Competitive Analysis

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Muhammad Fayaz: I`ve a competitors analysis fommat might be helpful for you, you can use Ahref to find the things mentioned in the format
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  Jason Wells: Muhammad Fayaz care to share?
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  Michael Martinez: Studying competitive backlink profiles provides minimal value. You can get some ideas for acquiring links but you won`t ever collect reliable data about which links do or do not help. No 3rd-party tools can tell you that.Crawling competitor sites without their permission is also unethical. You should keep that to a minimum or at least do them the courtesy of spacing out fetch requests so you don`t create an undue burden on their server performance.*=> Understand that unleashing an unmoderated crawler on someone else`s Website counts as a Denial-of-Service attack, even if you think it`s not an effective one (and they can be quite effective, in my experience).All that aside, you can use search engines to search for links pointing to other people`s sites. You won`t get a full report but you can search for things like:1 Domain names2 Fully resolved URLs3 Unique article titlesThese kinds of searches at least show you what the search engines are indexing. They don`t reveal the keyword-rich anchor links that you might be hoping for, but these are pretty good results nonetheless.You can also use the "inanchor:" search operator to see if a site is receiving targeted anchor text. Here is an example query:inanchor:"best seo blog tips" -intext:"best seo blog tips" -intitle:"best seo blog tips"Run that on Google and you`ll get a couple of results from Pinterest, which means someone is linking to those 2 URLs with the anchor expression "best seo blog tips".I negated use of the phrase in on-page text and the page title so that it`s obvious there are links pointing to those pages using that anchor expression, and Google is allowing the anchor text to pass.There`s no actionable information in this kind of research. It doesn`t tell you if the site is ranking better because of those links. It only tells you that someone pointed links at those pages using anchor text that isn`t found on the pages or in the titles (or wasn`t there when Google indexed all that stuff).
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  Usman Rana: Semrush is providing competitive sites backlinks data
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  Brendon Stark: SEO SpyGlass gives an overview of anchor texts that are used by backlinks that are pointing to a specific website. you can check exact keywords and phrases used in all backlinks