Link Analysis? A Waste Of Time!!!!!

Hi

Do you analyze a competitors links?

Why??

Unless your website is an exact clone of your competitors, which would include same date of inception, same server, same server environment, same folder structure, same documents, same coding, everything would have to be exactly the same.

Otherwise you are wasting your time. Even something as simple as a few months live online means your site cannot compare to the competition as the age of a site adds to any scoring done by the search engines.

Also since you do not know the 3rd parties terms for scoring, you cannot do an analysis of any real fact or significance, since you do not know any of the facts, but are merely employing hypothesis, which in the business world doesn't cut it.

The amount of time you waste trying to determine what someone else has done could be put to use building a quality one way link that will have some value to You.

No matter what the competition is doing.....find your own way....that's how you win!

 

Why learn about history, since its lessons only pertain to the past? Why study the lives of famous people, since their circumstances are only going to be different from ours?

Yes, we make our own way in this world, but it still behooves us to take a look at what's gone before. The difference is we pick and choose what we want to try, & what will work for us. But we usually won't know what will work for us until we try things out.

 

I absolutely agree with heinlein99 you learn on mistakes of others and good examples.

 

Yes, not only will you learn from their mistakes you also learn about their successes. By analyzing your competition's links and web pages you will be able to get an excellent amount of data on what factors helped put them where they currently are. Even if your website and your competitors are different, that factor shouldn't matter, what matters is finding out how they were placed where they are placed and then exploit that information to boost your marketing strategies.

 

I like to see where they get related links, so I can get links from those sources too!

 

Can you show me an example of where your link analysis enabled you to obtain front page rankings on Google?

 

It's all about finding and digging for links. Studying a competitor's inbounds will uncover some FANTASTIC linking opportunities for your own site.

 

i think it's not waste of time because you will learn the backlink building ways of your competitors

 

Analysing your competitor’s link is one of the first things I would recommend you do. They rank well for a reason – they have quality links. Why not try to get the same links?

 

To a degree we can only guess what Google considers a good link (if you doubt that then you haven't read all the opinions on this forum ). By finding the sites that worked for you competitor and getting as many of those as you can to link to you, you save a lot of guess work. Then continue building till you pass the competitor.

 

Yeah, I always do that with my competitor.

 

Yes, it is a waste of time, so don't bother doing it ya? We will still do it of course....

 

Link analysis is neccessary because you should know about your competetors and their partners to improve your linking structure and also chaning in your site's layout.

 

IMHO, this amount of time is very well spent. Researching what someone has done may point you in the right direction, give you more ideas and more inspiration. Is this a waste? No, it is experience.

 

Ok well in my world it works like this

There are competitors in every business.

They have links

I need links, but they have to be better links than what the competitor has,

So if I study their links then I am getting links that will help me get to the same level as my competitors.

I don't like that level, I want to be a level or two above, and so I get my own links, by using my mind to decide whats the best link to gather, not what my competitor thinks.

More often than not Google seems to agree with my philosphy

 

Yes I have...

So I could find applicable places to find links for myself

I did this for several competing sites, and now have more links then all the ones I looked for. *shrug*

 

huh?

how can you say analyzing your competition's linking strategy is a waste of time? Here are just a few benefits I can think of:

-access to an organized list of backlinks that you can utilize yourself.
-getting an idea of how strongly you have to link for a certain term in order to land front page for it.
-getting an idea of what terms your competitors are NOT competing for, leaving open holes of traffic that nobody is bothering to gobble up (but you sure will


competitive link analysis being a waste of time? whadufxup?

always wanted to use that

 

I do a search on my competitor website name and see where they are listed.
I try to get a link there.

 

Good thinking, but what if you do a ton of research on your own and get your good links, only to find out that your competitor got those same links already? Then it would have been faster to just check your competitor's links in the first place, and go searching on your own afterwards

 

To a degree I agree with the original poster in that you need to get off the beaten track and go and get your own links. That's been my own personal link-building philosophy for quite some time now with great success. However, analysing your competitor's links is the first step in getting off that track.

Link building is like any aspect of webmastering - you need to learn how to get good at it, and there is a ton of information you can glean from looking at what your competitors are doing.

Anchor text is a good example. Not only finding out where your competitors are getting links from, but also finding out what terms they think are important can set you off on tangents that you might not have thought of. Heck, you can even take it a step further and go hunting for their log files and then not only can you see where your competitor is getting links from, but how much traffic they're getting from there also.

So I would say analyse your competitor's links by all means, but work at it smarter, not harder. And then get off the beaten track.

Phlegm...