SEOmoz add target to linkscape csv exports
Big thumbs up to SEOmoz for this one, I sent a suggestion only a couple of weeks ago to have the ‘target’ (i.e. page) that the link goes to added to linkscape csv exports and note today it’s already been added.
There are some great benefits to this subtle change, especially in relation to analysis :
Quickly find your competitors most optimised links
An optimised link would generally contain great anchor text and point to the most valuable sub-page. They are often paid for. Simply do a pivottable adding Target, then Anchor text to the row labels, then Anchro text to values and you’ll have a nice summary of pages with anchor texts and counts – if you click on a number then you’ll see the links to that page with the given anchor text in a new worksheet. What you do with this date is of your call
Work out very quickly what products your competitor appears to be targeting
This can be done with a very simple pivot table, look at how many of their sub-pages have inbound links ; if they are doing SEO it indicates which products are important to them
Find your or your competitors most successful linkbaits
This one is a simple pivottable & sort – look for deep pages with a lot of inbound links. When I do this on Seomoz.org, I notice that the beginners guide to search engine optimisation, and the search ranking factors are amongst the most popular pieces of content. Unfortunately , due to the ways linkscape filters out links you’ll lose a lot of the natural links , but you should still have enough to see the actual pieces which earned the natural links to find them with a new search (either using linkscape or Yahoo!).
Honing in on your competitors lower grade activity
What on earth do I mean by this? well I’m referring to comment spam, article distribution & the like – again, due to low quality frequently being filtered out of linkscape (and indeed many tools) it’s often necessary to find the URL’s and then move to yahoo to get the raw data (i.e. links).
You can hone in on this by exporting the linkscape data to csv, doing a pivottable, using nofollow as a filter (where nofollow has a ‘1′ in it), and target as both a row label and value – you should be able to identify sub-pages picking up a fair few nofollow links this way, which can trigger further investigation.
If you do identify a lot of these ‘noise’ links, then you can exclude this noise from your analysis when trying to work out the links that are really doing the damage.
An alternative way I’ve used to hone in such links is to do a similar thing using anchor text instead of target, isolating all nofollowed links with rich anchor texts – these are almost always spam. If you’re that way inclined you could even use these links to report your competitors, but given they aren’t paid for, Google is unlikely to care too much …..
If you’ve read this post wondering how on earth to do Pivottables, I recommend you read and listen to the distilled series on how to be an excel ninja .
While I think the ever increasing visibility being provided on links by Linkscape/Majestic is excellent, I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s becoming easier everyday for your competitors to imitate or scrutinise your link building techniques, meaning we have to work ever harder to create inimitable campaigns.
