When your link building for your site it is always better to get relevant links. Now there are many ways of finding relevant links, search engines, direcories, forums but one of the best ways is to see whoose linking to competitor websites or high profile websites in your niche.

There are two ways available to analyse competitors back links, one is the “link:” operator in Google, the other is Yahoo SiteExplorer. Now Google’s link operator will only show a handfull of a sites backlinks but SiteExplorer will show all backlinks but will only let you export 1000 of them.

Another problem we have with backlink analysis is the “no follow” tag. Not all links are valued equal and Google came up with PageRank to aid in solving this problem. PageRank is a value of authority assigned to a single webpage. An outbound link from a page will carry some of that PageRank. To allow webmasters control over their outbound links as webmasters do not always want to dilute their PageRank, Google introduced the “No Follow” tag. The “No Follow” tag informs Google not to pass any PageRank to the link, thus making the link have no benefit towards search engine rankings.

Not all Search Engines adopted the “No Follow” tag and Yahoo is one of them, so the problem with SiteExplorer is that it includes “No Follow” links and “Do Follow” links in its results. Well I’ve found a solution.

I’ve just begun using a firefox plugin called SEO Link Analysis by Yoast de Valk. SEO Link analysis adds to Siteexplorer the PageRank of the page that the links originate from, the Anchor Text used in the link, and offers colourcodes to explain if the link is a DoFollow link or No Follow link.

Below is a screenshot of SiteExplorer, before and after SEO Link Analysis has been installed:

SiteExplorer before SEO Link Analysis

SiteExplorer after SEO Link Analysis has been installed:

SiteExplorer with SEO Link Analysis installed

I hope this helps you with your competitor analysis!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Everybody loves to have links but nobody enjoys building them. Directory submissions are low lying fruit in the link building industry but they still offer some benefit. Below is a list of over 700 SEO friendly directories. When submitting your site, I recommend only submitting to directories relevant to your industry or niche.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

The other day I wrote a post about using RefControl to build traffic. RefControl is a referrer spoofer. Today I want to expand on that post. As great as this technique is to get traffic, the drawback is that most of us don’t have the time to check out thousands of sites a day to make this technique totally successful.

The way to solve this problem is by automating it. I’m now going to show you how to this.

1. You need a targeting list – To get your targeting list, you’ll need to perform a search in a search engine for websites that are related or would be interested in your product. I use Scroogle.com because the results are cleaner and are easier to scrape.
2. You need to scrape your results – To format the results into a usable format for the scripting software your going to need to use scraping software. I use web content extractor , its great for a lot of my projects.
3. Your going to need auto scripting software – To automate this process your going to need scripting software, 3 product available are AutoIt , AutoHotKey and a firefox plugin iMacros.
4. Setting up your autscript, for this example we are going to use AutoHotKey:

#x::
Run http://www.leofogarty.com
Sleep, 15000
Run taskkill /IM firefox.exe
Sleep, 15000
Send ^t
Run http://www.leofogarty.com
Sleep, 15000
Run taskkill /IM firefox.exe
Sleep, 15000
Send ^t
Run http://www.leofogarty.com
Sleep, 15000
Run taskkill /IM firefox.exe
Sleep, 15000
Send ^t
Run http://www.leofogarty.com

Just replace www.leofogarty.com with the url that you want to use and repeat. If you like this please leave a comment!

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’m always looking for new ways to build links for affiliate sites. Last night I came across a brilliant firefox plugin (thanks to the brilliant nicky cakes) that will help you build links naturally while you use the internet. Ok, so whats the plugin? The plugin is called RefControl. What does it do? It allows you to spoof your referrer address whilst on the internet.

If your a webmaster like me, you should be used to analysing your logs to see where your traffic is coming from (If your not, your not doing it right!). I always check my logs to see who is sending me traffic, if I see a referrer, I’ll check them out to see in what context are they linking to me. RefControl allows you to overwrite the referer url that your browser normally sends to webpages with whatever web address you want including your affiliate website address.

What should happen now, is that the webmaster of sites you’ve visited on the internet will check your site to see how your linking to them. If you’ve got good content, it should earn you a link!

If you like this plugin as much as I do please leave a comment!

Popularity: 2% [?]