Research Your Competition with Yahoo Site Explorer - SEO Tip Week 28
I’ve got a simple SEO tip today. As an SEO Company we are always doing competitive research. Many of our clients are astounded at the wealth of information that can be discovered using Yahoo’s Site Explorer especially for competitive link research. Site Explorer can help you track down the links pointing to your competition and allow you to contact those same sites and request or pay for a link to your site.
Yahoo’s search engine also provides information about competitor backlinks. You can find tools to do this for you but going to Yahoo! Search and typing in the following commands will work just as well.
- If you are looking for web pages that link to multiple competitor, usually you will find good backlink pages like this, you would type in:
linkdomain:competitor1.com, linkdomain:competitor2.com - We also should all know how important .edu and .gov links can be to our site. So why not look for competitors who have these links. I’ll give an example as if I was looking. I would type in a keyword such as “seo” and then do a search for only .edu domains. I would type in: seo site:.edu Replace the .edu with .gov for government backlinks.
Of course there are many other things you can do for research and seeing what advanced options are available can be a great catalyst so be sure to view the advance search options in Yahoo! for more ideas.
Google also has advanced search but I think Yahoo! does a better job with options and functionality, especially when it comes to researching backlinks.
Please send any suggestions or add them to the comments on this SEO tip. We are always looking for new ways to improve our SEO research methods.
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5 Responses to “Research Your Competition with Yahoo Site Explorer - SEO Tip Week 28”
By WordPress Advice on Jul 14, 2007 | Reply
Probably this is th only area in which yahoo has a lead over Google. Google does not give you accurate results, I know that is on purpose. As Google want to create a mist around the way they index.
I had been only using yahoo to check back links for a few of the domains. but combining two domains in one query is new to me.
By Free SMS Andy on Jul 16, 2007 | Reply
I’ve found Yahoo Site Explorer extremely useful for searching my competitors backlinks. The Google search seems broken in comparison
The challenge though is trying to get your own links back from those sites! Any tips on that?
By Turism on Jul 23, 2007 | Reply
Until I read your post, I never used yahoo for these kind of queries.
After reading I gave it a try and it really gives a different result, and I think more accurate results than Google.
By Shell Harris on Jul 26, 2007 | Reply
Free SMS Andy,
The big challenge IS getting links from your competitor’s backlinks. We do all that we can starting with an email or a phone call (Yes, you can call people to request links). If an exchange is appropriate that can work as well. Offering them content such as a article that would be useful for them is a good idea and can have links to your site within and finally offering a financial reward is often accepted for placing a link.
By m7mmad on Feb 16, 2008 | Reply
Really helpful information , Thanks .