Top 5 Rules for Link Profiling

0 Comments May 12, 2010

Yesterday we launched our new version that supports Link Profiling automated. Today we are going to dive a bit deeper into the concept of link profiling and sum up with the 5 most important rules to keep in mind when doing link profiling.

What is link profiling?

Back link profiling is perfect for gaining and understanding in your competitive landscape. When doing competitive research you dig into the backlink profiles of those sites that rank above you, that receive more traffic, that make more money. Simply said, you try to understand why they are ranking better than you.

Link Profiling is a great way to visualize all that data

Let’s take a look at this site. We breakdown their back links by Majestic’s ACrank, which is similar to MozRank a metric that compares link strength in the original fashion that Google Page Rank was implemented.

This is a reference site for us and we know it has not done any excessive link building, black hat or other artificial stuff in the past (albeit it’s in a hyper competitive space)

Now let’s look at this site.

We see pretty high, unusual high spike in the backlinks of ACrank 7,8,9 while the “low ones” at 4,5,6 are under represented.

This screams “Link Building High PR/AC Links”, doesn’t it?

Digging deeper into the backlinks of the 2nd site we could find all their placements with ACrank 7 and identify some really good possible partners and sponsorships to acquire a link, too. You know why? Because the 2nd site was a highly ranking site that seems to have done it right for _that_ industry.

Of course this example is simplified. You need more sites than two to look at. You need more SEO metrics than just ACrank to look at. If you look at the other charts for MozRank and the Backlinks counts the picture will change again.

Don’t believe it?

Here’s the first site in the MozRank Profile.

and here’s the 2nd site again.

Top 5 Rules when doing competitive research in your space

• ALWAYS compare sites within your industry, and NEVER EVER think that a link profile one industry (say Finance) follows the same rules as in another industry (say Dating)
• ALWAYS look at least at 3 other websites in your space – the more the better. It’s pointless to do a comparison with one single site that you believe is representative. This is too simple and actually dangerous.
• Keep in mind that you still look at ONE data value at a time for the back links in a link profile. Again the more SEO metrics you look at, the better – after all the link research tools offer you over 40 different SEO metrics to analyze.
• Take notes, take notes and take more notes. Excel is your friend. Print the reports with “View All” and look at them side by side again to gain a new angle maybe
• ALWAYS pick sites of different performance. If you look at the back link profiles of small/natural sites compared to highly optimized sites you will soon gain an understanding of how the SEO landscape is made up in that space.

Your advantages for using Link Research Tools for link profiling

• Combine link data from Google, Yahoo, Bing, SEOmoz Linkscape, Sistrix, Majestic, Google Webmaster console and custom link lists
• Enrich link data with over 40 different SEO metrics like Page Rank, MozRank, ACrank, Page Authority, Domain Authority, CEMPER Juice™ and many more
• Chart the back link profiles automatically with every report
• Be efficient – save time for interpreting results and implementing actions!