don’t really care what the URL is.” -Melanie Nathan, Canadian SEO

“It’s more of what I DON’T look at. A URL itself can be an amazing source of signals, but more often, I look at URLs as a means to steer away from the junk.” -Eric Ward, EricWard.com

“If you see a lot of gardening-resources-7 or links.html near the top of their backlinks you know their profile is pretty weak.” -Aaron Wall, of SEOBook

“I look for things like keywords in the URL (more is good), URL parameters (fewer is good), and the depth of the directory (fewer slashes is good).” -Jeremy Bencken, of WebSimple

29 on-page factors in backlink profile analysis

When investigating backlink profiles, it’s vital to look at the pages that contain (or will contain) the link. Link builders consistently cited on-page analysis as a crucial element of backlink profile analysis.

1. Link embedded within relevant content that discusses link target
2. Title, headers, and content to see if the theme of the page is on topic
3. Text surrounding the link
4. Does the link appear paid or given freely, by editorial choice?
5. Does the page rank for its title?
6. Spam content in comments
7. The anchor text of the link
8. Page linked from other external websites
9. Proximity of the page to the root location
10. How well the page is linked to from within the website
11. The URL being Linked To (home page or deep)
12. Location of the link (on the page)
13. Number of outbound links on the page
14. Page Content (topic and amount)
15. Page back links
16. Page cache date
17. Pagerank
18. Quality of outbound links
19. Logical, appealing page layout
20. Page is bot-readable
21. Title and HX tags present?
22. Content buried under CSS and javascript?
23. Important page on the site vs. a “throw-away” blog post
24. Can you add directly to the discussion
25. Excessive advertising
26. Intent
27. Excessive links from link directories or blogrolls
28. Excessive links from links.php pages
29. Duplicate links on the same page (what is the first link’s anchor text?)

Key thoughts regarding on-page factors

“On page criteria is integral to the backlink analysis process. Outbound links are critical. It’s important to do a double backlink analysis. Analyze the backlinks of the sites your link candidate is linking to. This will help determine exactly what kind of link clique you are going to be associated with. Building a link clique independent from established link cliques is a way of combatting the established 800 pound gorillas that are entrenched in the top three. When you study the backlink of established sites you will generally see a relevancy pattern. Poaching from their backlinks only makes you a part of their sphere of influence. In my way of doing things, I aim to establish my own, and it has worked in overtaking websites that are a part of multi-million dollar networks for important two word keyword phrases. On page criteria is a key part of this process.

The ideal web page, in terms of on page factors, is a web page that has zero SEO fingerprints. Zero.”

-Roger Montti

“In general, I prefer to see a fairly decent pagerank (1-3 depending on how far down the page is in the site architecture) with a good amount of both external and internal links (can’t stress this point enough). Obviously relevancy is a must, but a more telling signs of a pages’ authority is its cache date; within one week is great, 1-2 weeks is average, 2-3 weeks is just OK, and anything 3+ weeks isn’t very powerful.” -Paul Teitelman, of Search Engine People

“The page must be closely geared towards my client’s target term or I don’t even bother. I want prospects where I don’t have to convince them to link; they just do it because it’s a logical fit. ” -Melanie Nathan

“A neat tool for quickly analyzing the value of getting a link once you’re on a page is Foxy Rank” -Tom Demers, of WordStream

“Is the link in the middle of content on the middle of the page, if not, take that into account. What other links are around it? Where do all the external links point out to on the page as a whole, are they relevant destinations to your site? Was this link added to the page after the fact or did it show up when the page was created?” -Brian Chappell, of Adapt Marketing

28 on-site or sitewide factors in backlink profile analysis

When analyzing a potential link prospect (or a key competitor) there are a number of sitewide inbound link factors to analyze.

1. Site type distribution of inbound linking sites (Blog, Directory, Social Media, Press Release, Website, ETC)
2. Domain age
3. Toolbar PageRank (both domain and linking page)
4. MozRank
5. Recency of the latest post or other newest content
6. Estimated traffic
7. Presence of social network widgets
8. Unique linking IPs
9. Unique IP blocks
10. Does the site rank for its domain name?
11. Does the site rank for its target terms?
12. Which pages of the site are getting the most links (helps to determine what has worked as link bait)
13. Unique link distribution (Unique IP Adresses, Unique IP Blocks)
14. PageRank distribution across site
15. Link Type Distribution (No-follow, Do-follow, Missing, Broken)
16. Reciprocal links
17. Number of indexed pages (gauges how SEO friendly their site architecture is)
18. Link accumulation speed
19. RSS subscribers
20. Human comments
21. Does the site have a logical structure and hierarchy?
22. Is it easy for a human and bot to navigate?
23. Hosting Location Distribution
24. The sites’ relevance to and focus on subject matter
25. Site using KWD rich internal anchor text
26. The total link count.
27. Does the site come up for country-specific searches in Google
28. Anchor text distribution

Key insights regarding on-site factors

“I look for evidence of human activity. I’ll want to see who writes the content and how dedicated to the task they are. I’ll also look at evidence of audience participation – do people leaves comments on articles for example. Once I’ve established in my head that it’s a quality site, I’ll look for opportunities such as ‘write for us’, ’submit an article’, ‘editorial guidelines’, etc. I’ll also look for partnership opportunities with sites I’m really taken with.” -Ken McGaffin

“We look at the website’s linking profile and overall strength of backlinks. Specifically, we look at deep links within a website we’re trying to acquire a link from for our client. If the homepage is very strong and the site has no deep links, then the value is typically lessened. The structure of the website and how strongly focused it is to the client’s business is the next best indicator for us. Is it easily spidered and indexed by Google. A quick way to see this would be to type in “site:widgetsite.com,” then look at not only the pages indexed, but also pay attention to the diversity of the title tags, descriptions, and URLs being indexed in Google. Stronger websites nearly always have a wider and more clear diversity while previewing the indexed pages from the website.” -Brian Gilley, of Social SEO

“A lot of the link stuff is recursive. So when you look at an individual page or site that someone is getting a link from sometimes you can also see where that site is getting links from and come up with new link building ideas based on that.” -Aaron Wall

Further reading:

• 30 Link Builders Discuss Backlink Analysis For Campaign Design – Part 1
• Paul Teitelman’s extended answers to the backlink profile analysis questions

Here is a complete list of our contributing link building experts. Thank you to all the contributors for their time and gracious contribution of hard-earned experience.

Sometimes we get caught up in trying to dream up the next best link scheme and overlook the very simple but effective linking methods. I’m guilty of this as much as anyone, but after the success of the concrete site, I decided to include a passive linking tactic in all our custom work. The decision has been a good one on both the marketing and accountability fronts as this tactic allows us to produce authoritative links, measure results accurately and show a positive return on investment to our clients.

Before you roll your eyes and click away thinking this is going to be one of those “ask your vendors for a link”  type posts, hear me out. Granted, there is a bit of “asking”  involved but with a  twist. Take a look at these two passive link marketing tactics and see if one or more will work for you.

Loyalty campaigns

Customers are a built in fan base which can be tapped for repeated promotions as well as link building. Take advantage of their loyalty, send a well crafted email to your best customers and offer the opportunity to try an additional product for free. Be clear and explain there are no strings attached, but you’d appreciate a written review of the product on their blogs/websites.

If they don’t have a blog, point them to your product video on YouTube and/or your Yelp business profile and suggest they leave  a review there. Provide an  URL to the internal product page but nothing more, let them create their own descriptions and anchors.

Keep an eye on who adds links, YouTube and Yelp comments, send a thank you note to anyone you can identify and include a “pass-along” discount coupon. Hopefully, these brand evangelists will pass the coupon along to someone new who will buy your products and become part of the promotion process.

Incentive linking

When I started working with the concrete site, it had been online for a couple of years, and it had been optimized, but was not yet ranking well. Concrete isn’t exactly a sexy topic outside the concrete industry, so I needed to come up with a way to attract attention and links from their small niche and a slightly larger complementary niche.

It wasn’t easy, as construction engineers don’t blog and social media users didn’t seem to be voting up concrete stories, so I was forced to look “outside the box” for a way to get link embedded content distributed. After surveying concrete employees and reading a number of trade publications, I decided to create an incentive program using a very simple item as my hook:  t-shirts.

I discovered concrete was a dirty business and ruined workers clothing.  Armed with this “dirty”  knowledge, we created an industry resource center on the client’s site which featured multiple articles, white papers, images, etc; and included a simple offer on each page:  reprint our content on your website/blog, and we’ll send each of your concrete employees a free t-shirt.

Yes, content for t-shirts worked. The t-shirts had funny generic sayings on them so we eliminated the objection of wearing a competitors logo. I sent personalized emails to concrete companies and companies in a couple of complementary niches plus ran ads in association newsletters announcing the offer. After three months, we closed the promotion and counted 131 one-way inbound links from relevant, on-topic pages.

Solid hits don’t come easy

From a linking standpoint, I believe long-term ranking and business success will happen if you secure a wide-range of inbound links from well established web pages. Most of the link building methods you hear about still work and produce results, but sometimes we get so involved in keeping up with the link Joneses we forget the simple, non-technical stuff works. Passive tactics work and can lead to massive relevant links. While you’re using the latest linking tricks out there, keep the passive stuff in mind and in your arsenal of link marketing tactics.

Link marketing is related to link building, but it’s a far more tactical and nuanced approach to the process. People often use the terms link building and link marketing interchangeably, but that doesn’t do justice to either term. If I’m not mistaken, it was Debra Mastaler that first coined the term link marketing.

How does link marketing differ from link building?

In several ways, and the easiest way to explain one is to provide an example. I can’t give away a specific client’s tactics, so this a fictional example, but using two real companies with websites. If anyone from those two companies happen to find this post, you are both welcome to use this strategy if you like it. Or, if you want to comment on why it’s good, bad, or impossible, I’d welcome your feedback.

Example:

Imagine you are 3riversarchery.com. You are a specialist e-commerce site offering thousands of  archery products. That’s a lot of products in a specialized vertical.

Now, imagine you are mega-store Bass Pro Shops. You also sell archery products, but it’s an extremely  small part of your business. Keyword search “archery”, and it looks like Bass Pro has about 900 archery products.

So what could these two sites possibly offer each other?

Link marketing.

How many times a week around the U.S. does someone buy an archery product online from Bass Pro Shops? Given that these two sites don’t compete at all for any archery product Bass Pro doesn’t carry, if the marketing folks at both sites could get over their fear, they might find common ground.

What if, when I buy one of those 900 archery products from Bass Pro Shops, there was a link in my confirmation email to 3riversarchery.com that said something like:

For your specialized archery equipment needs, try 3riversarchery.com

I can hear the marketing folks screaming, “NO WAY!” Why should we use our email confirmations to send people to another store? Well, because your sending them to a store that sells things you do not sell, based on a purchase the customer already made from you. You have little to lose and a lot to gain. Those email confirmations are gold. The links within could be golden.

You could sell those links to 3riversarchery.com or, instead of being greedy, you might propose a swap. The site 3riversarchery probably sends out email confirmations as well. Far fewer than Bass Pro Shops, but that misses the point. Every single shopper at 3riversarchery.com is a prospect for Bass Pro Shops, because of the variety of gear Bass Pro sells. But it’s only the buyer of archery equipment at Bass Pro Shops that 3riversarchery.com cares about, because that’s their vertical specialty.

You tell me. If you are 3riversarchery.com, what’s a link to your site worth inside a confirm email from Bass Pro Shops to a person who just bought archery equipment? Think about that for a minute.

My hunch is the recipient is going to be very receptive to that  link.

Conversely, if you just bought something at 3riversarchery, your email confirmation could include the note:

Visit Bass Pro Shops Clearance Section on the web for great deals on all Bass Pro’s outdoor gear.

Argue about how sending customers to another site is bad business, but the reality for any online stores is that while they might compete with each other in some areas, if they recognize where they are complimentary and are smart about how they implement this strategy, there is more to gain than lose.

They key to this link marketing strategy I call “recognition of compliment.” Maybe my above example is too grandiose. Maybe Bass Pro is too big for this to make it through corporate. But what about the thousands of smaller stores on the web that compliment each other?  Forget reciprocal links or banner ads for a moment. Warehouse Skateboards and Stewarts Surfboards? PoloGearUSA.com and Jeffers Equine?

Could there be a business to be built playing matchmaker for this one type of link marketing?

Ever seen an entire authority website that is strictly devoted to creating kid-friendly crafts using rubber animal stamps that are made from recycled and reclaimed materials? No, neither have I. However, the narrow niche categories that people create blogs around continually surprises and amazes me. Blogs are easy to build, and many non-technical people have been able to share their passions with the world simply by building a very simple Wordpress blog, for example. Why ignore that community?

There are many theories about the link juice passed by blogs, so I won’t go into that here. Besides, I’m talking about traffic here, not juice. I’d take a link on a fantastic PR 2 blog post before I’d take one on the homepage of a PR 5 site that’s totally irrelevant to my niche. Sure, I might get more link juice from the site, but the potential for quality traffic is more important in many cases, though not all, as some people just want better rankings.

7 ways to tell if a blog is a good linking partner

1. It has fresh, regularly updated, unique content. A blog that exists as nothing else except a rehashing of other blog posts, or one that simply runs a feed of other people’s work, is not a quality linking partner.

2. It links to other relevant sites that are of equal footing in the niche. Whether in the blogroll or in the blog posts themselves, outbound links should be the same types of links that you’d pursue yourself. If there are 50 links in the sidebar and they’re on every page, I’d certainly not ask for one of those kinds of links. If the only links that you can see are totally irrelevant and a bit misleading, you might be better off going elsewhere. If the blogroll contains a few links to sites/blogs that are also of an acceptable quality and the posts link to a few relevant pieces of content, you may have a winner.

3. It’s not overloaded with banners and ads. While I understand the need to make money, I also recognize that many people won’t stay on a site that looks as if it exists just to make money. You may have great content, but it might never get seen because people are so turned off.

4. Its posts are indexed and rank well for keywords. If there are no technical reasons for older posts to not be indexed and they’re missing in action, this might not be a good choice. We’ve recently come across a few blogs that are totally blocked by the robots.txt files, and since they don’t exactly rank well, I’d not bother with those. It’s hard to get traffic when you don’t have any rankings.

5. The backlinks are good. This doesn’t mean that there are a billion of them, but the ones there should be from respectable sites. Look for non-blog niche sites that link out to the blog, for example. If the majority of a blog’s backlinks are from irrelevant, spammy sites, I’d move on.

6. There’s a visible community there. People are commenting and the blog authors are responding. Comments are more than “great point! I’ll be back soon!” When there’s a great dialog going on somewhere, people return to it, and other people keep coming to it. Those people see your link, right?

7. The blog has a presence in social media. While certainly not a dealbreaker, having a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page means that the blogger understands the value of marketing in those mediums.

As I said earlier, I’m ignoring the link juice aspect of blogs in this piece simply because I want to underscore the importance of building blogs into your linking campaign. They’re good for traffic, remember, and they’re fantastic for building a community.

You’ll find each expert’s answer grouped by question. You’ll have to assemble the “big picture” takeaways yourself by reading through all the responses. I’ve read through this at least three times now, and each time I come away with new ideas. There is repetition, but there’s enough difference that I believe even the most experienced link builder will have a moment or two of discovery-induced excitement.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to the contributors. I can’t wait to put what you’ve taught me to work! And we’ll see you again in part 2, which looks at the technical aspects of what exactly gets analyzed, and in part 3, we’ll gather up all the loose ends.

Here are the 3 questions covering backlink analysis in campaign design:

1. When and why do you perform backlink analysis?
2. How does backlink analysis inform or affect your link building campaigns?
3. What elements of a backlink profile are most useful/telling in competitive analysis?

When and why do you perform backlink analysis?

To warm up my experts, and provide a framework for the overall discussion, I asked about when and why they perform backlink analysis. By and large, backlink analysis is a first and foremost step in designing a link building campaign.

Julie Joyce, of Link Fish Media

I perform backlink analysis when I begin a new link building campaign and periodically throughout it, especially when something’s not quite right and I need to investigate to see what’s going on behind the scenes. In our agency, backlink analysis is almost always done by myself and other senior staff who have years of SEO experience, so we’ll typically formulate a plan with the clients, then pass on our plan to the link building team. The reason that we do this is to get a good outline of the site’s link profile. Are there link spikes over the past few months or years? If so, why? Analysis helps us to identify issues that we think could potentially become problematic, and to figure out why they occurred and what to do for the future. Without checking the past, it’s hard to know how to move forward properly.

Eric Ward, Search Engine Land link columnist

I do backlink analysis for any number of reasons, but there are two primary motivations. First, I do them for specific client work. Second, and far more often than the first reason, I do them as part of my own efforts to understand the types of things that affect link seeking success, rank, publicity, and tendencies across a wide variety of verticals.

Debra Mastaler, of Alliance Link

When doing custom, competitor outreach and content generation programs.

Roger Montti, aka MartiniBuster

The why is simple: the value of a website is as good as its backlinks. Content is great, but in terms of link building content takes a secondorary role for determining the value. The backlinks, ideally, are a reflection of the quality of the content.

Webmasters rely too much on the Google toolbar and on third party link analysis tools for metrics. Fact is, nothing is better than eyeballing the backlinks oneself in order to determine the value of a site. There are many poor practices that are commonly accepted as being useful. Eyeballing the backlinks, taking a moment to see why sites are linking to it and how they are linking to it will help determine whether a site is going to help your link building efforts.

Some of these bad practices arise from misinterpreted observations that are subsequently perceived as loopholes to be exploited. For instance, one of these poor practices started from the observation that nofollowed links showed up in the Google’s backlink reports, including Webmaster Tools. That’s the observation. The mistake is to be ignorant of the fact that Google only shows a sampling of backlinks and that this sampling has never differentiated backlinks that helped a site rank and backlinks that do not help a site rank. The observation of nofollow links in WMT has led to the erroneous conclusion that nofollowed links have value and has led to a resurgence of blog comment spam. Eyeballing the whys and hows of a backlink will help in the determination of whether the thousands of backlinks a site has are useful or not.

Where most backlink analyses falter however, is focusing on quantity while discarding otherwise quality backlink candidates, particularly those with low PageRank. This is a case of webmasters relying on the toolbar without realizing they are relying on the toolbar. Google is known to rank web pages in the top five regardless of a lack of backlinks. This is what some might call the mom and pop boost, elevating a quality site that lacks inbound links. But you have to think about why? Is it the content? That certainly has a role. It’s clear that simply counting the backlinks of a site and making the one with the most link the winner doesn’t work. The search engines are more sophisticated than that it’s not uncommon to see low pagerank pages ranking at the top. So something is going on here that needs investigation.

The search engines are analyzing link graphs to determine the relevance of a site to a particular query, and part of that analysis is to throw out sets of sites that raise certain flags. This process is generally referred to as earning trust, but I’ve been coming around to seeing it more as part of the process of identifying what niche bucket a site belongs in, with the spam bucket being one of several. Imagine these buckets as clouds of sites that are relevant for particular topics. Now here is the question that webmasters aren’t considering. Is it possible to rank a site according to the relevancy cloud that a site belongs in? If it’s possible to extract meaning from the clouds of “meaning” a site belongs to, then it’s possible that a relevant site with low to zero PR regains importance as part of a link building project. This is something I refer to as determining the link clique.

An important role of backlink analysis is culling out the bad link candidates in order to speed up the process of finding the best ones, to cut down on wasted time. For example, you can make your criteria strict in order to bypass sites that have the possibility of using questionable SEO tactics. One rule, a strict rule, is to remove from consideration any website that has an overwhelming amount of links from no-followed comments. There are other more specific rules I use, but I don’t want to single out specific groups.

Jeremy Bencken, of Web Simple

There are three reasons I perform backlink analysis (on sites other than my own):

1. Website acquisition. Is an acquisitions candidate’s backlinks paid – are they likely to disappear, or likely to be discounted by Google? Are they hard to replicate? For sites with mostly-organic traffic, backlinks are their core competitive advantage.

2. Link prospecting. Do my competitors have links my site should have. Unfortunately, if you rely on this alone, you’re by definition trailing competitors. A better strategy is to ask, “what audiences are organically linking to my competitors and how can I use those ideas to generate my own focused link building campaigns?” What other adjacent markets might also be interested in my site’s story? The key is finding inspiration, ideas, and improving upon inbound linking trends you discover from competitors.

3. Link policing. Are my competitors participating in shady link schemes? I know this is controversial, but I’m of the opinion that link purchases that can be discovered is just poor SEO, and reporting them to Google (in hopes they will be penalized) is a service to the SEO industry.

Michael Gray, Search Engine Land columnist & Wolf-Howl.com

A backlink analysis is one of the key aspects of any site’s SEO profile. You should always address any on site issues first, such as canonical, site architecture, page templates, but backlinks are the first step when you start looking at offsite SEO. It can be your site, a clients site, or a competitors site, backlinks are really critical.

Shaun Anderson

I’ll carry out some simple backlink research at the beginning of any project to identify any obvious link hubs in the vertical, and/or any obvious quality link sources, or to just examine the types of link opportunities available in this sector. Once I get the team of flying monkeys out of keyword research and into deployment (via article submissions and dropping semi-quality links on sources I know change positions) I’ll revise my linkbuilding analysis and further target the next wave of links to try and acquire / emulate. So, in effect, I’m constantly analysising links month on month, but I never just rely on the links others have already got.

Eric Enge,  Stone Temple Consulting

There are two reasons for performing backlink analyses of your competitors and major players in your market space:

1. To identify the most important links that those sites have, so you can request links from them.

2. To learn what their link building strategies they have been using.

It is the latter point that is actually the more important point of the two. Once you understand your competitor’s strategies, and/or where they are obtaining quality links, it becomes much easier to decide on what your strategy will be.

We like to do backlinking of competitors very early in our engagements. Link building, and more broadly “promoting your web site” remains the most important thing you can do in an SEO effort. Yet there are so many different choices for link building campaigns that any given publisher can pursue, yet the return on each campaign can also vary significantly. For that reason it is critical that you put careful thought into deciding your strategy. Seeing what has helped major competitors thrive is invaluable.

Wiep Knol

I always do a quick backlink check before I take on a new client. Just to check what kind of link building they are doing, or have been in the past. If the client has high expectations, but also has a very polluted link profile, I might choose not to take on that client. A combination like that can only turn out the wrong way. When I start a campaign, I dig in a little deeper and take a look at the competition as well. This can give me an overview of the industry and competitors in general, but it could also give me inspiration for what websites to target or what kind of content to create.

Brian Gilley of Social SEO

We primarily use backlink analysis reports to dissect the backlink profiles of our client’s competitors. Running a thorough backlink analysis of between 4 and 7 competitors and then meshing those similar or unique backlink details together gives us a strong roadmap to help our initial link building efforts for the client. We don’t just look at domain and page authority or getting links from the aggregated backlink data we’ve collected. Instead, we use the data to really educate the client on the types of backlinks we should be focusing on within our link building campaign — whether that be industry-specific, local, social media, link bait creation, or another types of link that we can identify that’s paying off well for competitors.

Jennifer Van Iderstyne of Search Slingshot

I always perform a back link analysis at the beginning of an SEO campaign. I feel like it’s important to understanding a website’s history. Sort of like cutting down a tree and examining the rings, you can uncover vital information about a website’s past and use that information to plan for the future. I also like to perform a back link analysis periodically throughout a campaign, just to look for surprises either good or bad, and to gauge the success of any particular link building effort.

Then of course, there are good reasons to perform an analysis when a sudden problem arises, like a loss of rankings. I always check the back links to see if the answer is there. You might discover the site has some how got tied into a bad neighborhood. Maybe the site got lost, driving around downtown Compton in a Lexus at midnight… If that’s the case you wanna know about it, and a back link analysis will tell you if that is the case.

And sometimes, when you’ve hit a wall brainstorming new ideas, a back link analysis can provide inspiration.

Paul Teitelman of Search Engine People

Backlink analysis is absolutely crucial to get a solid insight into what previous efforts have been done for a client or for a potential client. Before starting on any SEO campaign for a client (or even when pitching clients) I do a complete, exhaustive backlink analysis to see both the amount of links, and the different types of links (articles, directories, blogs, social media sites) that have been built already. Even more importantly is to thoroughly analyze the anchor texts used in order to give you a complete insight into their current “link profile”. This helps determine what kind of link building strategy I need to execute both in terms of link velocity and link variation.

Melanie Nathan, Canadian SEO

I do backlink analysis mainly when starting work for a new client so I can get an idea as to their profile (number of links, strongest links, anchor text etc). I also mine the backlinks of competitors while looking for suitable prospects. Even if I find a 404 error on a competitor’s site, I’ll do a quick backlink check on that particular page, to see if the links have value and if there are any opportunities to scoop them.

Brian Chappell, of Adapt Marketing

Backlink analysis occurs typically when reviewing new niches for me lately. Or analyzing a clients site for potential answers into ranking falicies, good or bad. Links to me tell a story, so its very important to understand the age, location and anchor text of a sites links.

Wil Reynolds, of Seer Interactive

Now I do it at the onset of a campaign, sometimes you get beat on anchor text, sometimes its authority, sometimes it is just raw number of links. But you won’t know what you are up against unless you do a competitive backlink analysis up front.

Tom Demers, of Wordstream

When I consult, I do a lot of site audits, and a major piece of these is backlink analysis (for clients and competitors.) I also conduct a similar analysis upon taking on a new project, even if they haven’t ordered a site audit. This is basically a deep dive look at the types, quantity and quality of links in the client profile, and a slightly higher-level analysis of some of their competitors. On an ongoing basis, I’ll periodically audit a client’s backlink profile, and I’ll frequently look at backlink profiles of competitors or interesting sites to mine them for links I can either get or generate a link building idea from.

Ken Lyons, also from Wordstream

There are four distinct reasons I perform backlink analysis.

1. SERP appraisal: when targeting verticals for new clients, I evaluate the link profiles of the big dogs that dominate the page one SERPs. I want to know why they’re top ten. Usually, I can grab a lot of intelligence sifting through their links profile, both domain and page level. I’m looking for weakness and opportunity, something I can exploit or duplicate.

2. Competitor evaluation: when I see anyone else outranking my established sites for target keywords, I want to know why they’re ahead of my site in the SERPs. Typically, that boils down to some link advantage: more links, better links, superior relevance of links.

3. Internal link audits: I feel it’s critical to analyze my own site’s link profile to determine why certain pages perform better than others. Is it based on level of competition in the SERPs, or is it the result of certain links in my own profile that are passing equity and relevance to these top performers. If it’s the latter, I want to try to replicate these quality links to as many of the other “money” pages on my site.

4. Link discovery: most SEOs use keyword tools for keyword discovery. They should also be analyzing link profiles to discover new link opportunities. I’ve stumbled on some prime link partners sifting through a competitor’s backlinks. In fact, when I see spammy, low value sites outranking mine in the SERPs, I get giddy because I know if I rummage through their garbage link profiles, I’ll find gold. It’s evident that there’s some juicy link pushing them ahead of me. I just need to roll up my sleeves and find it.

I have to add that a backlink analysis is only a part of a link building campaign. In some cases, it’s a very small part, in other cases it may be a bit more, but only looking at your competitors or your own history will never get you optimal results.

Gab Goldenberg, Search Engine Land columnist & SEO ROI

I perform backlink analysis when I need to have an idea how challenging and time-intensive it’ll be to rank a prospective client. This also gives me an idea as to whether I should even take them on or whether their needs are beyond what I can provide. I’ll also do backlink analysis if I’m considering a few different affiliate niches and I want to see what’s easiest to rank on, relatively speaking.

Christoph Cemper

Whenever doing competitve analysis, going after competitors links, buying an existing domain, out of curiosity for good rankings

David Harry

Three main reasons are:

1.  Competitive analysis: whenever we’re getting into a new query space we use it to guage how tough the space may be by looking at some of the competitor link data.

2.  Client analysis: obviously when we get a new client, we’d be looking at the profile to get a feel for where they are at the moment.

3. Content programs: obviously when we’re looking at content placement and other strategic alliances we’ll look at link profiles for prospects.

Arnie Kuenn, of Vertical Measures

We perform backlink analysis whenever we are either performing an SEO review or trying to obtain links from pages linking to our clients’ competitors. It’s a very efficient and effective way for finding relevant pages and is a comparatively easy method to discover high quality links. This works especially well if you can discover a path that the competition has taken with respect to attracting links.

Dixon Jones, of Receptional

Whenever a client specifically approaches us for this, but also, we work on this with retained clients after we have sorted out their site architecture. No point in developing links unless and until the client understands that changing url structures has consequences! Typically, we carry out an analysis before starting ANY campaign, as our quickest wins are typically found during this exercise. We even, these days, conduct a very brief analysis free for the client for our own benefit in reply to their initial inquiry.

Ann Smarty

Backlink research has been a great way to do the following:

• See the competitors’ strengths.
• Learn the competitors’ friends and promoters. As well as their tactics to promote themselves.
• Learn the clients’ past link building tactics (to diagnose the penalty for example).

Bill Hartzer, of Vizion Interactive

We have a very specific process for link building. We usually review the links to the site when we first hear of a domain name (like during the initial sales process or when talking to a potential client) so we can get a good idea of what would be involved in promoting that domain name/the site. We then perform an initial, detailed backlink analysis of the target domain, but also of many online keyword competitors so that we fully understand the market and the competition.

Ken McGaffin, of WordTracker

I’ll do informal and formal backlink analysis. Informal will just be a quick look to check out the quality of a site.

I’ll do formal analysis when I start on a new project. I’ll look in-depth at each of the major players. I want to assess what their linking strategies are and how well they’re implementing them. As well as that, I’ll be looking for influential blogs and the people behind them, community sites, news and information sites and particularly journalists who are writing about the topic I’m promoting.

David Lewallen, Cybernaut SEO

I perform a backlink analysis at the beginning of a new engagement with a client in order to get a feel for their backlink profile. This allows me to gauge the sophistication of their link building initiatives to date as well as to determine what is working for them or has worked in the past. I also like to see if the client has been up to risky business (buying links, bad neighborhoods ETC…) and to determine what needs to happen in order to mitigate that risk.

Ryan Clark, LinkBuildr

Backlink analysis is one of the most important aspects of any link building campaign, aside from the links themselves. You should be on top of your backlink analysis before, during and until you forget about the certain campaign. The first place you’ll need to look to is of course the top 10 websites ranking for your keyword. Without an idea of what the competitor has hidden behind the mask of their SEO efforts, you’re going to be building links in the dark…not something I’d recommend you should do. I always make sure to look at the sites ranking for the top 20 results. Eric Ward recently wrote about even checking past 40 -50-60 etc (http://searchengineland.com/linking-food-for-thought-34113). There’s no harm in seeing what you can leverage for your own profile, and you’d most likely save yourself some time in the long run.

Ben Wills

Most often, I perform backlink analysis for two reasons: 1) to identify sites with multiple citations to competitors for link opportunities, and 2) as a method for identifying the competitiveness of a keyword space. The more competitive the backlink profiles, the more competitive that keyword space will be.

Aaron Wall, of SEOBook

Mostly I do it at the beginning of entering new markets…and mainly when trying to decide an entry point to the market. If you try to compete head on with limited resources that makes winning harder, but if you find an area where the competition is weak or you have a strong competitive advantage you give yourself a much better chance to succeed. Most of the backlink analysis I do is just an overview look at the market using SEO for Firefox.

How does backlink analysis inform or affect your link building campaigns?

With this question, I hoped to hear more about how link builders moved from the backlink profiles of clients and competitors to actually designing a campaign.

Roger Montti, aka MartiniBuster:

Link analysis is the backbone of all my link building campaigns. Let’s talk about a double backlink analysis. Eyeballing who links to a site is the first step. The second step is to review who they link to, and then doing a backlink analysis of those sites they are linking to. The other day, I found a PR 6 site that was linking out to what looked like decent websites but a backlink analysis showed that those sites had backlinks from sites that linked out to self-described black hat websites. None of those sites rank well, either. So the double backlink analysis is a good one to use. Most people would take the PR 6 but for me that site is a loser. A strong case for not trusting the toolbar for making link building decisions. Link analysis done by your eyeballs, without the use of a third party tool, is the way to go. It’s fundamental.

Jeremy Bencken:

It’s a huge source of ideas for finding audiences who’d be interested in a site and worth approaching with promotion opportunities. For example, if my client is a pizza restaurant and I realize some Pop Warner football team is linking to their competitor, then you can bet I’m going to look into why they’re linking. Once I figure it out, I’m going to try to improve upon the idea and pitch every kids sports team I can find to link to my client. This is the fun creative part of link building: reverse-engineering why people link, then creating new opportunities that take advantage of the same dynamic.

Michael Gray:

You want to look at who is linking to the competition, are they getting mostly low quality high volume links, or are they getting mentioned and linked to from authority sites. If a site is getting links from well known, and trusted online resources, you modify your strategy accordingly.

Ken McGaffin:

Backlink analysis is crucial to a campaign. But I’m not looking to chase up links to competitors, I’m looking to build up a sense of the important influencing or information sites in the market I’m researching. Once I’ve got that list, I move on to thinking about what type of outstanding content can I create.

Jennifer Van Iderstyne:

A back link analysis creates a baseline for any link building campaign, by posing and helping to answer these questions:

• Are there problems which need to be rectified?
• Have there been bad linking choices?
• What existing success can be capitalized on?
• What strategies have been used in the past that could be expanded or replicated in the future?
• Are the back links too one note?
• Is there a need for diversification?

All of these questions need to be answered in order to design the most effective campaign possible and can be answered at least in part, through a back link analysis. Also, existing back links can help create ideas for how to build new ones.

Dixon Jones:

The analysis helps to quantify and demonstrate the scale of the task at hand. In some instances, the website in question is underdeveloped by a massive factor compared to their competitors. This usually reflects relative differences in brand building on and offline in the past – but if a local paper hopes to compete with the BBC, they had better reframe their objectives to think around local terms, for example.

Julie Joyce:

We don’t get into the nitty-gritty of saying “well this backlink profile has 455 mentions of the keyword fashion and only 427 for clothing, so let’s attack clothing!” We use it to formulate a general outline. We want to know what the most commonly used anchor text was so that we can discuss plans with the client. We want to identify opportunities to make things better, so if we see an inbound link that points to a less-than-optimal page, we might want to contact the webmaster and point out a better bit of content. Basically, the analysis that we do gives us the information that we need to lay out our plan for the next few months. Without the analysis, I don’t see how we’d have a good idea of where to move next.

Bill Hartzer:

A thorough backlink analysis tells us where we are now, how many links we need to get, and where the competition is right now. Then, depending on our analysis, we will put a certain amount link building resources towards the project depending on how competitive the market is. We also continue to perform our link building analysis process on a regular basis to make sure that we’re keeping up with the competition.

David Lewallen:

I like to see what types of sites have linked to the client in the past and determine what specific strategies and techniques have worked for them. This gives me a starting point, if a client has not done any link building I start with the basics, but if they have a well versed link building then I will employ more advanced strategies to boost their profile. I also like to see if their business partners are linking to them and in what fashion. I check to see if there are links going to 404 pages, broken or missing pages.

Shaun Anderson:

It helps me see the linking habits in that vertical and the types of links that have secured sites top ranking already, and the types of links I may find available for me. For instance, Im currently looking at a vertical where the number 1 position has links that are all kind of spammy. But they’re working…. so I can assume there’s not a lot of domain authority in play in that vertical, and can assume if I throw a bucket load of low quality links at the site over a short time (months) I can hide the odd real quality link in there that will get me at least into the top few results.

Brian Gilley:

It affects our link campaigns heavily since we look at the overall compilation of link data from multiple sources and then determine our focus after we have fully examined the data. If it looks like a piece of content has gotten the majority of its ranking strength from industry-specific channels, then we know that following the same direction will likely be more costly. If the backlink data has a good percentage of article/contributor based websites, local links, and it heavily focused on driving linkable content from social media sources, then we can gear our campaigns and budgets accordingly.

Paul Teitelman:

Backlink analysis has huge implications on any link building campaign. As I mentioned, by analyzing the current amount of backlinks you can then set your campaign strategy both in terms of link velocity and link variation. For example, if a client had very few backlinks, you know that you need to take your time and only use the absolute safest link building practices with lots of anchor text variation. On the other hand, if the client has a massive amount of backlinks with lots of link and anchor variation already then it’s a completely different story. In this case, you know that you don’t need to be as concerned with the speed at which you build links, but need to concentrate on higher end link building strategies with focused anchor texts as the basics have already been mostly covered.

Brian Chappell:

At surface level, it tells you who’s linking to you, and who possibly you should go to for new prospects. But if you really dig deep you can gain intelligence required by competitive terms that require an understanding of the cost/benefit relationship to actually ranking higher organically. Aaron Wall has always nailed this home and I feel its right on point when thinking about time invested and link analysis.

Tom Demers:

It greatly impacts the quality and quantity of links I’ll target for a client or a project. Determining the competitiveness of a query space is pivotal in attempting to rank a keyword(s) efficiently. See this post on competitive query analysis.

Wiep Knol:

It can provide some basic historic and competitive insights, but it can also be used for identifying new potential link targets.

Gab Goldenberg:

It allows me to identify patterns as to the most valuable links in a particular niche, and perhaps come up with link sources I would never have thought of. For example, I found out that for a hotel I worked with, a local escort review board was a good source of links! By patterns, I should clarify that I mean what sorts of hubs you see in a niche. Escort review forums aren’t a pattern in the hotel space, but you can find things like Hamlet Batista did in promoting RankSense. I’ve done SEO for a mass-market piece of software too, and so I can confirm that PAD files are a source links.

Ryan Clark:

I’m a firm believer of building quality links over quantity, so I’m always looking to see how you’re doing on your end in that department. Let’s say someone ranking in the top 5 for your target keyword has 500 links, 75 of them are of medium to high quality. I can tell from that just what kind of links I’ll need to catch up to them and take over. If you’re specing things out for a client then you’ll also be able to have a sense of the cost for them. It’s really hard to measure a cost with ranking success from a link building campaign. A competitor’s backlink profile might reveal that they’ve paid to be in Business.com and the Yahoo Directory. Little tips like that can start to put a dollar value on your campaign costs which helps keep things in perspective. * keep notes/journal on how many links it took to rank for said keyword

Christoph Cemper:

By looking at what the competition has, or has not you get an idea of the playing field that you’re in. thats especially important if you work in so many different industries and niches as we do for our clients

David Harry:

I’d say many times one of the more important aspects of link profile analysis is finding new opportunities. Many times, unless one specializes in a market, it isn’t obvious which routes to take with link building. I find that the process of reverse engineering during the competitive analysis can help find approaches we may not have had in mind originally. This has a huge affect. Where are they strong? Where are they weak? How balanced is the profile? Much of this affects the actual campaign to be implemented.

Arnie Kuenn:

It gives us a lot of information if we do a deep analysis. We can certainly discover what is working to help other sites get ranked and as I mentioned in #1, sometime we discover a whole method of obtaining links, not just a list of domains and pages to target in our link building efforts. For example, did the competition have an angle to attract .edu links? Did they distribute any free products or tools to attract links?

Ann Smarty:

The best thing about the backlink research is that it inspires me: this way I can see which direction I can go, how creative I can get and which site types will work best.

Debra Mastaler:

Any information found is strategically used in our decision making process. We don’t necessarily use the same link sources in our linking efforts but knowing where and how a competitor links helps us plan a smarter strategy.

Dennis Hettema and Elias Kai:

When I identify an interesting source through backlinks I try to get a picture of the keywords that this source is strong in and target their competitors. ie. If I find a camping site linking to my website for (biking shoes) I figure out the keywords that this camping site is trying to rank on. These keywords I cluster and I identify the top ranking players in the SERPs for that cluster. These are the guys I would initially target for link building.

Ben Wills:

Backlink analysis is used mostly as seed data for identifying potential link prospects. As mentioned above, it might also be used for competitive analysis or multiple citation analysis.

Aaron Wall:

Mainly it determines if we decide to enter the market or not, and what piece of it to enter. Sometimes co-citation tools like Hub Finder and clever search queries can help you find particular competitive strategies which you can try to duplicate or at least learn from.

What elements of a backlink profile are most useful/telling in competitive analysis?

In this question, I hoped to draw out what’s most important to look at in the competition’s backlinks.

Julie Joyce:

This is a great question for discussion, because I think that we could get into the art vs. science thing here. Basically, I feel like a bit of a link analysis hippie. I see the general pattern, get an idea about the overall aspects of the backlinks without needing to tie it down into discrete bits. Therefore, all of it matters to me in terms of importance, but I honestly do not look at my site vs. yours and pick out why one is better. I think a lot of it is very relative, and I realize that I’m sounding too New Age-y here, but there’s a lot more to why someone does better than you than that they have 5000 more backlinks or that their anchor text variance is much nicer than yours. I’d look at everything. I’d look at variety of anchor text, deep linking, authority site links, sitewides, contextual links, types of sites linking, and of course the simple amounts of everything, but I couldn’t pick out any as being that much more critical to me than the others.

Ken McGaffin:

I really want to cherry pick the best targets and then concentrate on those. So I’m not concerned at all with numbers but with quality. I want only the best targets; links from them will be difficult to get, but they’ll be worth the effort many times over.

Roger Monti:

The most telling is how natural the links are and how relevant they are. I will not consider any site that has irrelevant backlinks that are a result of a link bait campaign. Google analyzes the relevance of a backlink. They have been doing this since at least 2003. Part of that analysis is to deprecate the PageRank of irrelevant backlinks. This is a fact. Link bait campaigns are about quantity. But quantity is only a part of the backlink equation. The lack of control over relevance and quality is where link baiting as a link building technique fails and becomes a dead end. This kind of analysis reveals things about a site that the toolbar will not.

Jeremy Bencken:

Time. If you have a link building tool that identifies when links first appeared, then you may be able to identify spikes around particular campaigns or link purchases. Then you can get clues to why the links were created by looking at them.

Shaun Anderson:

The actual sites the links are on. I use to find out if I am up against link farms, blog article syndication, properly marketed content, viral success, small business or big brand…. or indeed SEOs lol

Eric Enge:

We do still look at metrics such as PageRank (or mozRank) and mozTrust. A highly trusted site with high PageRank is not guaranteed to represent a killer link, but there is still a correlation there. I am sure we would all agree that MIT, or USA.gov, or the NY Times are all probably highy trusted by the search engines, and are cetainly perceived as authorities. They also happen to have a PR9 of PR10 Google Toolbar PageRank. That does not mean that there are no clunkers with high Toolbar PageRank – there are. But, the sites you are looking for most likely have high Toolbar PageRank as well.

However, you do want to look at other metrics as well. Gather the founders of the company together and simply ask them who the leaders in the field are. That data will also help you identify sites that are likely to be seen as trusted and authoritative by the search engines. Taking the authority aspect a bit further, sites that have lots of links from other authority and non-authorty sites in the space are more likely to be seen as authoritative, and a backlink profile can help you get a sense of that.

One component that people often overlook, is that it is not just about the authority and trust that a domain has, but it is also about the page which the link can be found on. The classic example is a student page on a major university web site. The student does not speak for the university, and it is not likely that the search engines credit much of the domain’s authority or trust in such a page. So you need to look at that as well.

You also don’t want to overthink theses analyses. If I have identifed 10 sites that based on their PageRank and mozTrust levels that might be authoritative, I could spend two hours per site trying to determine how authoritative they are. However, in 30 minutes I can analyze their site content and organization objectives, have determined who to contact, how to contact them, and written them a highly personalized email.

Wiep Knol:

It’s the overall picture that can tell the most. A backlink profile with a relatively high amount of links from home pages does not have to be bad. But if this website has an over optimized anchor text portfolio as well, and tends to get most of their links from navigational website elements such as footers or sidebars, some things may be wrong.

In general, you can tell if a website has been building links by their anchor text portfolio.

Paul Teitelman:

Great question, after a while all the different factors kind of blend together to tell a story when comparing one site vs the competition, but for those starting out I’d definitely say to first focus on looking at the anchor texts in each backlink profile. You obviously want to see a focus on your targeted keywords but want to ensure that good link variation was properly utilized.

Although the number of backlinks is obviously important, the link variation used is actually a more telling sign of the power of that link profile. Ideally you want to see a variation of link building strategies (articles, directories, blogs, social media, etc. etc.) as well as authoritative mentions (.org, .edu, online newspapers, clubs and business associations). The overall number of links can easily be inflated: whereas getting high authority mentions online cannot, so really can’t stress this point enough.

Brian Gilley:

The age and number of backlinks at the page level of a backlink analysis is the most helpful for us. If we see that a specific page of a link prospect’s website is 4 or more years old and has a solid backlink profile of tens or hundreds of links, then it will provide us with a solid and valuable link. The most informative backlink data we’ve used over the past few years is looking at how deep and diversified the backlink profile is for any given competitor’s website. That means examining the most linked-to pages and determining how we can create content that achieves the same greatness.

Tom Demers:

For me it’s (in no particular order):

• Domain Page Rank
• Links
• Unique Linking Domains
• Difficulty of Link Acquisition
• Distribution of Link Types

These give me a nice baseline for how competitive a term may be to rank for, and can help me to generate ideas around which specific tricks I might replicate, and what my link profile will need to look like in terms of link quality distribution.

Ken Lyons:

These aren’t listed in any specific hierarchy of importance, but some of the critical link signals I look at in competitive analysis are:

• Link quantity
• Link quality
• Page level vs. domain level links
• Unique linking domains
• Domain age
• Top-level TLDs: .edu, .gov
• Quality directory presence: DMOZ, BOTW, Business.com, Yahoo!
• Social media mentions: Diggs, Delicious bookmarks, Twitter citations, etc

David Harry:

Certainly the old standard,  toolbar PR is useless by and large. Consider a page that has plenty of links, but they were obtained after the most recent export? Just because a page has no toolbar PR, doesn’t mean it isn’t garnering actual PageRank.

So we need to look at:

• Total links
• Status (nofollowed?)
• Anchor text
• Linking page TITLE
• Link types (editorial, forum, social etc..)
• Diversity (overview of link types analysis)
• Link age (ie; link decay potential)
• Velocity (rate of link growth)

Jennifer Van Iderstyne:

In a competitive analysis, I’m looking for quality but I’m more interested in discerning strategy. Trying to determine how this site has gone about getting links. That means looking for patterns and commonalities. Is there one particular page that has a lot of back links? What’s on it? Is there a predominance of one kind of link? Do the links appear (or could they be) paid?

I like to ask questions during a competitive analysis. Answering those questions is the most important part of identifying patterns and discerning the competitor’s strategy. Only when you have identified a pattern can you attempt to replicate it.

Bill Hartzer:

I’m more concerned about getting a lot of links from a lot of different domain names. I’d rather have 100 links on 80 different domains than 1100 links on 20 different domain names. A good mix of all types of links is helpful, as well, not just directory links or blog comments or article links or press release links, but a good mix of all of those. Even having some nofollow links may play into it, as well.

Melanie Nathan:

It really depends on the purpose of the analysis, but most often, sheer volume of links, backlink quality and targeted anchor text are what I scrutinize.

Knowing the sheer number of links my clients have vs. what their top competitors have, helps me determine how far I’ll have to climb to get them to (and beyond) that level. And knowing the quality of their links and what they’re heavily targeting helps me determine how fast I’ll be able to get them there.

Brian Chappell:

Age and anchor text as well as the rate of link growth over time.

Michael Gray:

Looking at the domains and URL’s can tell a lot, I’ve looked at so many backlinks now that I know example.com/keyword/page1.htm is almost certainly a link directory. Links from radio stations and local TV stations are also highly suspect since that industry is overflowing with link buying/selling.

Wil Reynolds:

Anchor text distribution for the top 10-20 sites vs. my site for a given keyword, this will let you know if you are in a dogfight for anchor text links.

Authority links that are not buried more than 3 clicks from the homepage – a lot of authority links get archived deep in a site, so its not enough just to look at if they have links from authority sites but to also evaluate how far from the homepage that link is, if that page with my link has any internal links pointing to it, and if I have targeted anchor text. Analyzing this on the top 10-20 will show you your highest value targets.

Christoph Cemper:

Each datapoint is valuable – we look at over 40 different parameters for each link! the most popular that you want to check for each link are obviously Domain Age, Backlinks to the page, Juice/Rankings for the page, if/when it was last changed, when the page was created, etc.

Arnie Kuenn:

I would have to say this starts to become some what subjective. Some of it you can only gain from experience, looking at hundreds of sites over time. You can get pretty good at spotting paid links, paid blog posts, free directory spam, etc. When that doesn’t jump out at you, you start looking deeper for “paths” as we call them here. What content are people linking to? Does this site work for coupon offers? Did they create some really cool research that people linked to? Is their blog attracting lots of links? And so on. If you can discover these “paths” then we try to create something similar on our client’s site to attract similar links.

Ann Smarty:

Of course, the answer may vary from niche to niche but most often these are links from blogosphere. Bloggers will tell a lot. How useful is the tool / service? How do they promote themselves (paid posts are usually either obvious or disclaimed). Do they have anything of value to offer? Were they ever engaged in some link bait / viral campaigns?

Dixon Jones:

We map the relative ACRanks of competing sites’ referring domains, creating normalized graphs that help to show the relative link “qualities”. This shows some interesting redflags in the competitor strategies.

Eric Ward:

Aside from the low hanging fruit of target site identification, what I find most useful is being able to look across a large sea of URLs pointing at any given site/URL, and based on experience, I can tell who is using what tactics, and whether or not they are going to work short and long term. Call it live link forensics. The ability to see who is on the right path, and who is about to blow up.

Ben Wills:

The relevance (keywords in the title, h tags, etc) and value (PageRank, backlinks, authority, etc) of the sites and URLs linking to those pages

Next time in this series…

• URL assessment
• On page & on-site factors

I recently came across a couple of linkbait campaigns, they’re from different companies in the same industry. Both used an info graphic to convey their message but one is better in terms of creativity, marketing and linkability. It’s this “linkability” which is the essence needed to attract links and take your content viral. Since the two pieces targeted the same audience but took different approaches, I thought they’d make a great comparison study on what you should and shouldn’t do when creating linkbait.  (Note:  I have permission from the owner of the less stellar linkbait to use it here.) Before we get started, a quick definition of linkbait.

What is linkbaiting?

Linkbaiting is a link building tactic which uses dynamic content to attract attention and links. The term and technique gained prominence in 2005/2006  when controversial blog posts and articles were used  to “flame” and/or humor people into linking. It’s quietly morphed into a more mainstream “content generation” method using elements such as puzzles, contests, widgets, infographics and inspirational content to attract attention and links.

Good and not-so-good linkbait

Both companies in our comparison study are in the ink cartridge industry which is a busy and competitive space.  Each created an infographic to show how many pieces of paper it would take to print every tweet sent. Great tie-in for an ink cartridge company but the similarity between the two linkbaits stops there. To help with the comparison process, I’ve listed three important components of a linkbait campaign and compared the two pieces to each.

Component #1: emotion

Whether you make them laugh or cry, your visitors will remember what they see if your linkbait stirs an emotion.  Both pieces provided impressive statistics, but Company A didn’t make me work to find them, their information was presented in short, easy-to-read captions.

Company A Intro:

Company B:

Company B used too much verbiage and not enough graphics so I started skimming and skipping over segments to get through it. Long sentences and lots of text can be a killer with linkbait, keep your initial call to action and body content short and sweet.

Component #2: information

Linkbait should have something new or eye-opening as part of its content so the message sticks long after you’ve left it. Both campaigns did this by showing the amount of  paper needed  to print every tweet sent but Company A’s linkbait made it easy for me to understand and be impressed by what I was reading. Seven billion tweets printed = 3.5 million pounds of paper, that’s a lot of dead trees.

Company A, Part 2:

Component #3: viral

The goal of any linkbait is simple… get as many people to see and link to it as possible. In order for this to happen, the bait needs to be  promoted heavily through social and traditional media for a better chance at going viral. The viral element is highly desirable for many reasons but reach and cost are the two biggest. People passing linkbait costs you nothing, nets views from a wide audience and hopefully more media attention down the road.

Company A’s linkbait was highlighted on Mashable, the article had over 1100 retweets and 18 comments. Comments are important to help with the next piece of linkbait, check out some of the advice left for Company A. According to Yahoo! Site Explorer, Company A’s linkbait was linked to by over 940 sources while Company B’s had substantially fewer inbound links. Since Company B was second to launch,  their data was old news and ignored in traditional and social media. Sometimes, being first is all you need.

Linkbait takeaways

1. Keep the linkbait short and sweet and be sure to include an “embed this image” option for easy reprint.  Include Twitter, Facebook and Stumble share buttons.
2. Keep an eye on the social media sites and what’s going hot in your industry, try to create linkbait around topics people are reading and talking about. (Both companies used Twitter  in their titles which was smart!)
3. Launch your linkbait to a specific group of people before going public, tap the associations and social media communities you belong to for feedback and a jumpstart.
4. Don’t be afraid to use bright colors, bold graphics and slogans. You want to be remembered and passed around, not filed away under “cute”.

This post is focused on using linkbait as a SEO link attraction method but not everyone uses linkbait for links, some want to build brand or promote charitable causes. Take a look at what the Special Olympics is doing, I think it’s awesome and one of the best examples of linkbait I’ve seen outside of SEO. Here’s the full linkbait piece from  Company A and Company B.

People will tell you that one of the better ways to spot link targets is to study the links of competing sites that rank above you. Fair enough. While technically accurate, why is there an assumption those sites will link to your site too? And why so little discussion of how this “xerox approach to link building” is in the client’s best interest? Frankly, low co-citation link gets are way better than high cite gets.

Why does everyone obsess over the inbound links of the top ten results? If a search term brings back 3,200,000 results, even the site ranked 39th will have something about it you can learn from. In fact, I produce my strongest client content linking plans by spending more time studying results pages 2-20 than page 1.

On the topic of target sites, if people would spend as much time learning Google, Yahoo, and Bing’s advanced search functionality as they do learning how to use some new whizboombang link building tool, they’d be far better off, and so will their rankings.

If you are a link builder and have never used clusty.com, give it a try.

How many of you who spend a lot of time studying huge spreadsheets full of URLs (meaning tens of thousands of URLs) have gotten to the point where you can spot link spammers just by paging through the URL list, without even having to visit those URLs in a browser? It’s laughable, isn’t it?

I just read New York Times to spend 2010 erecting a partial paywall. Let’s hope they understand how to do this right, so a few hundred thousand deep link inbounds don’t go 404 or 301 to a “we want money” page. Link equity is precious. Handle it with care.

One example/suggestion:

Any direct clicks to interior pages at nytimes.com (like this page) where the click originated from a .edu based link to that interior page (like this page) ought to result in the user getting the expected content at no cost.

The above example was easy. I’ve got a boatload of link equity preservation strategies, and have saved several large content sites from link equity disasters.

Lastly, test your link profile forensic skills with this teaser.

Search phrase: flags of the world

Why does this page rank #1:

http://www.flags.net

And this page ranks #2 (indented):

http://www.flags.net/indexa.htm

But this page:

http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/ ranks #3  ?

You’d think the site at position #3 would be #1, especially given this particular search phrase/content match and the link profiles. I have my hunches and some analysis that help me to better understand the ranking result/scenario above. But I’m curious.

What are your thoughts?

While covering several angles is definitely a smart marketing move, it also can lead to a bit of confusion on the part of each person involved as to how exactly to determine whether or not results (good or bad) have come from his or her own specific efforts. Hopefully your client is measuring ROI as well, but it’s definitely best if you do keep track of your own results.

Before becoming involved with something of this nature, you might want to ask a few questions in order to determine whether this is the type of link building that you feel comfortable doing. Considering the mess that can come about from a poorly executed cooperative link building effort, you’ll want to make sure that you keep the following 10 tips in mind if you’re considering this.

1. Determine whether a group link building effort is the right fit for you.

It may not be something that you’re comfortable doing, for whatever reason. If you have expectations in place (such as open communication and honesty) then you may find it difficult to deal with this situation if you’re not “allowed” to speak to other parties. In some cases, you won’t have a clue that others are working on the same campaign, for example. If this isn’t something you can handle, don’t get involved. If you are involved and then find out after the fact, just do your best to work around it, or, if you feel that you have to, lose the client.

2. Establish which methods are being employed by others, and let everyone know which ones you’ll be using.

If you’re lucky enough to have a smart client, this should be a well-planned link campaign where everyone brings a different strength to the table, but it’s best not left to chance.

3. Work together.

For example, if one team is doing a big content release and you’re working on emailing and asking for links, time it so that you’re pointing to their new content. For large campaigns, you can move faster if there are more hands on deck. If you can work together, you benefit from bouncing ideas off each other. There can be several different types of link building going on at once (content writing, social media promotions, emailed link requests, etc.)

Some people excel at different forms of link building than others, and if you put together an ace team, your results should be stellar. Communication within the various groups is an absolute must if you want to avoid stepping all over each other and entering into deals with the same site from different angles.

4. Check to make sure that no one is negating your efforts and that, in turn, you aren’t negating anyone else’s efforts.

If you have a particularly strong belief in link building without going against Google’s guidelines, for example, you may find yourself working on a campaign that’s also employing people who are buying links. You could be buying links and doing it in what you think is a very low-risk and natural manner, and then discover someone else working on the campaign who is blatantly buying horribly spammy ones that are risky and exceptionally obvious.

The odds of two or more entities working on one campaign and having the exact same mentality about what is and isn’t ok are very low, of course. My guess is that if this situation does arise for you, you’ll find that determining that the good that you think you’re doing may be negated.

5. Create a master list of who’s doing what, and stick to it.

Just as with any group effort, there needs to be a set list of responsibilities and assignments that you can refer to when necessary. List out method of communication (team calls, emails, run everything through the client and let him/her handle it, etc.), critical due dates, and absolutely anything that’s relevant to keeping this all running smoothly for everyone involved.

6. Set your own conversion goals and figure out how you’ll track them.

I talk about marketing different keyphrases below, but what I mean here is that you should first determine what you will consider to be a successful effect of your own efforts. Is it an increase in traffic, a sale, more links on a certain social media platform, and so forth? If you don’t typically ask for access to a client’s analytics, now’s a good time to start.

7. Market different keyphrases.

If this is possible, do it so that you can get a better idea of results from specific rankings and traffic data. In accordance with making sure that no one is negating your efforts, however, I’d also advise routinely checking on keyphrases that other teams are working on just to make sure everything’s all proceeding nicely.

8. Create timelines for different link releases.

Just as development follows a schedule of releases, so should a large link building campaign. The last thing you want to do is sabotage your efforts by creating link spikes that throw up a red flag.

9. Keep everyone informed beforehand.

It’s better to be able to make alternate plans if what you’re doing will have an adverse effect on someone else’s work, and vice versa. It’s not fun to rush to clean up a mess that could have been avoided.

10. Be open to suggestions, revisions, and criticism from others.

It’s entirely possible that another person will see a problem with your method, so listen to what he or she has to say without flaring up. The criticism may be well-warranted.

As is probably obvious by now, working in such a collaborative way definitely has its challenges, but if you’re making an effort to stay involved and on top of things, it may prove to be a very fruitful experience. You can definitely learn from people who do things in a very different manner, especially if everyone is able to bounce ideas off of each other.

So. Do you interview others or try to get others to interview you?

Either way, the queries are the same to find your prospects. Here are query ideas to get you started.

Media interview queries

[kw] intitle:expert interview or talk or discuss or answer
[kw] expert interview
[kw] intitle:”group interview”
[kw] intitle:”advice from”
[kw] intitle:”chat with”
[kw] intitle:”conversation with”
[kw] intitle:”discussion with”
[kw] intitle:”q and a with”
[kw] intitle:”tips from”
[kw] intitle:”q/a with”
[kw] intitle:”q&a with”
[kw] intitle:”question and answer with”
[kw] intitle:”questions and answers with”
[kw] intitle:”thoughts on”
[kw] intitle:”talks with”
[kw] intitle:”talk with”
[kw] intitle:”discusses”
[kw] “group interview”
[kw] intitle:”thoughts from”
[kw] intitle:experts interview or talk or discuss or answer
[kw] intitle:experts interview or talk or discuss or answer
[kw] intitle:expert interview or talk or discuss or answer

To speed up your research, auto-create these interview queries in our new link building query tool. Just add your keyword and select “Thought Leader” from the Asset Type dropdown menu.

Running queries and analyzing your interview prospects

The queries above show you people and sites that conduct interviews (targets for getting interviewed) and they show you people who submit to interviews (targets for interviewing).

If you want to get interviewed, use our guide to qualifying link prospects to identify the sites that will have the greatest impact on your rankings. For large digs I’d also recommend removing the “intitle:” command from the queries above, running each query and then analyze them using the SERPs dominator process. This will show you a far larger universe of prospective interviewers (hat tip to Dennis Hette.ma for this idea).

If you want to interview people in your industry, make note of people who consistently give interviews and gather all the URLs of all their interviews. Interview subjects are highly-likely to help promote your interview with them. Make note too of community metrics that illustrate their social reach such as Twitter follower count, how many times they’ve been listed on Twitter, their blog subscribers, etc.

By no means should your interview prospecting stop with queries though: your existing relationships are another great source for interview prospects.

To interview or be interviewed?

Interviewing others—especially group interviews—has the potential to earn many links but far fewer leads. Getting interviewed earns you one link but many leads. If you’re newer in a space, build your community and reputation by interviewing others. If you’ve been in the space longer this does not give you the “right” to be interviewed, but you will have a better chance of landing interviews through outreach.

Interviewing others, either solo or in a group, requires careful question preparation. If you land an interview with a prominent industry expert you must go back and review their previous interviews (it won’t do to ask questions they’ve already answered elsewhere, unless you use a different angle). In group interviews you must create engaging questions that help your guests demonstrate expertise and meet the information needs of your audience.

Getting interviewed requires far more finesse and relationship building. You’re asking others to “vouch” for you to their readership, plus do the actual work of interviewing you which may require becoming more knowledgeable about what you do. If you don’t do your homework in approaching potential interviewees you’ll come off looking arrogant and overreaching. But, the leads are worth the effort.

Further thoughts on interview execution

Preparation is everything, whether you’re interviewing by phone, email, audio podcast or on video. Treat every interview like a serious business engagement by conducting thorough background research. Know where your subject went to high school, his first job after college and be prepared to ask how these historical nuggets impacted his ascent to the top of the industry (unless those questions have already been asked in other interviews). But you’ll know this because you already sourced and took notes from all previous interviews by querying: ["person's name" interview].

On the other side of the microphone, in some cases you may get more interviews if you write and answer great questions for yourself and simply submit the interview as if it were a guest post. Researching previous interview questions with industry experts—and staying relentlessly, thoroughly helpful—will help you ask yourself some solid questions that make it easier for your interviewer to hit the publish button. Further, be aware that the person interviewing you might be interested in your capacity for pushing the interview in your community. It won’t hurt to let them know how you plan to help promote them!

Group interviews done well are exhaustively thorough. Here are two fantastic examples from the link building space: 11 Experts on Link Development Speak Out and Link Value Factors. Your goal as a group interviewer is to dig out nuggets of actionable brilliance using questions and your decisions about organization and editing. It’s a lot of work, but if you have great interview subjects and incisive questions, the links will follow. Plus, promotion is “baked in,” as the interview subjects will mention the interview to their network.