Reverse Engineering a site's SEO efforts

tonyp

tonyp

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Hi,

So I found a competitor site which is ranked for quite a few competitive KWs and I'm trying to understand how he got there.
He just entered SERPs around a month ago and his backlink profile doesn't justify his SERPs. He bought quite a few links but not enough to be ranked so high on his KWs - wondering what else can I do to discover what he did. Everyone has been talking about 301 lately but I don't see how I can check if he has domains redirecting to him.

Anyone knows how can I discover 301 domains which are being redirected to his main domain or what else I can do to discover how to got his rankings?

Thanks!
 
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Try open site explorer, it usually shows popular 301 redirects, get a trial account.
 
Looked in majestic - couldn't find any redirects, where is this info located on opensiteexplorer?
 
Also try Ahrefs. It should be on the overview page at the bottom under "Redirects."
 
He must have a PBN that kicks spiders of ahref majestic, ose etc- . it can be done manually using your htaccess or plugins like spyderspanker
 
I guess it is PBN links. Most of the PBN link owner these days block the ahrefs, majestic etc. from their site.
 
tonyp said:
Looked in majestic - couldn't find any redirects, where is this info located on opensiteexplorer?
Click to expand...

You can select "only 301" under the first drop-down menu in Inbound Links tab. The Majestic SEO's link database is much bigger than OSE so If it's not showing up in Majestic, you won't find it in OSE.
 
Probably PBN links as someone else said, those things kill it. Primarily homepage links as well.

Paid links work people! But it could be 301's or a mixture of the two. Do you have majestic seo or ahrefs?

301's generally show up at the top of the backlink list.
 
I always believed using Majestic to reverse engineer a top 10 competitor's backlinks was the best way to learn what backlinks Google values at any given time. I never understood how to perform that analysis for social media signals though.
 
Thanks everyone for the feedback.


FBGuru said:
You can select "only 301" under the first drop-down menu in Inbound Links tab. The Majestic SEO's link database is much bigger than OSE so If it's not showing up in Majestic, you won't find it in OSE.
Click to expand...

Might be missing you there - this is what I have on majestic:
http://screencast.com/t/GvgmJQB6p
When I export the backlink list to CSV, I have a column called "FlagRedirect" but they are all 0 for this specific site

I checked on ahrefs and found 5 redirects but from social bookmarks site etc (format was: sub.domain.com/link.php?example.com) - so doesn't seem like this was it.

I guess like some people said - it could be a PBN which is blocking spiders
 
I have sites ranking #1 that display 0 backlinks on all backlink tools.

So if your competitor is blocking his links then you won't be able to find them.
 
Hi,

It could be PBN and the chance are that majesticseo and OSE not showing the latest backlinks. PBN created recently may not be indexed by them but on the other hand google index website rapidly. just wait may be you will see it. I am damsure they can't match the processing power of google.
 
This is driving me crazy ;-)
keep finding more of these sites... ranked very good on SERPs but all tools (majestic / opensiteexplorer / ahrefs) showing about 10-15 referring domains for each site.
mostly new domains (bought in 2013)
 
tonyp said:
Thanks everyone for the feedback.




Might be missing you there - this is what I have on majestic:
http://screencast.com/t/GvgmJQB6p
When I export the backlink list to CSV, I have a column called "FlagRedirect" but they are all 0 for this specific site

I checked on ahrefs and found 5 redirects but from social bookmarks site etc (format was: sub.domain.com/link.php?example.com) - so doesn't seem like this was it.

I guess like some people said - it could be a PBN which is blocking spiders
Click to expand...

The instruction is not for the MajesticSEO but OSE. Seems to be a PBN in this case.
 
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