SEOs often argue that it’s very difficult to replicate your competitors’ backlinks, but this isn’t always the case. I’ve got many of the most powerful backlinks for TechTage using Ahrefs and my brain. And, sneaking into your competitors’ link profiles don’t only give you a nice list of sites that you can target for getting links from, it also introduces you to a lot of great sites in your niche that you might not have known about before.
The thing is, everyone doesn’t have the same level of expertise in any particular field of link building. A broken link buidling rockstar might suck at guest posting and vice versa. An infographic marketing genius may not be a crowd-sourcing wizard and vice versa. This definitely reflects on your site’s link profile especially if you’re a one-man army or have few people other than yourself working on your site.
But, you can’t let it go and let guest post links or infographic links make up 50% of your entire link profile either – because that’s a bad signal to Google! This is why a proper balance of different types of links in your site’s link profile is important.
When you’re out of ideas about leveraging a link building strategy that’s fairly new to you (for example, guest posting), a powerful link profile monitoring tool like Ahrefs can provide you with unlimited help, literally.
When I needed to know about some more solid places to get my guest posts published on, to both increase my personal visibility online, create more connections, and get some links built to TechTage in the process, I leveraged a fairly easy tactic using Ahrefs.
What I basically did was to take a few related sites that I really love and admire, and going deep into their link profiles using Ahrefs. As my site was related to SEO and Inbound Marketing in general, I chose highly-successful blogs in the industry such as Kaiser the Sage and Backlinko.
At first, I just normally put the URL of the site I want to monitor the link profile of in Ahrefs. Lucky for me, I already had and still have a paid subscription, so there were no practical limits as to how many links and referring domains I could find.
backlinko.com was used as an example
The next thing that I almost always did while looking into the link profile of a site for the first time is checking its anchor-text distribution, to get a glimpse of how natural its link profile might be.
Anchor-text distribution
As you can see in the image above, Backlinko’s link profile looks fairly legitimate, with branded anchor-texts such as ‘backlinko’ and ‘backlinko.com’ making up more than 34% of its link profile. The anchor-text ‘brian dean’, which is the name of the webmaster, is making up 7% of its link profile, which could’ve been a bit higher but still looks natural enough. This is definitely a good signal to the search engines.
Then, I go directly to the ‘referring domains’ tab in Ahrefs, where at first the referring domains are shown in order of most to least backlinks from a domain to the target domain or URL. It looks like this:
Ahrefs > Site Explorer > Referring > Domains
As I was looking for mainly new (and awesome) guest posting targets, this screen by default was next to useless for me. Plus, I didn’t wanna replicate nofollow’ed links, which were also included in the results.
So, I filtered the results by choosing to show only dofollow’ed links (by clicking on the ‘dofollow’ box in the top portion of the image) and then I sorted the links by Ahrefs Domain Rank:
DoFollow filtering > Sorting by AR
There you go! Tons of high-authority domains pointing dofollow’ed links to the site we’re checking the backlinks of.
At first, you might not always find what you’re looking for, but you still find some really lucrative sites anyway. Let’s take WordPress.org for example. When I spotted it sitting at #1, I questioned myself, why would WordPress.org link (with a dofollow) to a blog about SEO? Little did I know that their codex, or the wiki about WordPress itself (the open-source web software) freely links out (with dofollow) to useful contents about itself hosted on external sites.
As Brian had a really nice guide, plus an infographic on on-page SEO, it was fairly easy for him to drop a link in the ‘more resources and tutorials’ section of the SEO for WordPress codex page. At that time I had a really comprehensive guide about WordPress SEO on my own site, so getting it included in the same list wasn’t much problem. And, the entire thing took around 15 minutes for me to implement. So, a great piece of content, and 15 minutes of time was all that was necessary for grabbing a nice dofollow’ed link from a PR5 page and a DA100 site! What’s more is that link consistently drives around 25 visitors per day to that post on TechTage, so you get a good amount of referral traffic as well.
Going further down the list, interesting domains start to appear slowly:
interesting domains start to appear slowly…
From the list above, so far I’ve been able to get my posts live on InkThemes (PR6, DA90), SearchEngineJournal (DA84, PR6), and Business2Community (DA83, PR6).
If you go further down, you’ll find even more interesting sites:
even more interesting sites when you go further down the list …
WordTracker, ContentMarketingInstitute, SEMRush, Ahrefs Blog – excellent places to get your online marketing article live on. SearchEngineGuide – a PR7 blog about SEM.
Then, moving on to the next page:
more interesting sites appear…
Again, a host of high-quality sites! By the second page, I’ve already got to know around 12-15 high-quality, relevant sites that accept guest posts. I wouldn’t need more sites for the next two months. So, how much time does this take? Less than 15 minutes for me. Is it more time efficient than sneaking into people’s ‘contributor to’ sections of G+ profiles and using other time-consuming methods of finding guest post targets? Yeah. Can you exclusively choose to see the most high-authority sites with powerful link profiles first? Hell yeah.
To distinguish between guest post links and other types (like those .edu resource page links you can spot in the images above), all you need to do is to click just once on ‘backlinks’ on the right.
Hit ” Backlinks” button next to the referring domain
Right below the result, you’ll see more details about the links from that domain as the row expands.
more details about the links from that domain as the row expands…
If you’re in doubt about the type of the link, just visit the source URL and check for yourself. Remember, category and archive pages are often updated frequently, so there’s a chance that you won’t find that particular post on those pages anymore. So, it’s better to directly identify the URL of the actual post and visit it.
Apart from helping me compile a nice list of high-authority guest posting targets, Ahrefs also made me realize how effective infographics are practically when it comes to acquiring links. Brian published two infographics on his site till now, and he leveraged them to get a TON of quality links.
I was fairly new to producing infographics to be honest. I designed on my own in the past, used Fiverr gigs, used design competition sites like 48HoursLogo, contacted design agencies etc.
But, I quickly realized that oDesk can be a quite good place for finding talented designers who wouldn’t charge an arm and a leg.
With the help of a very talented designer I found on oDesk, I was able to produce the first ever infographic for TechTage. Using the backlink data of Backlinko, I was able to get more than 30 domains to either share or link to the post containing the infographic within the first week or so with very little work.
Resource page links are a different story. You can either do your research using Google, ScrapeBox and lots of advanced search parameters, or you just steal the links from your competitors. The formula is basically:
- Find resource pages related to your content.
- Email the webmasters of those websites, praise the resource pages, and tell them why they should include your content too.
- Let the links roll in.
Conclusion
A balance of different types of links in your link profile is helpful in NOT sending search engines a bad message about your site. While using traditional link building skillset is often beneficial in acquiring quality links, it can’t really assure you about that balance.
This is where Ahrefs and its extensive competitor backlink analysis come into play. While choosing a more successful competitor site makes sense, the trick is using all the features and tools that Ahrefs gives you efficiently, to increase your success rate in (high-quality) backlink replication.
Have a question? Drop a comment below.
What other ways do you prefer to use to fill the voids in your site’s link profile?
