Finding affiliate links with opensiteexplorer

[pilkster]

Hey guys,

I'm trying to develop lists of our competitors affiliates using opensiteexplorer using the following method

1. When logged in to seomoz, go to http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
2. Search for<rival company="" domain=""></rival>
3. Select Show ALL links from ALL pages to PAGES ON THIS ROOT DOMAIN and SHOW LINKS UNGROUPED
4. Click 'Filter'
5. Click_ 'Download csv'_
6. Open the csv in excel and filter the Target URL column for any known part of the affiliate link (example ?a_aid) - this leaves you with a list of the affiliate links
7. Filter out duplicates

Is this the best process? I have a feeling I'm missing some as OSE truncates to 25 links per domain. It would be nice also if OSE could do the filtering for me.

Any better ways to do this?

[pilkster]

In fact when I shared the list of competitors with my client they are sure I'm missing a large proportion of the affiliates. Any ideas?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Howdy Pilkster!

Sounds like your method is pretty good, and I don't have too many suggestions to improve it.

In my experience, lot of sites either cloak or redirect affiliate links, so I bet they can be near impossible to find, even for search engines!

OSE advanced reports can filter by anchor text and several other variables, but as you noted it can't sort by URL parameters. If you'd like to see this as a feature request, we have a forum for that - https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-SEOmoz-PRO-Feature-Requests

(it would be a pretty cool feature actually - I'd vote for it

As for only seeing 25 links per domain, this could miss some links, but I suspect the majority of the time if a domain links to another with an affiliate link, most of the links would also be affiliate links. There are plans to expose more of this data in the future, at least through the API.

Thanks for the feedback!