Competitive Analysis – The 7 Essential secrets to mastering “Backlink mirroring”
Link Analysis By analysing your competitors’ backlinks, you could obtain the same links and mirror their link profiles. For this analysis, you must have Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, and Majestic.
In case you’re not familiar with what mirroring is and how it works, it is when you imitate your competitors’ link profiles because they receive high ranking in a search engine results page. However, not all link profiles are of good quality, so you must be very careful when mirroring.
Links that you should search for include your competitors’ memberships, resource lists, niche and geo-targeted directories, brand mentions, sponsorship, and niche guest posts. Since you’ve already known the links you have to acquire, it’s of great importance to ask yourself the following seven inquiries when investigating your competitors’ link profiles:
- What is your competitors’ home page to deep linking ratio? By using Ahrefs, deep linking ratio can be easily found to construct overall website authority that will help your web pages get high rankings.
- What is their percentage of DoFollow and NoFollow? A link profile worth mirroring has an equal percentage of DoFollow and NoFollow links. Statistics show that most online businesses rank well due to a good rating of NoFollow links gained from press releases, business listings, and visitors’ feedbacks.
- What is your competitors’ anchor text distribution? Competitors use an anchor text distribution that can be either over-optimised or under-optimised. Between the two, it’s best you mirror competitors who utilise the latter since under-optimised anchor text ranks better than the other one.
- Do they use redirects? Since 301 redirects bear valuable weight, it’s important that you take them into serious consideration as well. These days the most typical redirect you’ll encounter ranges from an old website to an new one. However, anticipate that there are other 301 redirects like link shorteners that function as a buffer.
- Do your competitors use site-wide links? If your competitors utilise those links, you’d better not mirror them since they could cause manual actions and damage your anchor text profile.
- Do they hide their links? If you’ve kept searching but haven’t found any backlinks of your competitors, we can infer that they’re using a private blog network (PBN). The bad news is, there’s nothing you can do about it. The good news is, they can’t keep using PBN links for prolonged periods. All you can do right now is obtain all available quality links from your competitors’ website until you get access to their other links hidden by a PBN.
- Do your competitors have foreign links? If ever your competitors have links or anchor text from foreign websites, don’t bother mirroring them since you have a target region wherein your target audience is located. Any businessmen would love to have readers internationally, and if ever you plan to have foreign links, just make sure you include those links in the minority.