Link Overlap: Competitor Link Research Tactic

If you have tried to use your competitors to get link ideas you would have found out that it’s not all so easy. Quite often competitor links come from exclusive types of arrangements such as customers, dealers, partners, news mentions…etc. Checking thousands of links manually could be a dull process. This SEO tip highlights the fact that many of your competitors share common links – places that link to two or more of your competitors. The likelihood of you getting a link from a site that links to more than one competitor is greater than the one that links only to one as the chance of it being an exclusive arrangement is significantly higher. At Dejan SEO we call this tactic “Link Overlap”.

You can use spreadsheet programs to perform this analysis but there are also tools out there that enable you to perform link overlap analysis. Our favorite is the link intersect tool by SEO Moz. Of course if you want it to work exactly the way you imagine you still have the option of creating your own tool.

Useful Links:

• http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect
• http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape