How to Replicate Your Competition’s Links with SeoQuake
April 3rd, 2008 by MarkWe’ve talked about how to find out how many links you have, and also how many links your competitors have. Now it’s time to see how good your competitors’ links are, and where exactly they’re getting them. Armed with this information, you’ll be able to go to work replicating your top competitors’ link strength, and if you stick with it, you can beat them.
The goal is that by the end of this post you’ll have a list of your competitors’ links, the exact pages where those links are found, and the PageRank of the pages where they’re getting their links.
To show you how to create this list, I’m going to use a Firefox Extension called SeoQuake. I’ll walk you through how to install it and how to use it.
Start by going to the download page for SeoQuake. This is what it looks like:
Click ‘Add to Firefox’, then click ‘Install Now’. Once the install is finished, click ‘Restart Firefox’ on the next pop-up you see. Now if you go to Tools in the Firefox menu and choose ‘Add-ons’, you should see that SeoQuake is installed and automatically enabled. In the bottom right corner of your browser window you’ll see the seo quake icon which looks like this: 
You can enable or disable the tool just by clicking on that icon. If you click on it now, a red X will appear - that’s how you know it’s disabled. Just click it again to turn the tool back on.
Now you’re ready to find out exactly how good your competitors’ links are, exactly where they’re coming from, and how to create a nice, neat list that will help you take their place at the top.
Do a Google search for your main keyword. I’m going to search for ‘trailer hitches’, which is one of my main keywords on my ecommerce site. My site currently sits at number 9 for this keyword. The listing should look like this with SeoQuake running:
Next to ‘SeoQuake’, you see the Google ‘G’ and the letters PR. This obviously stands for PageRank. You also the ‘G’ with a capital ‘I’ next to it, which tells you how many pages the site has in Google’s index. Next is the Yahoo! ‘Y’ with an ‘L’ telling you how many links your Yahoo! is giving the site credit for. That is the number we’re going to use to build the list.
Choose one of your toughest competitors and click on the number next to “Y! L:”. That’s going to take you to a link search just like the one we did the other day. The only difference will be that SeoQuake allows us to make better use of the results of that link search. Check it out:
Beneath the three gray buttons, you see the word ‘Sort:’ and you see the ‘G PR:’ with a ? next to it and then an up arrow and a down arrow. Click the down arrow. Why? Because that will sort all my competitor’s links according to PageRank, so I can try to replicate their best links first.
Now that you’ve sorted the links according to PageRank, you want to export them to a spreadsheet where you will always have easy access to them.
Click the gray button that says ‘Save to File’. 
When you save the file, make sure to delete the ‘http/–’ from the file name. For some reason if you try to save it without deleting that it won’t work right. Don’t worry about the fact that it’s a .csv file. Microsoft Excel (and NeoOffice Calc) will open that with no problem.
By the way, when you exported the Yahoo! Link search results, you only got your competitor’s top 100 links. You can go back to the search page, go to page 2, export the next 100 links, and so on. This will take some time, just like most SEO techniques that are worthwhile. 
As you export more and more pages of links, you can add the new spreadsheets to the one you already created, and soon you’ll have a very comprehensive list.
Now you can open that document with your spreadsheet software and you’ll have a road map that will take you straight to out-ranking your opponents.
There you have it - a clean spreadsheet showing your competitor’s links, and the PR of the page where the link is found. You know what to do next - figure out a way to get those same links!
Hope this is is helpful to you all. Leave any questions or insights in the comments.
Oh, and one more thing. I recommend turning off SeoQuake when you’re finished with your link search (by clicking on the icon in the lower right of your browser), otherwise the tool can really slow your web browsing down.
Save to del.icio.us
Digg This!
Post to Facebook
StumbleItRelated Posts:
How to Maximize Your Internal ROL (Return on Links)
There's been some debate in the SEO world lately over what's known as pagerank sculpting. Basically ...
Read Your Competition’s Work
Whatever the topic of your site or blog, you need to know your stuff! If your competitors know it be...
What Three Dead American Authors Can Teach You About Blogging
Born into wealth in the early 1800s, this author took jobs abo...
Related Posts Plugin And SEO
First of all, this entry won't do you any good unless you're using WordPress!
For the purpose of ...
What I’m Working On This Morning
Today I have several new ideas for posts, and I've started a few of them. Here are the ones I'm curr...
New Technorati System?
Has anyone else noticed that Technorati doesn't show the number of links in this section anymore? To...
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:51 am
Very nice post. I wouldn’t mind seeing a case study on your trailer hitch biz. These studies are a perfect indication that there are a ton of niches that I haven’t even gear my mind toward.
This info and the KeyWord Sniping material,is making me think more outside the box.
Thanks again, Mike
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:42 pm
You’re right Mike. There are virtually unlimited niche markets to be explored and profited from.
Glad we can help open your mind to them!
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Hehe now if only there was a neat little tool that allowed you to import the spreadsheet and then just go replicate those links for you at the click of a button! That would be worth buying
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Thanks for the tips. I have SEOQuake and have hardly explored its functionality at all. There are a host of right-click options on any web page, too. Try that sometime.
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Courtney,
Apparently SEO Quake isn’t available again for download to Firefox browsers until 4 April according to their site.
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Court - Very cool tool. This will help a lot. Thanks!
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Scott -
Follow the link in this post. It will take you to the download page on the firefox website. Only the SeoQuake site is down until tomorrow.
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:50 pm
very helpful, just tried.
Thanks for sharing.
April 3rd, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Is there a way you can find out what anchor text they are linking to the site with also? that would be a very cool feature
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:44 pm
I don’t know of a way to figure out the anchor text James. But based on what we know about SEO, it’s safe to say that if you get a link from the same page they got one, and if you use the keyword you’re targeting as the anchor text, your link will be at least as strong or stronger than theirs.
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Nice post, I had no idea such a tool for internet marketing existed.
Thanks a whole bunch for pointing it out.
Regards
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Great post Mark. Thanks! Was able to garner to additional PR3 links in a matter of minutes. Excellent.
–Chris
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Congrats on the links Chris! Always glad to help.
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:42 pm
great post…very informative…
I would appreciate if you can shed some light on how to get the links… the hard bit. Do you recommend something like Backlink solution to get links
thank you
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Most awsome post ever.
How does this little free tool compare to SEO Elite. I don’t have SEO Elite yet and was going to buy it but this sounds like it is almost the same thing minus a few bells and whistles of course.
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Hey Nuker -
I’ve actually never researched SEO Elite much. Court, have you?
For my purposes, free tools like SeoQuake and Aaron Wall’s SEO for Firefox have done the trick, along with Yahoo!’s link search.
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:28 pm
I haven’t ever seen the need - as you said this tool with the SEO for Firefox do the trick.
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:06 pm
What a great browser extension. I think I can have loads of fun with this
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:53 pm
You’re right Tony. This is Nerd fun for sure. I can do this kind of thing for hours. I just have to make sure I actually get something productive accomplished!
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:18 pm
I have been using this plugin for a while but this is a much better way of link development. The only problem is that it slows down Google searches so i just disable it when i don’t use it.
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Hey hey… Wow, every time i see a new post on here, I get excited because I know it will be awesome information.
I had used SEOquake, and hated it because it slowed down my browser. I never even thought of using it to investigate on Yahoo for my competitors websites. And then, with the export function, I can be done with SEOquake, disable it, and still have fast browsing, and with tons of information about my competitor’s backlinks.
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Hey Court, I’ve been implementing as many of your SEO suggestions as I am able to understand :), installed your News Blue theme (which I really like), and am slowly making my personal blog into a much more business-like looking/clean site (well I think so).
You have certainly been accomplishing exactly what you set out to do (in your bio) - you explain things in a way I understand and can follow.
Thanks for all your work and for sharing your knowledge!
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:56 pm
You’re welcome Heather!
Never hesitate to comment when we share something that doesn’t make sense to you. We’ll do our best to explain the principle better, and your questions will help us come up with great future posts.
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Court,
I have a questions. My competitor has about 457 links. Only the first 40-50 have page rank of about 2 on average. Can I outrank if I am getting higher PR than him, and if so how many PR0 links are effectively offset with a good PR4?
Thanks
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Ray you have the right idea here but that’s tough to estimate. It will depend on the nature of the links your competitor has. For example, if their links are all on related sites that makes your work harder.
A good PR4 link from a related site might offset as many as 100, but it would have to be from a closely related site.
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Court-
Where do you come up with this stuff? Simply amazing. Thanks!
April 4th, 2008 at 12:08 am
This is the most useful post on the subject of linking. I am lost for words to describe my amazement at the amount of research that you do and share with us. Thanks a million.
April 4th, 2008 at 3:11 am
Thanks for sharing this nice tool Court. It will be a great help. In fact I was looking for such a tool for long.
April 4th, 2008 at 4:42 am
Your completely right. Just copy your oponents and than do just a little bit more linkbuilding, that’s how to get top 5 positions!
April 4th, 2008 at 4:52 am
Nice post!
Thank you for your reveiw of SeoQuake.
–
to all: our server is down, but you can use mozilla to download last version of seoquake. except some plugins for it. we work hard to fix it, but we have to fix seodigger before. Sorry.
April 4th, 2008 at 7:22 am
I love SEOQuake. It’s the Swiss Army knife of Firefox SEO plugins. I had not thought about using it to extract competitor links. Thanks.
Beau
April 4th, 2008 at 7:58 am
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!
Outstanding post… outstanding advice… Keep this up and it won’t be long until your Feedburner subscribers number is sporting a lot more zeros on the end!
April 4th, 2008 at 8:31 am
Thanks so much for this nifty little bit of info! I had not heard of this, and I wondered if there was a way to do this. Very helpful.
April 4th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Just did a run through of this process. It works great. But, after you export the file you will need to make a change. The file saves as a .csv but is not truly a csv. If you open the original file with Excel it will cram all the data into one cell. Not very user friendly. Here is how you fix the problem. Once you save the file Open the .csv file with notepad. Click on Edit - Replace - in the Find and Replace box replace all semicolons “;” with a comma “,”. don’t use the quotes. Then save. Now it will open in Excel in a nice user friendly format.
You can add to the original file by using the append button in SEO Quake.
April 4th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
thanks for the tip. i have installed seoquake but have never really used it before
April 4th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Can Firefox run on a machine that uses IE7? Will it mess anything up on my computer?
April 4th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
They can run side by side without any problem. I’ve been using both together since FF was in beta.
April 14th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
They happily co-exist. The only reason I’ve got IE6 & 7 on my machine is to check if websites are viewable in them, otherwise FF is my 1st choice browser.
Since changing over to FF three years ago I haven’t had any issues, it is a far superior browswer to IE. If you however only want it for SEO Quake you’ll be happy to hear that there is a new version for IE.
April 4th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Just installed it. Does this create any computer problems?
April 6th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Hi Court
Great info as always.
May I add a suggestion to your readers…
Get links from pages with low PR as well as high; it might seem like a waste of time but a search engine is going to look at a website that only has links from sites with high PR a little suspiciously.
April 10th, 2008 at 10:20 am
[…] much of this is dependent on your skill level. What I would think is impossible may seem easy for Court or his partner in crime […]
April 10th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
This is a fantastic tool, it’ll really help me out when I’m looking at my competitors links! Thanks again!
April 12th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Thanks for sharing this tool with me. I have SEO Elite as well, but I feel like this one gets me the info faster and it’s free (although SEO Elite does have a lot more features).
I think I will be using seoquake a lot. I’ll just have to train myself not to waste time using it just for fun:)
April 15th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
I don’t know where I would be without seoquake! I also like Search Status, another great firefox/seo add-on!
April 16th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
[…] Read more about SEO Quake here. […]
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Oppss… Your Comment Hurt…
Yesterday, Asia’h Epperson got two very big surprises. The first surprise is that this blog, Asia’h Epperson, is being booted out of the top 100 spots in Google ranking. Then, later another surprise c……
May 7th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
[…] Более подробную информацию о SEO Quake можно прочесть здесь. […]
June 2nd, 2008 at 3:54 pm
I agree but does it find the common backlinks of your competitors.or just backlinks.?