Ever wish you could peek at your friend's hand while playing poker? He's wearing such a smooth poker face, what could he be hiding? Is it a Royal Flush? How much is he going to bet? Maybe he's bluffing!
In the world of Search Engine Optimization, the stakes are much higher than in a friendly game of poker. Knowing what your competitor is up to behind the scenes can help you improve your own optimization efforts. Wouldn't you like to know...
- How they've organized their incoming link structure?
- Which keywords they're optimizing for?
- How long they've been online and listed in the engines?
There are many tools on the market that offer what's known as Competitive Intelligence. These tools are like a behind-the-scenes pass that let you analyze your competition and determine what aspects of their search marketing are working successfully for them.
However, one of the drawbacks to most of these tools is the high price of admission. For example, a company called Hitwise offers a package costing $20,000 per domain—a price that places them out of the affordable range of many small businesses.
Fortunately, there are ways to do a fairly detailed analysis of your competitors for free. While you don't get the same level of detail as you might from the paid packages, you can often get a very good idea of why your competition is doing well in the search engines.
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How You Can Become a Link Commander!
Quality incoming links are generally the primary reason a site is ranking well in the search engines. Luckily for us, most search engines offer advanced search commands that allow for fairly detailed link analysis. We'll use Yahoo, since they provide far superior features and information when it comes to analyzing a site's incoming links.
Let's say you want to target a highly competitive keyword like real estate. You'd start by checking which pages are getting top rankings in Google, since that's the engine that tends to send the most traffic. Then, you'd go back to Yahoo to check the backlinks of those top ranking pages.
In this case, the top ranking page in Google is the homepage for Realtor.com—http://www.realtor.com/
To see who is linking to this page, you'd use the Yahoo link command:
As of this writing, Yahoo shows 282,000 links to this page, which is a fairly significant number. Of course, such numbers can fluctuate slightly from day to day, but this link command search will still give you a very good picture of a site's incoming links.
Now, since search engines don't give as much weight to incoming links coming from onsite, you may want to discredit the links that Realtor.com uses to link to itself. To do that, you combine the link command with another Yahoo search command called site.
The site search command allows you to add or remove sites from a search command. For example, to see all pages linking to the Realtor.com homepage except those links coming from Realtor.com itself, you would use the following search command:
Note that the link command requires that you use the http:// in front of the URL, while the site command requires that you omit it. It's important to get these little nuances right in order to achieve accurate results.
You should also remove the www in the site command, since sites that haven't dealt with their canonical issues will often show internal links from both the www and non-www versions of their pages.
This search shows that, when you eliminate links from its own site, Realtor.com's link numbers drop from 282,000 down to 193,000. This tells us that a significant number of these links are internal. And we know that such internal links aren't considered as important as the remaining external incoming links.
Yahoo also has another command called linkdomain, which will show you every page that is linking to any page anywhere on the entire site. That command is used as follows:
This shows us there are a total of 530,000 pages that link to any page in the Realtor.com site. Removing internal links, we get a more accurate number of 351,000:
Combining these tools can also help us determine a site's deep-link ratio—the number of links pointing to subpages of the site rather than to the site's homepage. This is important to know because search engines tend to prefer sites that have many links pointing to their subpages. This looks more natural from a linking perspective, and shows that the site has quality pages other than the homepage that are inspiring people to link to them.
Using our first command (link:http://www.realtor.com -site:realtor.com), we know there are 193,000 external links pointing at Realtor.com's homepage. From our second search (linkdomain:www.realtor.com -site:realtor.com), we know there are 351,000 external links in total pointing to any page on the entire Realtor.com site.
Subtracting the links pointing at the homepage from the total number of links to the site, we get 158,000. This is the number of links pointing at the site, but not pointing at the homepage. To find the deep-link ratio, we divide this number by the total number of links.
158,000/351,000 = 0.45 = 45%
In general, a higher deep-link ratio is better. Most sites that rank well for very competitive keywords have a deep-link ratio of around 30 or 40 percent.
There are also other ways to combine the Yahoo link, linkdomain, and site commands. For instance, you can use the site command repeatedly to exclude links from multiple sites, such as:
Removing links from Homestore.com drops Realtor.com's total external links down to 334,000, meaning that Realtor.com has a total of 17,000 links pointing to it from Homestore.com. When you see situations like this, where one site is linking to another from thousands of internal pages, it can often indicate a sitewide paid link—something that many search engines frown upon.
If you want to see only those links from Homestore.com to Realtor.com, you can also use a combination of the link and site commands to do that:
This search shows 14,700 links from Homestore.com to Realtor.com. Note that this conflicts with our calculation of 17,000 links above. Again, it's important to keep in mind that these searches are not 100% accurate, and can change slightly from day to day and sometimes even from minute to minute. However, they are still very good at giving you a close approximation of a site's link numbers.
One of the more important uses of this kind of searching is to determine the quality, not just quantity, of a site's backlinks. In our recent article, How to Benefit from Webpage Profiling & Laugh at Google's Next Algorithm Update, we described a research project in which engineers created a database of trusted, white-listed sites. They were able to determine that high PageRank pages that didn't get a significant chunk of their PageRank from sites in the white-listed database were often found to be engaging in link spam.
This research underscored the importance of getting trusted links when attempting to achieve and maintain high rankings. The trusted links in the study were slated as coming from the following three sources:
- Educational Domains. All pages on education domains were white-listed. This applied to both U.S. education domains bearing the extension .edu, as well as international education domains bearing their country's own specified domain suffix. For example, in the UK, they use .ac.uk, in India they use .ac.in, and so on.
- Government Domains. All US government sites were white-listed in the experimental study. In practice, it's likely that search engines place a high degree of trust in all government web sites, regardless of country.
- Quality Directories. Finally, they added sites from an online directory they considered to be devoid of spam. They intentionally didn't specify which directory, but, considering that two of the authors are Yahoo engineers, we can guess that Yahoo's directory was likely the primary contributor.
Here's how to use the linkdomain and site commands to determine how many .edu links a site (in this case Realtor.com) has pointing at it:
Currently we're finding 1,090 .edu links. Google seems to love .edu links, so it's no surprise that Realtor.com is dominating a highly competitive keyword like real estate.
You can also check the links from .gov sites:
linkdomain:www.realtor.com site:.gov (103 links)
Besides .edu and .gov, other top level domains (TLDs) that are likely to be white-listed, or at least carry a greater degree of trust, include .mil and .int.
The reason these domain extensions (aka, top level domains; TLDs) tend to merit a greater degree of trust is that their use is restricted to a narrow range of verified applicants (for instance, .mil is only available to the US military). This exclusive nature tends to carry with it an increased difficulty in getting links from such domains. The sites that do get links from them are assumed by the search engines to be legitimate—having distinguished themselves in some special way that makes them deserving of such an otherwise hard-to-get link.
By the way, you can also check how many links a site has from the two most trusted directories (Yahoo Directory and DMOZ):
linkdomain:www.realtor.com site:dir.yahoo.com (56 links)
linkdomain:www.realtor.com site:dmoz.org site:dir.yahoo.com (5 links)
As you can see, Realtor.com is certainly not hurting in the trusted links department. That's the main reason why they're on top for this very competitive keyword.
Enough about links, let's get to some keywords!
If you're wondering what keywords your competition is targeting to draw traffic to their web site, you could start by looking at the contents of their keywords meta tag. However, while this isn't a bad idea, the keywords meta tag isn't a very reliable source for such information for a couple of reasons:
- First, many sites no longer bother using the keywords meta tag. They tend to be ignored by many search engines these days, so what's the point?
- Second, and more importantly, the keywords meta tag only tells you what keywords the site owner thinks they're optimizing their pages for. It tells you nothing about what keywords Google considers relevant to the page.
Fortunately, there is a tool that will help you get a Google's-eye view of a web page. You have to be signed up with Google AdWords to use it, but that costs just $5 to get started—so it's most certainly affordable.
The Site-Related Keywords tool is designed by Google to help advertisers find relevant keywords to add to their AdWords campaigns. Here's how it works:
First you need to sign up with Google AdWords and create an ad group. Don't worry, you don't need to activate the ad, so it's not going to cost you anything beyond the $5 setup fee. You just want to have access to AdWords' very useful keyword tools.
Once you set up your ad group, click the link that says keyword tool. You'll then have access to Google's Keyword Variations and Site-Related Keywords tools (both very useful for keyword research, by the way). For our purpose, we want the Site-Related Keywords tool, so click that.
Here you can enter the URL of any page on the Internet. Google will then crawl and return you the keyword categories it considers relevant to that page. And, within each of those categories it will give you a list of the keywords that Google feels will drive the most traffic.
It's important to note that this tool does have some flaws. It's not going to show you all the keywords Google finds on the page. Rather, it attempts to map the page to some high traffic category, then show you the keywords to target within that category to get the most traffic to your site.
The tool is actually designed to help AdWords advertisers to bid on the highest traffic keywords in their category—something Google wants because more ad clicks means more revenue for Google. This means it's not completely reliable when determining which keywords a competitor's site is targeting—and it won't work particularly well if the page has very little content.
But it can help to show what high traffic categories Google considers the page relevant to and the keywords within those categories that are likely to send the most customers to a site. It's a great way to find some potentially very lucrative keywords that you or your competition might not be taking full advantage of.
Other useful Google tools
Like Yahoo, Google also has some advanced search commands that can show the degree to which your competition's sites are optimized. For instance, there are tools that will give you an idea of how many of your competitors are actively optimizing their sites for a particular keyword.
As you probably know, having your keywords in the anchor text of your incoming links is an extremely important factor in ranking your web pages highly (as long as you don't overdue it). Google's inanchor search command will show you every page that has links pointing toward it that contain a specific keyword within the anchor text.
For instance, to see all pages that have the words real estate in the anchor text of their incoming links, use the following search in Google:
This shows us that there are 8,660,000 pages that have links with this anchor text pointing at them, and Realtor.com has more than any other site, which is another reason why they rank top for this keyword (again, exact numbers reported will vary somewhat from day to day).
Note also that it's important to use quotes if you're searching for a multi-word phase such as real estate. If you want to search for multiple words in the anchor text, such as anchor text that contains both real estate and california use Google's allinanchor search, such as:
Besides having your keywords in the anchor text of your incoming links, another important place to put your keywords is in the titles of your web pages. You can also use Google to find out how many pages contain your keywords in their title tags by using the intitle search command. Again, we'll use real estate as our example, but you should use whatever keywords you're targeting for your site.
Now we see that there are 18,000,000 pages using the keywords real estate in their title tag.
Finally, you can use Google's intextcommand to see that 280,000,000 pages in Google's index simply use those keywords somewhere on the page:
There are also allintitle and allintext search commands if you want to search for multiple keywords at once.
You can even combine these three operators to see how many sites have coordinated their keyword placements in all three of these strategic locations— incoming link anchor text, title tags and webpage body content;
There are currently 5,330,000 pages that match this criteria. This clearly suggests that real estate is an extremely competitive keyword. Considering this level of competition, you're usually better off finding a less competitive niche within which you can more easily make headway.
Note that you cannot combine the allinanchor, allintitle, and allintext search commands. If you want to search for multiple keywords and phrases, you'll need to combine multiple instances of the inanchor, intitle, and intext search commands, such as:
Here, the number of results returned drops off significantly to 87,400. This shows you that you'll have a much easier time targeting a more niche keyword like california real estate than you would if you tried to go for something extremely broad like real estate.
Getting some background on your competition's domains
So we've covered incoming links, keywords, anchor text, title text, and body text. Another critical piece of intelligence you must gather is the active age of the domain. Google, in particular, has a preference for older domains. Fortunately, there is also an easy way to check the date that a domain was registered by using a whois service like that provided by Network Solutions.
Simply enter the domain name into the form, click Search, and look for the text that says Creation Date or Record created on. Sticking with our example, we see that Realtor.com was registered on September 14th, 1995. As domains go, that's very old, and very valuable if you're trying to achieve high search rankings. The age of this domain is yet another contributing factor to Realtor.com's ability to rank well in this highly competitive keyword search category.
Of course, just having a domain with an old registration date is not nearly enough all by itself. What really counts, ranking-wise, is the date the search engine first discovered the page. A domain that was registered years ago but never brought online hasn't really earned much, if any, age equity. It's much more important that the domain has been indexed by the search engine for a long time. It's also very important that it has some quality old links that have stuck with it that entire time.
So how do you find out when a site first came online and was first indexed by the engines? You use a tool called the Wayback Machine, which you can find at:
The Wayback Machine is a project that has continually been archiving web pages on the Internet since 1996. It's a great way to tell how long a page has been online (and it can also be a hilarious way to see what some pages used to look like way back at the dawn of the world-wide-web) .
Doing a search for Realtor.com shows pages from as early as January 9th, 1997. Realtor.com was almost certainly online before then, but the Wayback Machine's records don't go back much further than that.
Finally, you can check to see what other domains your competition might be hosting on the same server. This is done using a tool called reverse IP lookup. A useful version can be found at:
In cases where the site is using its own unique and dedicated IP address, you'll only see the site itself. But a surprising number of businesses still stack multiple sites on a single IP address—making it easy for tools like this to expose their network of sites.
Generally this isn't much of a problem, but if they've been involved in a little mininet hanky-panky, then they don't really want this information publicly available (one of the many reasons we recommend hosting each of your sites on a unique and dedicated IP address).
Using this tool, you can see that Realtor.com has three domains stacked on this IP address: Barbdraplin.com, Stgeorgehomes4sale.com, and, of course, Realtor.com. Each of these domains basically mirrors the content on Realtor.com.
While such a practice might be viewed suspiciously by the engines for a new site, it's nothing likely to get Realtor.com penalized. That's because Realtor.com has age equity and is likely white-listed due to such a high number of trusted and natural looking incoming links. But often, if a site is involved in some kind of artificial link scheme, you can use reverse IP lookup to help expose it.
Being more intelligent than your competition, for free!
That wraps up our whirlwind tour of free competitive intelligence tools—all of which are now tucked neatly into your tool belt. While it's true that paid tools can offer more in terms of learning just what links and keywords are sending a specific volume of traffic to your competition, the free tools we've listed above will empower you to gather a plethora of useful competitive intelligence on an affordable do-it-yourself basis and without the sting of a $20,000 price tag!
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