Weekly SEO news: 25 February 2014
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

Analyzing the backlinks of your competitors can help you to greatly improve the backlink structure of your own website. Of course, it's not enough to depend only on the backlinks that your competitors already have. You have to do the right things.

In the news: Google targets more link networks, Google+ violates Google's own linking policies, poor grammer can lead to low rankings on Bing, negative SEO becomes a major problem, and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Three steps: how your competitors’ link profiles can help you to improve the links that point to your own site

Analyzing the backlinks of your competitors can help you to greatly improve the backlink structure of your own website. Of course, it's not enough to depend only on the backlinks that your competitors already have. However, the backlink profiles of your competitors can be full of great backlink opportunities for your own website.

Websites that link to your competitors are websites that should link to your website. The link profiler tool in SEOprofiler can help you to find easy link targets:

Step 1: Enter the domain of a competitor in the link profiler tool

Search Google for a keyword for which you want to get high rankings on Google. Write down the domains that are listed in Google's regular search results (i.e. the results that are not marked with a red 'local' pin).

Enter one of these domains in the link profiler tool in SEOProfiler and view the result page. The link profiler tool offers a lot of filters that help you to find easy link targets quickly:

Filter your backlinks

Step 2: filter the results by industry and context

A great feature that other backlinks tools do not offer is the fact that the links are categorized by context. For example, it is relatively easy to get links from blog pages. Review websites often link to your website if you offer them products that they can review. There are several other link contexts that you can select.

In addition to the link context, the linking websites are categorized by industry. For example, if your website is in the travel industry, it is usually advisable to get backlinks from other travel websites. The link profiler tool in SEOprofiler helps you to find these websites:

Filter industry links

Step 3: Add the page to the link manager

Click the 'Add' link next to a link to add a page to the link manager. The link manager will automatically retrieve the contact information of the page so that you can quickly contact the owner of the linking website.

Add to link manager

There are many ways to sort the list

In addition to the filter settings above the result list, you can sort the results by clicking on the column headers of the results table. You can also click the labels in the result table:

Sort the links

The link profiler tool in SEOprofiler helps you to find good links as quickly as possible.

Tips and tricks

  • Quality is much more important than quantity.
  • Add all quality websites that could be good link partners to the link manager in SEOprofiler.
  • Contact the owners of these websites and ask them for a link. Tips and tricks can be found here.

Create your SEOprofiler account now to test the link profiler tool and all other tools risk-free:

Free trial Test full version



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2. Search engine news and articles of the week
Google targeting link networks in Poland and Germany

"In a post on Twitter, Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Google has taken action on link networks in Poland. Google also posted a reminder about unnatural links in the Polish webmaster blog.

Matt Cutts didn’t say which link networks were targeted. Earlier this month, Google announced that several German link networks had been penalized."

Email notificationsGoogle+: the most devious link campaign of history
"1,792,729 [is] the number of unique websites according to NerdyData that have attempted to install authorship markup with links to Google+ [...]

Google has now blocked the passing of PageRank in contributor-to links. They terminate the cycle of link juice inside Google+, so it earns all of the value while not passing it on to anyone else."


Negative SEO: still taboo or becoming an accepted practice?

"Until recently, negative SEO stayed out of the spotlight, lurking on the darker, more subversive areas of the net. [...]

The cost of performing negative SEO hasn’t really changed in years, if anything, it has become more widely available and at more competitive costs. This may be one of the reasons why we’re seeing more instances of this kind of digital warfare, especially with smaller brands in competitive niches.

How are Search Engines combatting this? Well the honest answer is, they aren’t. With no way of identifying the origin of negative links, search engines like Google and Bing are unable to police effectively against these damaging SEO assaults."

Editor's note: if your website has been hit by negative SEO, use the link disinfection tool to get rid of the harmful links that point to your website.


BingBing: poor grammar and typos can lead to lower web page rankings

"In Bing’s official blog, Duane Forrester has published a new post in which he explains that you should check the grammar on your web pages. [...]

Bad grammar can be bad for your rankings. Bad HTML code can be even worse. Many people are not aware of the technical errors on their web pages."

Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's tiniest, fiercest competitor

"When Gabriel Weinberg launched a search engine in 2008, plenty of people thought he was insane. How could DuckDuckGo, a tiny, Philadelphia-based startup, go up against Google?

One way, he wagered, was by respecting user privacy. Six years later, we're living in the post-Snowden era, and the idea doesn't seem so crazy. In fact, DuckDuckGo is exploding."

Search engine newslets
  • Yandex revenue up 37% compared with Q4/2013.
  • Google penalizes social video advertising site Virool.
  • Google: we may show your redirected URLs in the search results.
  • Blinking Google results.
  • Bing adds timeline to infoboxes.
  • Video: Google  might use EXIF data for image search rankings.
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3. Recommended resources

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4. Previous articles
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