One of the straightforward tactics when working with link building is to take a look at your competitors’ link profiles. Here, you can often find inspiration for your own link-building campaign. You have probably heard this advice a million times before if you have read even a little about link building previously. However, it is not enough just to look at your competitors’ link profiles; you also need to know where to look.
As you become better and better at acquiring your own inbound links, you will spend less and less time analyzing your competitors’ link profiles. Once you have worked with link building for a couple of years, it will be an exercise you spend very little time on. The reason for this is quite simple; as time goes on and you have worked more and more with link building, you become much more creative in your approach to acquiring links, which means you start seeing opportunities everywhere.
Get Inspired by Your Competitors
You should be careful not to just copy your competitors’ links. In the past, this could be done because even bad links did not harm your website. Nowadays, you need to be more stringent and ensure you do not try to copy the bad part of a competitor’s link profile. However, you can use it to understand why they are ranked the way they are, and this is essentially what you use competitor link analyses for as you become more experienced.
Consider some of the following scenarios before deciding to copy your competitors’ links:
- You typically do not know which sites could be potential bad neighborhoods.
- You do not know which of their links transfer PageRank or, for that matter, anchor text value.
- You typically do not know if the websites your competitor gets links from are involved in link exchanges or other dubious methods such as link wheels, cloaking, etc.
- You do not know if it is your competitor who controls the website.
Many of the above points can be fully investigated, but it takes time – time that you can better spend on other things. Hopefully, this highlights some of the issues associated with copying competitors’ links.
You can, however, use link analyses of your competitors to find relevant theme-based websites where you can submit your link or write in to ask if you can be added to their list. These types of links you should definitely copy – but stay away from copying their splog links and links from porn and warez websites. These will certainly not improve the perception of your website’s trustworthiness, either with search engines or searchers.
This excerpt is taken from the full edition of Linkbuildingbogen. Purchase the full edition here.
