How To Find A Competitor's Paid Backlinks & What To Do Next
Backlinks are when there is a link from one website to another website, and years ago they were vital to get a website and a webpage to show up in search engines for highly competitive terms. They’re still important, but you can rank websites without backlinks. But because they are important, one popular technique for getting backlink is to pay for them. Not all brands are paying for backlinks, sometimes they do a media buy or use affiliate tracking the wrong way and it just looks like they’re doing a paid backlink strategy.
How To Find A Competitor's Paid Backlinks & What To Do Next
Other times the SEO is removed from the conversation and the company requires parameters to be placed on paid SEO efforts since they want to track the “effectiveness” of the money being spent. And the parameters used can help you to identify which teams or potential teams are responsible.
How To Find A Competitor's Paid Backlinks & What To Do Next
Common parameters include:
How To Find A Competitor's Paid Backlinks & What To Do Next
- UTM – Analytics tracking and used for tracking other brands the company owns or subdomain blogs
- MID, RFSN, /go/, etc… – Affiliate, PPC, or commission based
- Partner, banner, sponsor – Sponsorships, paid placements, media buys
Please note that not all of these are bad, and not all should be pulled if your brand is doing it. But they do give you insight into your competitors strategies and you can use this to beat them at their own game. I go into this below. Search engines expect you to track efforts, and crawlers (especially from tools) pick up backlinks from ad placements or media buys that are not intended to boost SEO. That’s why it shows lost, and when you go to the page you’re confused as to why or where the link would have been. Other times a company is interlinking their brands through the footer or header to track traffic going in between the websites.
How To Find A Competitor's Paid Backlinks & What To Do Next
If you look the Gap and their brands do this with a store ID parameter in their…
How To Find A Competitor's Paid Backlinks & What To Do Next
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