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    Wait, Paid Media Investments Can Yield SEO Value?! – Whiteboard Friday

    Friday, February 13th, 2015

    Posted by randfish

    Investing in advertising might feel like we’re simply buying people’s time and attention, but there’s far more to it than that. Done right, advertising can show returns in many organic channels, including SEO. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows us how.

    For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

    Advertisement Investments That Can Yield ROI for Organic Channels Whiteboard

    Video transcription

    Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about advertising investments and how paying for advertising can actually yield positive results for SEO, for links, for social shares, for content investments, for email marketing, for all of these organic channels.

    I know this seems weird, but it actually can work. Google has some guidelines around this. They say, “Look, if you’re over here and you’re saying like, “Hey, man, I’ll give you 500 bucks for a link on your site, a live, followed back link directly,’ that is not okay.” Even if the person on the other side says, “Sure, I’ll take your 500 bucks and add that link.”

    Google doesn’t want to count those links. They treat those as web spam. They’re going to find ways to avoid that type of manipulation. They can, in fact, penalize you for it, and lots of times they do.

    However, Google is totally fine with and they even support, endorse, and run systems, a whole advertising network around this to say, “Hey, I’d love to buy some ad spots from this website.” Sure. My sidebar ads are no followed, and they cost $150 a month. This is totally 100% okay by Google.

    In fact, this is okay by any form of things. So social networks are fine with this. Email things are fine with this. The FCC, the Federal Communications folks here in the U.S. are totally fine with this. The EU is fine with this. It’s totally okay. As long as it’s disclosed that this is an advertising relationship on the website, you’re in the clear. In fact, very often it’s the case that there’s a correlation, a strong correlation between advertising and organic types of relationships and returns.

    Tactics that are worth trying (depending on your business goals)

    Blogs, forums, niche websites, or news/media sites

    So a lot of times you’ll see an ad buy is the first step to a deeper relationship between a website or a blogger or a media source and an advertiser, and that will lead to some forms of content sharing. Maybe some of the content will be promoted on the advertiser’s site or the other way around. That might lead to some business development of some kind. That could lead to guest contributions of content or guest posting of some kind. It can lead to social sharing where the advertiser shares something that they’ve sponsored on the media sites or the other way around. It can lead to email inclusions and email sponsorships.

    It can even lead directly to links and brand mentions. People will say, “Hey, I want to thank my advertiser,” or “Hey, one of my advertisers came out with this cool product that, in fact, they didn’t pay me to endorse, but I am organically endorsing it because I really like it. By the way, they happen to be top of mind for me because they’re an advertiser.” Sometimes you don’t even realize those relationships are happening, but they do.

    This is why often there is a very strong connection between advertising dollars and those kinds of more organic forms of relationships. While Google certainly is smart enough to realize that those relationships exist, they don’t say, “No, it’s not okay that you bought an advertising format from this person, and that eventually led to a more organic kind of relationship and now they’re endorsing you without a followed link, without payment in an editorial kind of way.” That’s actually totally fine.

    This is why advertising can be so powerful, not just for search and for links, although that’s certainly a big one. So I’ve actually got a few suggestions, some places where we’ve seen over the course of time, and I’ve seen certainly in some of the companies that I occasionally help out informally, where they’ve benefited from these types of things. On the other side, I’ve seen from bloggers, journalists, and media sites and niche websites and forums, how they have also benefited from these forms of advertising.

    Some of these tactics may be worth trying. It’s really going to depend on your business goals and who your audience is. But the first and most obvious one is really what’s reflected over here, and that is reaching out to these bloggers, forums, niche websites, news and media sites. They often offer direct forms of sponsorship or display or text ads on their site. They are going to be no followed, or they’re going to use some sort of JavaScript redirect.

    What you want to do, though, is you want to go direct. So I want to buy from NicheBloggerABC.com, not from Google Ads or Federated Media, which happens to power advertising on their site. So you want those direct advertising inquiries, where you have the relationship personally, and that’s what you’re building. Don’t use that generic ad provider.

    By the way, if you’re going direct, make sure those links are no followed. You don’t want to buy followed links, or you’ll get into the problem that we had over here. You’re trying to build a relationship, not a followed link. Hopefully, all those other positive organic things, those will come later if you buy these no followed links, if you start that relationship with advertising.

    Conference and event sponsorships

    Especially, in particular, more creative and more audience relevant forms of advertising can create much greater engagement. So if you buy a booth at a conference, well that can help. Maybe you’ve got a trade show booth and people come by and that kind of thing, and that does work for some folks, especially if they’re looking for leads.

    We’ve done a few things with conference and events, even here at Moz, where we’ve done forms of sponsorship that are more creative. We give out swag. We share some content. We do something that’s very special for the audience, that happens to be relevant to their interests, usually along the lines of SEO stuff. That works much better. That often will get pickup and coverage by press and media, by bloggers who attend events, by people on social media who go to these events.

    Weirdly, almost ironically, the less promotional you are in your advertising, which seems counterintuitive, the better this works for all of the organic kinds of things you’re seeking. It might not work quite as well for that direct lead capture or sales capture. But by saying, “Hey, we’re going to provide free Wi-Fi to the entire conference, and all you have to do is enter a repetition of our brand name three times as the password.” Well, guess what? That builds a lot of brand equity, and it is much more appreciated than, “Hey, we’re going to need you to take this free demo” or “You need to give us your email address and be promoted to,” and these kinds of things. That less promotional can often have greater returns.

    Outdoor/TV/radio/print advertising

    Then the last one I’ll mention here, even though this list could go on and on and you can use your imagination, is outdoor TV, radio, print, those old school forms of advertising. I think one of the most interesting studies I saw was a couple of years ago showing the correlation between these forms of advertising and search volume. The team from SEER Interactive put up a case study about some outdoor advertising.

    Now, it could have been SEER. It might have been Distilled. I’m going to make sure, and I’m going to put it in the blog post itself. I’ll link over to that study for you guys, showing that when one of their clients had invested in these forms of advertising, they saw a direct bump in search traffic.

    Editor’s note: Rand offered up a couple of other relevant links for more information about the relationship between offline ads and search traffic:
    Mercedes-Benz: Quantifying how online and offline marketing work together to drive sales volume
    Can TV Advertising Really Impact Search Performance?

    Essentially more people were searching for their brand name, for their products, and those people went to their website. Now that’s a beautiful thing, especially if you are trying to increase search demand and search click-through rate.

    So if you perceive that you have a weakness in terms of, “Hey, we’re just not getting as much branded search. We’re not getting as high a click-through rate. Our brand recognition is low. That’s hurting us in search results. People are getting better engagement than us, and as a result they are getting higher rankings and better links and all this other kind of stuff.” This is a great way to potentially combat this.

    With any form of tactic that you’re trying like this, you’re going to want to think really carefully about audience makeup. So many of the times when you’re doing more traditional kinds of advertising, what you’re seeking is an audience that’s made up of people who are going to buy your product, people who have a high potential to be a customer.

    That’s actually not necessarily what you’re seeking when you do these forms of advertising. You are really seeking, yes, people who might become customers, but also people who might influence customers. Customer influencers is often a very different group than direct customers themselves. It might be that you’re reaching a much smaller audience, but it is more targeted to that flow.

    For conferences and events, you really want those press and media types of people. For these blog, forums, and niche websites, you might be targeting influencers and journalists and other bloggers and social media mavens and that kind of stuff, who consume this type of content online far more than your regular customers do.

    So you want to be careful about that when you’re choosing advertising that is supposed to be helping you with organic channels. This is a really interesting topic. It’s one of the newer kinds of forms and ways that people are leveraging paid advertising. It can run the risk, if you get too aggressive with it, that you actually step on some of these FCC guidelines or Google’s guidelines. So you’ve got to be very careful. But if you walk this line well, you can experience great benefit to your SEO, your social, your content, your email, your brand by paying for it and getting those indirect benefits as a second order effect.

    All right, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to some great comments. Hopefully, you all have some stories to share about this, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.

    Video transcription by Speechpad.com

    Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

    How to Defeat Duplicate Content – Next Level

    Thursday, February 12th, 2015

    Posted by EllieWilkinson

    Welcome to the third installment of Next Level! In the previous Next Level blog post, we shared a workflow showing you how to take on your competitors using Moz tools. We’re continuing the educational series with several new videos all about resolving duplicate content. Read on and level up!


    Dealing with duplicate content can feel a bit like doing battle with your site’s evil doppelgänger—confusing and tricky to defeat! But identifying and resolving duplicates is a necessary part of helping search engines decide on relevant results. In this short video, learn about how duplicate content happens, why it’s important to fix, and a bit about how you can uncover it.

    Now that you have a better idea of how to identify those dastardly duplicates, let’s get rid of ’em once and for all. Watch this next video to review how to use Moz Analytics to find and fix duplicate content using three common solutions. (You’ll need a Moz Pro subscription to use Moz Analytics. If you aren’t yet a Moz Pro subscriber, you can always try out the tools with a
    30-day free trial.)

    Workflow summary

    Here’s a review of the three common solutions to conquering duplicate content:

    1. 301 redirect. Check Page Authority to see if one page has a higher PA than the other using Open Site Explorer, then set up a 301 redirect from the duplicate page to the original page. This will ensure that they no longer compete with one another in the search results. Wondering what a 301 redirect is and how to do it? Read more about redirection here.
    2. Rel=canonical. A rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of ranking power as a 301 redirect, and there’s a bonus: it often takes less development time to implement! Add this tag to the HTML head of a web page to tell search engines that it should be treated as a copy of the “canon,” or original, page:
      <head> <link rel="canonical" href="http://moz.com/blog/" /> </head>

      If you’re curious, you can
      read more about canonicalization here.

    3. noindex, follow. Add the values “noindex, follow” to the meta robots tag to tell search engines not to include the duplicate pages in their indexes, but to crawl their links. This works really well with paginated content or if you have a system set up to tag or categorize content (as with a blog). Here’s what it should look like:
      <head> <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" /> </head>

      If you’re looking to block the Moz crawler, Rogerbot, you can use the robots.txt file if you prefer—he’s a good robot, and he’ll obey!
      More about meta robots (and robots.txt) here.

    Can’t get enough of duplicate content? Want to become a duplicate content connoisseur? This last video explains more about how Moz finds duplicates, if you’re curious. And you can read even more over at the
    Moz Developer Blog.

    We’d love to hear about your techniques for defeating duplicates! Chime in below in the comments.

    Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

    Announcing the New & Improved Link Intersect Tool

    Tuesday, February 10th, 2015

    Posted by randfish

    Y’all remember how last October, we launched a new section in Open Site Explorer called “Link Opportunities?” While I was proud of that work, there was one section that really disappointed me at the time (and I said as much in my comments on the post).

    Well, today, that disappointment is over, because we’re stepping up the Link Intersect tool inside OSE big time:


    Literally thousands of sweet, sweet link opportunities are now yours at the click of a button

    In the initial launch, Link Intersect used Freshscape (which powers Fresh Web Explorer). Freshscape is great for certain kinds of data – links and mentions that come from newly published pages that are in news sources, blogs, and feeds. But it’s not great for non-news/blogs/feed sources because it’s intentionally avoiding those!

    For example, in the screenshot above, I wanted to see all the pages that link to SeriousEats.com and SplendidTable.org but don’t link to SmittenKitchen.com.

    That’s 671 more, juicy link opportunities thanks to the hard work of the Moz Big Data and Research Tools teams.

    How does the new Link Intersect work?

    The tool looks at the top 250,000 links our index has pointing to each of the intersecting targets you enter, and the top 1 mllion links in our index pointing to the excluded URL.

    Link Intersect then runs a differential comparison to determine which of the 250K links to each of the intersecting targets are from the same URL or root domain, and removes any of those links that point to the top million links to the excluded URL/root/sub domain.

    This means it’s possible for sites and pages with massive quantities of links that we won’t show every intersecting link we know about, but since the sorting is in Page Authority order, you’ll get the highest quality/most important ones at the top.

    You can use Link Intersect to see three unique views on the data:

    • Pages that link to subdomains (particularly useful if you’re interested in shared links to sites on hosted subdomains like blogspot, wordpress, etc or to a specific subdomain section of a competitor’s site)
    • Pages that link to root domains (my personal favorite, as I find the results the most comprehensive)
    • Root domains that link to the root domains (great if you’re trying to get a broad sense of domain-level outreach/marketing targets)

    Note that it’s possible the root domains will actually expose more links that pages because the domain-level link graph is easier and faster to sort through, so the 250K limit is less of a barrier.

    Like most of the reports in Open Site Explorer, Link Intersect comes with a handy CSV Export option:

    When it finishes (my most recent one took just under 3 minutes to run and email me), you’ll get a nice email like this one:

    Please ignore the grammatical errors. I’m sure our team will fix those up soon 🙂

    Why are these such good link/outreach/marketing targets?

    Generally speaking, this type of data is invaluable for link outreach because these sites and pages are ones that clearly care about the shared topics or content of the intersecting targets. If you enter two of your primary competitors, you’ll often get news media, blog posts, reference resources, events, trade publications, and more that produce content in your topical niche.

    They’re also good targets because they actually link out! This means you can avoid sifting through sites whose policies or practices mean they’re unlikely to ever link to you – if they’ve linked to those other two chaps, why not you, too?!

    Basically, you can check the trifecta of link opportunity goodness boxes (which I’ve helpfully illustrated above, because that’s just the kind of SEO dork I am).

    Link Intersect is limited only by your own creativity – so long as you can keep finding sites and pages on the web whose links might also be a match for your own site, we can keep digging through trillions of links, finding the intersects, and giving them back to you.

    3 examples of Link Intersect in action

    Let’s look at some ways we might put this to use in the real world:

    #1: I’m trying to figure out who links to my two big competitors in the world of book reviews

    First off, remember that Link Intersect works on a root domain or subdomain level, so we wouldn’t want to use something like the NYTimes’ review of books, because we’d be finding all the intersections to NYTimes.com. Instead, we want to pick more topically-focused domains, like these two:

    You’ll also note that I’ve used a fake website as my excluded URL – this is a great trick for when you’re simply interested in any sites/pages that link to two domains and don’t need to remove a particular target.

    #2: I’ve got a locally-focused website doing plumbing and need a few link sources to help boost my potential to rank in local and organic SERPs

    In this instance, I’ll certainly look at pages linking to combinations of the top ranking sites in the local results, e.g. the 15 results for this query:

    This is a solid starting point, especially considering how few links local sites often need to perform well. But we can get creative by branching outside of plumbing and exploring related fields like construction:

    Focusing on better-linked-to industries and websites will give more results, so we want to try to broaden rather than narrow our categories and look for the most-linked-to sites in given verticals for comparisons.

    #3: I’m planning some new content around weather patterns for my air conditioning website and want to know what news and blog sites cover extreme weather content

    First, I’m going to start by browsing some search results for content in this field that’s received some serious link activity. By turning on my Mozbar’s SERPs overlay, I can see the sites and pages that have generated loads of links:

    Now I can run a few combinations of these through the Link Intersect Tool:

    While those domain names make me fear for humanity’s intelligence and future survival, they also expose a great link opportunity tactic I hadn’t previously considered – climate science deniers and the more politically charged universe of climate science overall.


    I hope you enjoy the new Link Intersect tool as much as I have been – I think it’s one of the best things we’ve put in Open Site Explorer in the last few months, though what we’re releasing in March might beat even that, so stay tuned!

    And, as always, please do give us feedback and feel free to ask questions in the comments below or through the Moz Community Q+A.

    Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

    Announcing the New & Improved Link Intersect Tool

    Tuesday, February 10th, 2015

    Posted by randfish

    Y’all remember how last October, we launched a new section in Open Site Explorer called “Link Opportunities?” While I was proud of that work, there was one section that really disappointed me at the time (and I said as much in my comments on the post).

    Well, today, that disappointment is over, because we’re stepping up the Link Intersect tool inside OSE big time:


    Literally thousands of sweet, sweet link opportunities are now yours at the click of a button

    In the initial launch, Link Intersect used Freshscape (which powers Fresh Web Explorer). Freshscape is great for certain kinds of data – links and mentions that come from newly published pages that are in news sources, blogs, and feeds. But it’s not great for non-news/blogs/feed sources because it’s intentionally avoiding those!

    For example, in the screenshot above, I wanted to see all the pages that link to SeriousEats.com and SplendidTable.org but don’t link to SmittenKitchen.com.

    That’s 671 more, juicy link opportunities thanks to the hard work of the Moz Big Data and Research Tools teams.

    How does the new Link Intersect work?

    The tool looks at the top 250,000 links our index has pointing to each of the intersecting targets you enter, and the top 1 mllion links in our index pointing to the excluded URL.

    Link Intersect then runs a differential comparison to determine which of the 250K links to each of the intersecting targets are from the same URL or root domain, and removes any of those links that point to the top million links to the excluded URL/root/sub domain.

    This means it’s possible for sites and pages with massive quantities of links that we won’t show every intersecting link we know about, but since the sorting is in Page Authority order, you’ll get the highest quality/most important ones at the top.

    You can use Link Intersect to see three unique views on the data:

    • Pages that link to subdomains (particularly useful if you’re interested in shared links to sites on hosted subdomains like blogspot, wordpress, etc or to a specific subdomain section of a competitor’s site)
    • Pages that link to root domains (my personal favorite, as I find the results the most comprehensive)
    • Root domains that link to the root domains (great if you’re trying to get a broad sense of domain-level outreach/marketing targets)

    Note that it’s possible the root domains will actually expose more links that pages because the domain-level link graph is easier and faster to sort through, so the 250K limit is less of a barrier.

    Like most of the reports in Open Site Explorer, Link Intersect comes with a handy CSV Export option:

    When it finishes (my most recent one took just under 3 minutes to run and email me), you’ll get a nice email like this one:

    Please ignore the grammatical errors. I’m sure our team will fix those up soon 🙂

    Why are these such good link/outreach/marketing targets?

    Generally speaking, this type of data is invaluable for link outreach because these sites and pages are ones that clearly care about the shared topics or content of the intersecting targets. If you enter two of your primary competitors, you’ll often get news media, blog posts, reference resources, events, trade publications, and more that produce content in your topical niche.

    They’re also good targets because they actually link out! This means you can avoid sifting through sites whose policies or practices mean they’re unlikely to ever link to you – if they’ve linked to those other two chaps, why not you, too?!

    Basically, you can check the trifecta of link opportunity goodness boxes (which I’ve helpfully illustrated above, because that’s just the kind of SEO dork I am).

    Link Intersect is limited only by your own creativity – so long as you can keep finding sites and pages on the web whose links might also be a match for your own site, we can keep digging through trillions of links, finding the intersects, and giving them back to you.

    3 examples of Link Intersect in action

    Let’s look at some ways we might put this to use in the real world:

    #1: I’m trying to figure out who links to my two big competitors in the world of book reviews

    First off, remember that Link Intersect works on a root domain or subdomain level, so we wouldn’t want to use something like the NYTimes’ review of books, because we’d be finding all the intersections to NYTimes.com. Instead, we want to pick more topically-focused domains, like these two:

    You’ll also note that I’ve used a fake website as my excluded URL – this is a great trick for when you’re simply interested in any sites/pages that link to two domains and don’t need to remove a particular target.

    #2: I’ve got a locally-focused website doing plumbing and need a few link sources to help boost my potential to rank in local and organic SERPs

    In this instance, I’ll certainly look at pages linking to combinations of the top ranking sites in the local results, e.g. the 15 results for this query:

    This is a solid starting point, especially considering how few links local sites often need to perform well. But we can get creative by branching outside of plumbing and exploring related fields like construction:

    Focusing on better-linked-to industries and websites will give more results, so we want to try to broaden rather than narrow our categories and look for the most-linked-to sites in given verticals for comparisons.

    #3: I’m planning some new content around weather patterns for my air conditioning website and want to know what news and blog sites cover extreme weather content

    First, I’m going to start by browsing some search results for content in this field that’s received some serious link activity. By turning on my Mozbar’s SERPs overlay, I can see the sites and pages that have generated loads of links:

    Now I can run a few combinations of these through the Link Intersect Tool:

    While those domain names make me fear for humanity’s intelligence and future survival, they also expose a great link opportunity tactic I hadn’t previously considered – climate science deniers and the more politically charged universe of climate science overall.


    I hope you enjoy the new Link Intersect tool as much as I have been – I think it’s one of the best things we’ve put in Open Site Explorer in the last few months, though what we’re releasing in March might beat even that, so stay tuned!

    And, as always, please do give us feedback and feel free to ask questions in the comments below or through the Moz Community Q+A.

    Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

    The New Link Intersect Upgrade is Powerful, Deep, Fast, and Finally Launched

    Tuesday, February 10th, 2015

    Posted by randfish

    Y’all remember how last October, we launched a new section in Open Site Explorer called “Link Opportunities?” While I was proud of that work, there was one section that really disappointed me at the time (and I said as much in my comments on the post).

    Well, today, that disappointment is over, because we’re stepping up the Link Intersect tool inside OSE big time:


    Literally thousands of sweet, sweet link opportunities are now yours at the click of a button

    In the initial launch, Link Intersect used Freshscape (which powers Fresh Web Explorer). Freshscape is great for certain kinds of data – links and mentions that come from newly publishes pages that are in news sources, blogs, and feeds. But it’s not great for non-news/blogs/feed sources because it’s intentionally avoiding those!

    For example, in the screenshot above, I wanted to see all the pages that link to SeriousEats.com and SplendidTable.org but don’t link to SmittenKitchen.com.

    That’s 671 more, juicy link opportunities thanks to the hard work of the Moz Big Data and Research Tools teams.

    How does the new Link Intersect work?

    The tool looks at the top 250,000 links our index has pointing to each of the intersecting targets you enter, and the top 1 mllion links in our index pointing to the excluded URL.

    Link Intersect then runs a differential comparison to determine which of the 250K links to each of the intersecting targets are from the same URL or root domain, and removes any of those links that point to the top million links to the excluded URL/root/sub domain.

    This means it’s possible for sites and pages with massive quantities of links that we won’t show every intersecting link we know about, but since the sorting is in Page Authority order, you’ll get the highest quality/most important ones at the top.

    You can use Link Intersect to see three unique views on the data:

    • Pages that link to subdomains (particularly useful if you’re interested in shared links to sites on hosted subdomains like blogspot, wordpress, etc or to a specific subdomain section of a competitor’s site)
    • Pages that link to root domains (my personal favorite, as I find the results the most comprehensive)
    • Root domains that link to the root domains (great if you’re trying to get a broad sense of domain-level outreach/marketing targets)

    Note that it’s possible the root domains will actually expose more links that pages because the domain-level link graph is easier and faster to sort through, so the 250K limit is less of a barrier.

    Like most of the reports in Open Site Explorer, Link Intersect comes with a handy CSV Export option:

    When it finishes (my most recent one took just under 3 minutes to run and email me), you’ll get a nice email like this one:

    Please ignore the grammatical errors. I’m sure our team will fix those up soon 🙂

    Why are these such good link/outreach/marketing targets?

    Generally speaking, this type of data is invaluable for link outreach because these sites and pages are ones that clearly care about the shared topics or content of the intersecting targets. If you enter two of your primary competitors, you’ll often get news media, blog posts, reference resources, events, trade publications, and more that produce content in your topical niche.

    They’re also good targets because they actually link out! This means you can avoid sifting through sites whose policies or practices mean they’re unlikely to ever link to you – if they’ve linked to those other two chaps, why not you, too?!

    Basically, you can check the trifecta of link opportunity goodness boxes (which I’ve helpfully illustrated above, because that’s just the kind of SEO dork I am).

    Link Intersect is limited only by your own creativity – so long as you can keep finding sites and pages on the web whose links might also be a match for your own site, we can keep digging through trillions of links, finding the intersects, and giving them back to you.

    3 examples of Link Intersect in action

    Let’s look at some ways we might put this to use in the real world:

    #1: I’m trying to figure out who links to my two big competitors in the world of book reviews

    First off, remember that Link Intersect works on a root domain or subdomain level, so we wouldn’t want to use something like the NYTimes’ review of books, because we’d be finding all the intersections to NYTimes.com. Instead, we want to pick more topically-focused domains, like these two:

    You’ll also note that I’ve used a fake website as my excluded URL – this is a great trick for when you’re simply interested in any sites/pages that link to two domains and don’t need to remove a particular target.

    #2: I’ve got a locally-focused website doing plumbing and need a few link sources to help boost my potential to rank in local and organic SERPs

    In this instance, I’ll certainly look at pages linking to combinations of the top ranking sites in the local results, e.g. the 15 results for this query:

    This is a solid starting point, especially considering how few links local sites often need to perform well. But we can get creative by branching outside of plumbing and exploring related fields like construction:

    Focusing on better-linked-to industries and websites will give more results, so we want to try to broaden rather than narrow our categories and look for the most-linked-to sites in given verticals for comparisons.

    #3: I’m planning some new content around weather patterns for my air conditioning website and want to know what news and blog sites cover extreme weather content

    First, I’m going to start by browsing some search results for content in this field that’s received some serious link activity. By turning on my Mozbar’s SERPs overlay, I can see the sites and pages that have generated loads of links:

    Now I can run a few combinations of these through the Link Intersect Tool:

    While those domain names make me fear for humanity’s intelligence and future survival, they also expose a great link opportunity tactic I hadn’t previously considered – climate science deniers and the more politically charged universe of climate science overall.


    I hope you enjoy the new Link Intersect tool as much as I have been – I think it’s one of the best things we’ve put in Open Site Explorer in the last few months, though what we’re releasing in March might beat even that, so stay tuned!

    And, as always, please do give us feedback and feel free to ask questions in the comments below or through the Moz Community Q+A.

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