Competitive analysis of inbound links

[dantheriver]

I am trying to figure out how to best use SeoMoz tools to do some competitive analysis of inbound links.

With the site explorer tool I can "compare Link Metrics" I see that a competitor is beating me on External Followed Links and Total Linking Root domains. I want to dig further into this data and see how these are distributed. What I am really after is which root domains are sending them the most links. Knowing that 20k of their links are coming from 5 specific root urls would be great to know. Is there anywhere that I can see this data. Ideal column headers would be:

1. Linking Root Domain

2. of Followed Links (from this root domain)

3. Linking Domain Authority

The ability to drill down from there into specific links would be mind blowing.

Is there any way to browse this type of data in SeoMoz?

[mediabase]

Hi Dan, SEO Competitor analysis could be simply defined as a process of discovering why competing websites are highly ranked by the search engines.

The first step is using your keyword research data to do a detailed analysis as to whatwebsites are competing for the same keywords and phrases.  From there, detailed analysis of their websites construction will yield clues as to how they are achieving good ranking in search engines.

For you to understand the Dan you should look at the Deep Approach to Competitive Analysis & after that competitor site analysis & back link analysis also.

I hope that your query of competitive analysis of inbound links has been solved.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Dan,

The only difficulty is that OSE limits the number of links from each domain to 25 per report. This limit is meant to display a greater variety of linking domains. Without this limit, the reports could be filled with 10,000 low-quality, repeating sidebar links all from the auto-generated blog.

One option would be to use the SEOmoz API to find the data you're looking for, but building a tool just for this purpose might be a bit overkill for this application.

Here's a solution that should work easy. Check out Dr. Pete's post on Link Profiling with Open Site Explorer. He provides some tools for a deeper analysis of link distribution you should find insightful.

When your done with that, try out these Excel speadsheets from John Doherty. They look both at PA and DA of your backlinks, as well as the added bonus of anchor text distribution.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.