[jamietofs]

I am going through competitor websites to view who is linking to them and any opportunities our company might be missing for SEO purposes. I am confused by the myriad of columns though and what they mean. The columns they have are:

Link type - no description
PR - no description
OBL - no description
MOBL - Modified link count. Devalues mutliple occurences of the same domain.
STR - In other words, link strength. Provides inverse relationship between page rank and outbound links.
mozrank - link's popularity rank
SEOmoz page authority - 100 point predicitve score of the pages ranking potential.
SEOmoz domain authority - 100 point predicitve score of the domain's ranking potential.

I really don't know what any of these mean or which are the most helpful to find out the best links for SEO purposes. Can someone please help? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[kmasters]

Originally Posted by jamietofs

I am going through competitor websites to view who is linking to them and any opportunities our company might be missing for SEO purposes. I am confused by the myriad of columns though and what they mean. The columns they have are:

Link type - no description
PR - no description
OBL - no description
MOBL - Modified link count. Devalues mutliple occurences of the same domain.
STR - In other words, link strength. Provides inverse relationship between page rank and outbound links.
mozrank - link's popularity rank
SEOmoz page authority - 100 point predicitve score of the pages ranking potential.
SEOmoz domain authority - 100 point predicitve score of the domain's ranking potential.

I really don't know what any of these mean or which are the most helpful to find out the best links for SEO purposes. Can someone please help? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

So I've never used SEOmoz's services, but I want to make sure that's where you are getting your information before I proceed.

[DarrenHaye]

Just look at the linking domains and then pages on this root, filter.

Then have a look at the top sites linking to them...

But then you still need to be able to recognise what a good linking site is, if all their top links are from "seodirectorylinks.com" "articleplace.com" + just all irrelevant sites then they aren't very good links to get.

The truth is really.. any real quality sites linking to competitors you wont be able to just get a link from them, you need to work out why they gave them a link and why they would give you one.

[jamietofs]

Thanks for your help guys.

Kmasters, yes, I am talking about SEOMoz's Link Diagnosis. Apologies for not clarifying.

DarrenHaye, thanks for the response. Is that part of the Pro version? The only report I'm seemingly able to run is the "backlinks" report....

Would this be the best resource for checking links to competitors? I also found Open Site Explorer, but I find Link Diagnosis more user-friendly, if only I understood their columns...

[DarrenHaye]

Originally Posted by jamietofs

Thanks for your help guys.

Kmasters, yes, I am talking about SEOMoz's Link Diagnosis. Apologies for not clarifying.

DarrenHaye, thanks for the response. Is that part of the Pro version? The only report I'm seemingly able to run is the "backlinks" report....

Would this be the best resource for checking links to competitors? I also found Open Site Explorer, but I find Link Diagnosis more user-friendly, if only I understood their columns...

That picture is opensiteexplorer and I explained a little bit about how to use it..

[jamietofs]

Thanks Darren.

Sorry, I meant Open Site Explorer!

Great, though what are root Domain's? It says we have over 500,000 from Pinterest though we only have abvout 10 boards and haven't been on it THAT long. Surely it hasn't given us 500,000 links to our website?

Also, would you recommend using Open Site Explorers "Domain Authority" to judge a links value? I see Open Site Explorer list that as a high level way to judge the value of a link, which includes root domains.

Thanks.

[DarrenHaye]

Originally Posted by jamietofs

Thanks Darren.

Sorry, I meant Open Site Explorer!

Great, though what are root Domain's? It says we have over 500,000 from Pinterest though we only have abvout 10 boards and haven't been on it THAT long. Surely it hasn't given us 500,000 links to our website?

Also, would you recommend using Open Site Explorers "Domain Authority" to judge a links value? I see Open Site Explorer list that as a high level way to judge the value of a link, which includes root domains.

Thanks.

It means pinterest itself has 500,000 linking root domains.

Domain authority it a decent metric, but just like pagerank it's an indication of quality, not a guarantee.

When I look at a site I like to see big sites in it's industry pointing linking to it as well as maybe some .gov/.edu/ac.uk and news papers.. if it has those and the content of the site is quality and who they link out to is cherry picked in editorials then it's going to be a quality site to get a link from.

If however, as I said above, it has links from freesubmitsite.com, seodirectoryplace.com etc and thats all it has.. it's not a good site.

For more info on opensitexplorer read this http://www.seomoz.org/help/ose-overview

[jamietofs]

Thanks! Much appreciated.

[whiterabbit]

The way that i'd approach it is by doing a full put of the links
then using FIND & SEARCH command pulling out the root domain and then using text to column in excel to pull the TLD also....although I think the column specifications you have below are OK... a column listing that may yield deeper insights for competitor analysis purposes may include the be below

As specified above:

A - Backlinks
B - Root Domain
C - TLD

sidebar: this lets you see what's a sidewide link and gives you a better idea of link placement across domains, but also lets you just sort by root domain, which you'd have in column B. Having the TLD column is one indicator of link authority (at a glance though, although this is certainly not the only indicator) in Column C

D - Anchor Text
E - Follow / no Follow
F - IP

To be honest with you, I am not a big fan of the moz metrics (although some of the other people on here may disagree with me about their value, which I 100% understand...i just found that the mozgerithm low balls a lot of aged quality pages on moz trust and moz domain authority, sometimes its an OK spam indicator but in terms of postive value, Im not a fan...others may disagree though )

Originally Posted by jamietofs

I am going through competitor websites to view who is linking to them and any opportunities our company might be missing for SEO purposes. I am confused by the myriad of columns though and what they mean. The columns they have are:

Link type - no description
PR - no description
OBL - no description
MOBL - Modified link count. Devalues mutliple occurences of the same domain.
STR - In other words, link strength. Provides inverse relationship between page rank and outbound links.
mozrank - link's popularity rank
SEOmoz page authority - 100 point predicitve score of the pages ranking potential.
SEOmoz domain authority - 100 point predicitve score of the domain's ranking potential.

I really don't know what any of these mean or which are the most helpful to find out the best links for SEO purposes. Can someone please help? Any help would be greatly appreciated.



Thanks.

[jamietofs]

Wow. That's some awesome info wr. Thanks!