Competitors' Link Mass Analysis: Useful Information for SEO Specialists

Website promotion on the Internet is a fairly large-scale set of works, which involves actions not only with the site itself, but also the implementation of activities that are referred to as external SEO optimization. In the latter case, one of the most important aspects will be increasing the volume of link mass or forming a high-quality link profile of Internet resources. By this concept we mean the totality of all external links that will lead to your site from any other sites that exist on the Internet today.

That is, if you want to make your portal appear at the top of search results, if you want to increase trust in it from search engines and ordinary users, then it is important to develop a comprehensive strategy for increasing external link mass. Here, too, quite complex work is ahead, but in any case, it will begin with an analysis of competitors. Thanks to this, you will be able to see how these works are implemented on other sites, how effective these or those strategies turned out to be. The information received will help you solve this problem for your resource as quickly and correctly as possible, while excluding excessive costs of time and effort for their implementation.

As part of today's review, we will dwell in detail on how to analyze the link mass of competitors. We will highlight the main stages that you will have to implement in practice. We will suggest tools that will be useful for you in the course of this work. After studying the information provided, you will be able to use it when developing your own strategy for increasing external link mass. One that will give excellent results with minimal budget expenditure.

We also suggest that you familiarize yourself with the concept of linkbuilding in general, in order to understand all the nuances of increasing external link mass for your site.

We correctly analyze the link mass of competitors

External SEO optimization - involves the implementation of a fairly impressive volume of tasks. If we talk directly about increasing the link mass, then here you will have to prepare content for third-party resources, negotiate with them about placing your publications, select such conditions that would suit you and could interest the other party. It is imperative that serious attention is paid to the selection of pages that you plan to promote, and anchors are thought out. This is a fairly complex task that requires detailed elaboration. And if at this stage you use the solutions that have been applied by your competitors and have already proven their effectiveness, you can significantly simplify and speed them up.

That is, first of all, you need to understand that the analysis of competitors' links is the work that will simplify your link building and significantly speed up both the development of a strategy and its implementation. So, in this case, you will have to consistently implement the following work:

1. Determine the direct competitors of your business.
2. Analysis of "behavioral factors" external link mass, that is, its dynamism.
3. Analysis of the types of links that your competitors use.
4. Analysis of the so-called "anchor lists".
5. Checking the quality of the link mass.
6. Analysis of links from the point of view of their regional affiliation.
7. Search for "broken" links.
8. Developing your own strategy and implementing additional activities.

As you can see, the work ahead is quite complex and large-scale, but each of these stages is very important in terms of auditing the link mass of your competitors. Therefore, now we will dwell on each of them in as much detail as possible, which will allow you to carry out the upcoming work correctly, easily and simply.

Determining the closest competitors of your business

At this stage, it is important to decide on the sites that operate in the same niche as you and offer the consumer market very similar, ideally identical products. These will be the direct competitors of your business. Manual or automated methods can be used to identify them. Thanks to the availability of specialized tools, you can complete this work as quickly as possible. But in some cases, it will still be advisable to rely on manual selection.

1. Manual selection method. First of all, you will need to determine the search engine through which you plan to work in the future and through it look for direct competitors. Now determine the categories or sections of goods that are a priority for your business and for each of them, determine several of the most frequent and relevant queries from those that are currently collected in your semantic core. We are sure that you already have these materials on hand, since collecting semantics is a key stage of SEO promotion. The smaller your site, the narrower the niche you work in, the fewer marker queries you will need. In theory, the first 10 positions in the search results for each of the queries will be your direct competitors. But if you work with goods, then with a high degree of probability, the first positions will be occupied by large marketplaces. They cannot be called your target competitors, at least for small sites. Therefore, it is still optimal to exclude them from subsequent work.
2. Automated selection method. The simplest solution in this case is to use tools such as Serpstat or Ahrefs. Serpstat is an option for those who plan to promote their site through Google or Bing search engines. In this case, you need to enter your site in the search bar, specify the region, and then go to the "Site analysis" tab (data analysis), and then select the "Competitors" option. Then you just need to select those positions that will be distinguished by higher visibility and will maximally coincide with the key queries by which your site is promoted. Again, here it is worth excluding all marketplaces, catalogs, message boards, aggregators. You need to select competitors that will be as close as possible to your site. You can download the final results for yourself as a table or use sorting through built-in filters. If you plan to promote in other search engines, then it is optimal to use the Ahrefs tool. In this case, you go to the "Site Explorer" section and indicate your domain name there. Then in the "Organic Keywords" tab select a keyword that you plan to promote and, accordingly, look for competitors. After you click on the request, detailed information will open. The closest 10 competitors will be listed closer to the bottom of the page.

The automatic solution will be faster and easier to use, but it lacks flexibility. You do not see how the program works, but can only analyze the results. Therefore, in some cases, manual selection will still be more useful. Although it will not require much time from you, it will allow you to respond to all the nuances as quickly as possible.

Analysis of the dynamics of the link profile of competitors

At this stage, your task will be to check how the number of domains that link to your competitors changes. Bet on those sites where the picture looks as smooth and uniform as possible from month to month. Search engines will perceive such a solution as quite natural: your information is distributed on the Internet, attracts the attention of an increasing number of audiences, people voluntarily share it with their friends and not only. That is, this minimizes the risks of deterioration of the site's position as a result of an unnatural increase in link mass.

However, sharp jumps in the number of external links can still be the norm for certain sites. In particular, they will be natural for news portals. If they post sensational material, then it is quite natural that many will quote it. This is also typical for resources that sell cult goods, for example, branded sneakers. If the manufacturer announced the imminent release of a new model on the market, then the sites where it goes on sale first will cause increased excitement among the audience and, accordingly, there will be a sharp jump in links to this resource.

It is also important to pay attention to the intensity with which the volume of link mass increases for your closest competitors. If you see that their dynamics curve is quite smooth, but the rate of backlink accumulation significantly exceeds yours, then it is still worth reviewing your own strategy and understanding what exactly you are doing incorrectly. But how can you see this dynamics? For this, you can use the Ahrefs tool. Go to the “Overview” tab to see the dynamics of link mass accumulation for your site or competitor's resources (depending on which link you specify as the source for analysis by the tool). The input data for the diagram may change depending on which parameter you choose for yourself as the key one. Alternatively, this could be the number of referring domains, their rating, paid or organic traffic, etc.

If you want to compare your diagram with a similar graph of your competitors, then you should use the “Competitors” tab and its drop-down list. Here we recommend that you follow these tips:

• Fill in all the items in the drop-down list with reverse domains, that is, links to those competitors that you would like to check. There are restrictions here: no more than 10 domains. Regardless of which parameter you want to see the dynamics on, the general graph will be built by default on the basis of average organic traffic, that is, the “Avg.organic traffic” option will be active. If this option does not suit you, then you will need to change this data to a format that suits you, such as the “Reffering Domains” option, if you are interested in the number of referring domains.
• After starting the program, you will see a graph showing the lines of the dynamics of link mass gain on your site and competitors' sites over a two-year period. If you are interested in other time intervals, then you need to click on the corresponding icon located in the upper right corner of the graph. Here you can set any interval that suits you, starting from 1 month. But to get the most clear picture, it is still better to set a period of 1 year or more.
• Analyze the results. Here you need to pay attention not only to the pace of development of your site and competitors' sites, but also to the number of donor resources involved in the collection of link mass. The greater the diversity, the better it will be for subsequent promotion and collection of backlinks. So, to see the number of domains that your competitors use to place their own publications with links, you just need to hover the cursor over the graph. It will immediately display all the donor domains along with the publication dates.
• You can see the domains themselves if you enter the URL of each resource in the search bar one by one, and then go to the "Backlink Profile" section, and select the "Reffering Domains" option. In the same section, open the «Backlinks» report. This way, you can find out the number of links leading to you from third-party sites.

If you have recently entered the market, if you are at the development stage, then you should not expect that your dynamics indicators will be the same as those of your competitors, or even surpass them. In any case, you will not be able to create a clear picture if you focus on brands, online stores that have been working in this niche for a very long time. Therefore, when choosing competitors for analysis, it is important to focus on those sites that appeared on the market at about the same time as yours. But in any case, you should understand that building up the link mass is what will increase the visibility of your landing pages on the Internet. This is the goal you should set for yourself when link building, not fighting competitors.

Analyzing link types

When working with competitors' link mass, it is also important to consider what types of backlinks lead to the site, as well as their ratio. In this case, we are talking about 2 main types:

1. Dofollow links. These are those that the search engine necessarily takes into account. Search engine bots follow them, which in itself will indicate that the site is quite willing to share part of its authority and weight with others. Such links will always be more priority and important for sites. However, not all sites that specialize in placing link mass add the dofollow attribute to links. Some do not have the opportunity to do this, while others do not want to.
2. Nofollow links. This link format will indicate that the site is not at all inclined to emphasize the authority of another resource, to share its own weight with it. The search engine does not react very positively to such links.

If you look at the Google search engine help document, you will see that it is recommended to additionally mark links with an attribute such as sponsored, which will indicate that the site has received an appropriate fee for placing such a link. If links are placed directly by the user on a particular site, for example in comments to articles, then it is worth adding the user-generated content (Ugc) attribute here. But we will remind you that it is still very desirable to put the dofollow attribute in links, although Google does not recommend this.

We will not talk about the proportion in which dofollow and nofollow links should be combined, because there are no ideal indicators here. In practice, you most likely will not be able to achieve 100% dofollow, and there is no need for this. If you manage to get closer to 70-80% dofollow and reduce it to 20-30% for nofollow, this will be considered ideal from the point of view of the search engine and will be perceived as quite natural.

The fact is that not all sites will agree to add the dofollow attribute to links. But you should not react to nofollow links as something useless. Search engines and the same Google will consider them not as a rule, but as a recommendation. In this regard, modern search engines are quite flexible. That is, they can easily go to your site and through them. In addition, they evaluate the quantity and quality of the link mass taking into account additional parameters, including the specifics of the niche in which the work is carried out, the region of the business, the chosen promotion strategy.

You can find information for analysis in the Ahrefs tool, namely in the “Overview” tab. Let us repeat that you should not react negatively to the presence of nofollow links. Their presence will make your site profile more natural for search engines, will contribute to increasing brand awareness, and will also become the basis for the subsequent increase in dofollow links.

Anchor list analysis

An anchor list is the text of links that will lead to your site or the site of competitors from other resources. Ideally, it should contain different types of links: branded, anchor, non-anchor. In this case, they will be perceived by your search engine as something more natural. Moreover, here you can already highlight the approximate proportions in their ratio:

• branded: about 40%;
• anchor: 20%;
• non-anchor: about 40%.

Here it is imperative to take into account the features of the site, the specifics of the niche where it is presented, as well as a number of other conditions. But still, the above percentage ratio should be approximately observed. In order to get all the necessary information for analysis, you can use the Serpstat or Ahrefs tools.

If you work through Serpstat, then you will need to find the "Backlink Analysis" tab, and then go to the "Anchors" report. If you use the Ahrefs tool, go to the “Backlink Profile” tab, and then select the “Anchors” option. In order to see the percentage ratio of all types of links, upload all the information into one table and set up the appropriate filtering. Both services offer you such options.

Analyzing the quality of links

Domain Raiting (DR) is one of the key parameters that must be taken into account when analyzing the link profile of competitors. It is used to assess the authority of a resource taking into account all the backlinks that will lead to it. Optimally, this indicator should be higher than 30. That is, the higher it is for you, the better. You can find out your indicator or competitors' data through the Ahrefs tool, in particular in the “Overview” tab. Under the table with link types, you will see the necessary information if you click on the "By DR" option. That is, you will see what percentage of the total link mass will be backlinks from sites with different DR indicators. If it turns out that most of the links come from sites where the domain rating is quite low, then the links themselves will be considered low-quality.

It is possible that among all these platforms there may be resources that intentionally put too many links to each other in order to deceive the search engine and artificially increase the position of their resource in the search results. Such sites are called link farms. Also, in practice, doorway sites are often encountered. They are created in order to attract as many users as possible for a particular request, and then redirect them automatically to other sites. To those, direct links to which can be considered spam by the system.

It is also important to understand that the system will react negatively to sites dedicated to prohibited topics, in particular gambling, adult content and other similar ones. If links lead to your site from such portals, this may have a negative impact on the ranking of the resource as a whole.

Analysis of links for their regional affiliation

For search engines, the geography of sites that will link to your resource is also a fairly important parameter. This is taken into account at the stage of determining the geolocation of the target audience of the site itself. In this case, attention is paid to the domain zone. That is, the search engine focuses on the "tail" of the domain name in order to rank the site and display it in the appropriate regions. Therefore, if it turns out that your site belongs to one geographic zone, and links to it lead from other GEOs, the system may consider this action irrelevant. In order not to take risks, it is best to place bets on sites that have neutral domain zones, such as .info, .net, .org, .com.

In order to determine the regionality of your competitors' donor sites, the same tools that we have already discussed above can be used:

• Ahrefs. Go to the "Overview" tab directly from the main page of the service, and then click on the "Backlink Profile" option. Here we go almost to the very bottom of the page and study the map, where the domain zones will be listed, as well as the number of corresponding domains, links and their percentage.
• Serpstat. When working with this tool, we will need to go to the "Backlink analysis" tab, and then click on the "Backlink dashboard" (summary report). All the information you need will be indicated here at the bottom of the page.

Such checks will be mostly sufficient to determine which region a particular site belongs to and to evaluate the feasibility of its use in practice. However, to obtain the most accurate results, experts recommend identifying the exact location of the site by its IP-address. There are also appropriate tools for this task.

Don't lose sight of checking the regionality of the sites where your competitors place backlinks. This is a very important point that will be useful to you in your subsequent work, since based on the results obtained, you will be able to select donor resources for yourself.

Checking the link mass for broken links

When working with the link profile of your competitors, it is also important to pay attention to what percentage of funds in the total mass is occupied by broken backlinks. These are mostly those that lead to already deleted, or even completely non-existent pages of the site. That is, at this stage, it is checked which target pages of the competitor the backlinks lead to and whether they all remain active. In this case, we perform actions through the Ahrefs tool in the following sequence:

• Go to the «Backlink Profile» tab, and then select the «Backlinks» option. Download the generated report. Here we need to pay attention to the information provided in the «Target URL» column. Now we check which of them are active and which are not.
• You need to copy the entire list of pages where errors were found, and then use the VLOOKUP formula to determine which external pages these broken links are from. As a result, you will get a selection of pages where the broken links are located.
• If you see that the site where the broken backlink is located is of high enough quality and quite suitable for your needs, you can contact the representatives of this service and offer to replace the broken link with your active one.

It will be useful to use these algorithms not only to understand how high-quality the link mass of your competitors is, but also to form your own high-quality link profile.

We also suggest paying attention to such an issue as competitive intelligence, as well as identify the main goals and features of its use in practice.

Developing a strategy and preliminary budget calculation

With all the information that you receive after processing the previous stages, you will be able to understand what the strategy of each of your competitors was, what effect they had it received in practice, you will see at what rate the link mass was growing, what results have been achieved at this point in time. You will also see what types of anchors and links they use, what sites are used as donors. But we want to warn you that you cannot use all these developments directly for your own purposes. If you simply copy your competitor's profile, you will not get the same solution in practice, because your business still has its own specifics, search engines rank pages differently. But you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of this strategy, take them into account when performing your own work.

At this stage, you will have to implement the following work:

• Determine at what rate the link profile is being formed. This is necessary in order not to give in to competitors and adhere to the given rhythm. Moreover, in the future, you will need to reduce this gap and bypass other services.
• Select domains that you will use as donors. They should be of high quality and correspond to your requests in terms of age, region, subject matter, traffic sources and volumes, number of indexed pages, link quality, and the number of domains and pages that link to them. All those portals that will look suspicious to you, those devoted to prohibited topics, spam ones should be removed from consideration.
• Use words or phrases that you have selected as key queries as anchors. It is optimal for them to overlap with those used by your competitors. It is important to maintain the ratio of branded, anchor and non-anchor links when creating your profile.
• Contact representatives of the sites that you plan to use as donors, discuss the terms of posting your material and then, after agreeing on all the nuances, provide them with all the necessary information.
• Determine how many anchors you plan to post, how many links should lead to a specific page. Based on this information, you will be able to at least roughly calculate your budget. Compare these figures with competitors' data to understand whether you can catch up or get ahead of other services with such material investments.

Approach the implementation of these works as consistently and professionally as possible. This is what will guarantee a good result in practice.

Let's sum it up

Determining the link profile of competitors is a job that requires a lot of time and effort. But if you do this work correctly, you will be able to minimize errors and get an excellent result. In this case, you need to do the following work step by step:

1. Identify sites that can be classified as your direct competitors.
2. Analyze the dynamics of link mass growth, identify the total number of domains and pages that contain backlinks.
3. Find out what the ratio of dofollow and nofollow links will be.
4. Determine the quality indicator of links that come from donor resources.
5. Identify how relevant the regional zones of the donor site are to the geolocations by which you plan to promote your resource.
6. Analyze the general information collected about competitors and, based on it, develop your own strategy for forming a link profile for your target pages.

By using your competitors' tactics in practice, you will be able to much more quickly understand the peculiarities of link mass formation for your site and take steps that will give good results in the shortest possible time. But we still want to draw attention to the fact that such work is often associated with risks and restrictions on the part of the system, which can ultimately lead to blocking your actions. What kind of link mass growth can we talk about then? In addition, not all services that automate the collection of information will be available to specialists from certain regions.

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