SEO 101

Index Saturation

Ross and John discuss index saturation and how much of your site is being indexed by search engines, if you have deep navigation or if your site is experiencing some major blocks. Our Sponsors: * Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Duration:: 39m
Broadcast on:: 09 Nov 2009
Audio Format:: other

Ross and John discuss index saturation and how much of your site is being indexed by search engines, if you have deep navigation or if your site is experiencing some major blocks.

Our Sponsors:
* Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The opinions expressed on this webmasterradio.fm program are those of the hosts, guests and callers, and do not reflect those of the staff, management or advertisers of webmasterradio.fm. Any rebroadcast or retransmission of this program, without the express written consent of webmasterradio.fm is prohibited. Welcome to SEO 101, your introductory course on Search Engine Optimization. So, turn on your computers, open your minds, grab your mouse and get ready to get back to the basis. SEO 10101 on webmasterradio.fm is now in session. Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing and my co-host is John Carcutt, the SEO manager for Miriwiz. Johnny! Hey, how's it going? Good. Very good. We're just talking about all the upcoming events. You're going to Pubcon and we're trying to figure out who's recording, what, when, and oh boy. Going to be out of Pubcon. Actually speaking on reputation management on Thursday, so come by and see me if you're not. Hey, also Ross, I know you're going to a World Camp in Victoria over the weekend that weekend. I think it's a little ways away, isn't it? It's like next month. I'm speaking at it, so I better be here. Actually I was going to try to go and it's the same time as the one I'm going to in New York. So it's the 14th of this month, so you got some, there's no preparing. I guess so. But yeah, World Camp on both coasts are going to be hidden, so. That's awesome. Okay. Well, I'm looking forward to you. I'll be speaking on SEO for World Camp and take all the stuff I've learned from Yoast over the, over the last few months on a site and his show, and yeah, it's going to be good. It's going to be really good. Nice. And today we're doing competitor analysis. Nice. Yes. Both something something we both like. We love getting down to the nitty-gritty and turn up on the competition. Yes. Why am I doing better than you? Why are they doing better than me? Exactly. Yes. It's one of my favorite things. I especially like telling clients, like, they give me a call and they want me to do it and I'm like, oh yeah, I love it. Just tear them apart and find out what's going on, make them tick and, you know, don't reinvent the wheel. Figure out what they're doing right and apply it to your own site. I love getting those calls, too, because it's like the client will call and say, I don't know what happened, but all of a sudden, competitor B is now above us, and we've been above them for years and all of a sudden they're above us. What happened and why? And it's actually kind of fun to try to figure out why. It is. It's when it gets to that, kind of like that's a good example of when it's kind of tough because you can only guess with a lot of educational guessing, I mean, you're looking at, you can find certain things, what exactly it wasn't made to change, who knows. But you can usually find some really good pointers on how to improve their site and then that gets them up there. Yeah, that's very true. So where do we start? I guess the initial considerations, you had some good thoughts, sir. Well, I guess it really depends on what the goal of your competitive analysis is. I mean, are you trying to find out who your competitors are in a specific market or are you looking at a specific guy and you want to know why he's doing better or he's changed all of a sudden? So there's really that you're going to kind of figure out what the goal of your analysis is and depending on which one of those kind of things are you looking at the market or you're looking at specific people, your analysis is going to change completely, I think. Yeah. And, you know, when we do competitors, which is mostly what we do, I can't actually recall doing a market one, at least for a few years, what I like to do, a lot of my clients will say, "Oh, these are my big competitors." I'm like, "Okay, well, that's interesting, but we're dealing with why are they better rankings than you?" So we tend to pick the competitors out of the top 10, hopefully top five, unless there's Amazon and guys like that, and we don't want to try to do a competitor analysis on them unless we're talking to some Fortune 500 clients. Right. So if you're going to pick the competitors out of the top 10, which terms are most important for that market, which terms are most important for that client that they're bidding on. So the top 10 for this phrase might be significantly different than the top 10 from this phrase, but it's in the same market. So I think that's where keyword research comes into play here as well. Yeah. I guess so. When we do it, I've always done it, I think everyone's got their own way of doing it. In our case, we would say, "All right, usually the client's calling is because they plummeted or something on a particular key phrase. They're a big money maker." So we already have the one we're going to target. Yes, there are other important ones, but when we target that, we would go through it and then figure out what the competitors did differently, what might have changed, what might, heck, what the client might have done wrong on their own site that made them happen, the competitors may not have done anything different. And then from that, we figure out where the competitors are ranking as well and we figure out maybe there's some keywords they hadn't thought of or maybe there's other ones that seem to be really competitive. So we sort of reverse engineered it, I guess. How do you do it? It sounds like I do it opposite from the way you do it, because I try to find out specifically if they do come and they come and say, "Hey, look, all of a sudden we've been taken over by a competitor." My first question is, well, for what terms? All your terms? One or two your terms? If it's all your terms, most likely it's not your competitor that has an issue, it's you that has an issue. So that's the first kind of question that I'm asking, is what are we analyzing from a targeting perspective first of all? And then when you go look at the competitor's site, you can also take a look at it from those specific terms and say, "Well, he's ranking better for this term because he's got it in his title tag, he's got it on the page, it's in his navigation." Those kind of things where you don't have it in your title tag is not in your navigation. So it sounds like we do kind of an opposite approach to it. Yeah, I mean, I guess if we consider questions, there's certain elements of your question there that would come up just in our normal talk. We would be asking about the background around this. Did you lose it everywhere? Yeah, definitely something would come up because if that's the case, then maybe they've got a Google penalty and we just change this into a site audit. Exactly. Yeah, there's no question that does come up. And then we generally target one phrase though at that time so that we can just go, "All right, these guys are in the top. What is it they do differently?" And I like that because I can keep it focused. And I figure the less variables, the better chance I can find something of real value. It also makes it smaller because we went from multiple keywords to just be a massive report which clients either can't afford or just don't want to read. Right. And that's kind of where I specify whether you're doing a market analysis or a specific competitor. If you're doing a market analysis, you look at a number of keywords and you look at a number of competitors who are showing up for those sets of keywords and I'm not going to go in and do a detailed analysis of each competitor, I'm doing more of a overall analysis of the market. So I think it's almost, maybe we're just talking about two different versions of the same thing. Probably. But occasionally, it's funny because that's I think just the nature of our industry because none of us had official training, there isn't really anything that I would, in my opinion. So when it comes to this, it's more like we've invented our own way of doing it from logic and know what works and what doesn't work because we've been doing it so long. Right. So let's stick to what you were talking about. If we were looking at a specific site and we did an analysis of a specific competitor to find out why are they doing better than we are, what are some of the things? Where do you start there? Well, first of all, I pick a minimum of three in the top 10, a minimum of three. So you've got a pretty good broad number of them and try and make sure that the ones that you pick are similar to your company, they seem to be pretty much on par. There's nothing vastly different, like again, like Amazon, something like that, it's just no point. They're going to skew all the results because they can't really do anything wrong, it seems. So okay, so we look at every single site and we'd say, all right, what are the obvious SEO indicators? I mean, those are just a given, right? We'd look at the titles, we'd look at the headings, all the stuff we'd normally do when we're doing an optimization. And in that, we'd certainly compile what one of them might be doing more of. Ironically, we go back to an old tool that we used to use back in the day, like 97 when keyword density worked. You put it in matter to me? What's that? When it mattered? Yeah. GRKDA, which is a great old little program. And I use that just to get a picture of what it gives me stats as this pages, this two headings, this one has, and it lets me do sort of an overview of how each site is optimized and I find that really helpful because then I can get a good idea, and sometimes I even throw that into a chart. It's all about getting this huge, wide picture of all the data and it's trying to find any kind of pattern. That's what I love about it. Oh, yeah, definitely. So there's a tool that I use, if someone can talk about cool tools, I can remember it's called WinWebCrawler, and basically it's a desktop crawler that you can send it out and crawl the site, and if a site is crawlable, which is always handy, it'll produce a spreadsheet basically giving you a list of all the URLs that found on the site, it'll give you all the titles and metadata. If you can crawl it when the last time the page is updated, how big the page is, that's an interesting tool from a competitive analysis standpoint because now you get a really good picture, how big is this site, how many URLs, you can get a real clean look at what are they targeting, how has it broken down from a content perspective as long as they have titles and descriptions that are clean and good like that. If they don't, that's another key that you can look at as well to include in your reports. These guys have lots of duplicate titles and they're missing a bunch of descriptions, those kind of things. Now that can be pretty overwhelming if it's a big, big site, such as I do a good job of making it easy to scan. It does. It'll punch out a spreadsheet. I mean all this stuff in a nice little spreadsheet and you can sort it and just like you would with any date in a spreadsheet. Cool. Can I get that a shot? I like it. Yeah. You just search for web, win, W-I-N crawler. I don't have a specific URL that I could give you for it. Is it a free program? No. It's not. I think it's about a hundred bucks. It's not bad though. It's not bad, especially if it's going to save you that much time. The other one that is free, if you can figure out how to get it to work, is the IAS SEO tool. The one that Bing or Max? That's right. Yeah. If your competitor has not blocked the IAS tool, there you go, that'll do that all for you. Right. That's very true. A lot of it. If you can get it to work. Just to clarify, getting it to work means you have to install it on IIS, an IIS server somewhere successfully. Yeah. And it sounds easy, maybe for some. But when I did it, I found out later on that it had to be on the latest, absolute latest version of Windows Server or Vista. It was just like, "Oh, I didn't have the time for this. I don't keep everything up to date that much." Right. I don't have dates, yes, but not buying all these products like that. Exactly. But anyways, that's a nice one. I've yet to be able to use it, but I've heard good things about it, if you can't actually get it to you. Works. Dido. Yes. Okay. Well, that's a good one. I like that. I'm going to give that a shot at some point. Oh. So another onsite concept is index saturation, which is a fancy term for how much of your site has been indexed by the search engines. Right. And I find that key because of course, that's telling you whether or not you have any structural issues with your navigation and everything's way too deep for search engines to navigate, or perhaps just there's some major blocks and all that stuff. So anyways, before we move on to that, we're going to take a quick break and when we get back, we'll get a little more on an index saturation, some of the other cool stuff. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. How do you choose the right affiliate network to partner with? The answer is simple. MarketHealth.com, where health and wealth connect. Established in 1998, the MarketHealth.com affiliate network allows you to market and promote the world's leading health and beauty offers on the net. Start making recurring income and the highest payouts in our industry. Choose from over 50 of the hottest selling offers ranging from herbal supplements, skincare, vitamins, beauty products, weight loss, and much more. Sign up for free at MarketHealth.com and start making money today. Does your website need a bailout? Looking for a conversion rate stimulus package? Do you need a website improvement to do list? On Target, a subscription service from Future Now and Brian Eisenberg monitors your website 24/7, analyzing the actions of every potential customer. It gives you a to-do list. It tells you exactly what to fix and how to fix it so that more of your visitors do what you need them to do. On Target, pricing starts at $1,000 a month. See more at futurenowink.com/ontarget. I'm Brian Eisenberg and I approve this message. Hey, this is Danny Sullivan. To talk to you about the Bruce Clay Incorporated, they've made ink magazines list of growing private businesses and have exhibited and sponsored at my conferences since the very beginning. You've seen their search engine relationship chart or you've read their SEO code of ethics so you know their SEO experts, but did you know they can help you with PBC, web analytics, web design, marketing strategy, promotion and branding? Yep, get everything you need for success in the online marketplace. You can check it out from the professionals at Bruce Clay Incorporated for over 10 years with offices worldwide. They've got the answers you need. Check them out today at Bruce Clay dot com. Inboxed Wednesdays at 5 p.m. Eastern 2 p.m. Pacific or on demand anytime inside the internet marketing channel only on webmasterradio dot FM. Ok class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session only on webmasterradio dot FM. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio dot FM with John Kirk cut, SEO manager for media it was, and myself, Rasta and CEO of Step 4th web marketing Inc, say just a minute ago we were talking about index saturation so in other words how far a search engine can actually index your website and whether or not there's any issues and if you're doing a competitor analysis, I mean quite handy, you can look at your competitors, find out their site is so well designed, every page is getting indexed whereas yours isn't. I mean that's the kind of stuff that can really make a difference. Not to mention the fact that from a structural standpoint, but just the amount of content you have on your site, I mean you can have a perfect structure and only have 10 pages on your website, the site that has a semi perfect structure and has 2,000 pages indexed is still stronger than your 10 page site. So I think it's the number of pages that you have indexed play a big key if your structure is sound enough because that internal linking structure and those links from page to page you know build that foundation and if you have 2,000 pages building a foundation versus 10 pages building a foundation, that larger foundation is going to do better. Yeah and you know while you're doing this there's certain things that are just sort of well it just makes sense when you're looking through the sites which one has better content. That's another thing to throw to client, you know if they're not doing well, look you've got to bring your content up to a new game, a new level because your competitors are getting so many viral links because their content is so good. Yeah and if they came to you with a specific keyword that the competitor is doing better on, you can probably find you know compare the 2 pages that both companies are ranking for you know if you're talking about content from a targeting perspective, you know how well are those pages each targeting that particular phrase. Definitely. One of the things actually I was just doing before we started the show is doing some of the geo-site maps like we had when we were talking about in the last show. And I think that's something too, you know you've got to keep an eye out for the different types of site maps the competitors are using. You know if they don't have them or if they do, a lot of times the ones that are you know kicking butt in a competitive field will have a site map at least one and you can look at just how you can really get an idea for their marketing strategy by looking at how they've set up the site map because if it's like I said a competitive market they're usually very very particular about what they put in there and the update frequencies and stuff actually have some reasoning behind them versus just being an automatic ad. Yeah definitely, don't disagree one bit though you have to remember though that's a good indicator but the site map itself is not going to play a specific role in getting that page ranked higher. The competitors page being ranked higher than your page. What you might be able to determine though is you know either through the site map or it was one of these other crawling tools we talked about is whether the page that just started beating your page is new or not so that kind of stuff can help as well if it's a new page it all of a sudden it showed up in the index and started beating yours and that makes a difference when you're doing your analysis. Yeah and one thing too we mentioned a second ago was index saturation if your site isn't doing as well in terms of being indexed perhaps the structure is fine it just seems to be some oddity that Google's not getting in deeply. I actually did a little reading of the day and recalled that one way of going about that is to change your site map to just focus on deep pages you're not going to lose ranking because it's just a suggested place for certain Google to find new contents so if you link to some of the stuff that's deeper in your site that hasn't been indexed voila you know you've given them a direct entry point and that can help you get a few more indexed pages just that came up the other day. So another one is local marketing optimization like you can look if you find out your because a lot of people these days are focused on the fact that their competitors are doing better than them in the local 7 pack no longer the 10 back in the local results and it could be that they've got KML links on the site you know that those are the keyword keyhole sorry keyhole mapping link I think it is for keyhole forgotten the full term for it anyways it's from Google these are the downloadable files it has all the geo location for your location and all that sort of stuff right they could have that they could have the address on every page they could have a geo site map there's a whole bunch of stuff too and if you find that on their site and you don't have it well there's a go there you go you see that through all your competitors were kicking kicking your butt right now there's another good example and I think that ties into a lot of the things because we've talked a lot about on your site you know I don't know your competitors site but if someone's going as far as putting together local marketing optimization they're looking at off site factors probably maybe a little deeper than you are for local search they might be getting in the areas of off site factors that you're not so they're building up strength from that perspective and that's a very good to me that's a very good clue you know if they have one of these these as local based site maps you know they're looking outside they're looking at a wide variety of different marketing techniques and platforms and if you're not doing that and your competitor is you're behind yeah it's a really good you're right and it's and to perhaps further focus that it's it's an obvious example that they know what they're doing and that they're on the cutting edge to some degree anyway local marketing and geo site maps and stuff are are still far from common so that's they've got the got some game anything you think about a competitor analysis is not that different than you know analyzing your own site you got three things you got to worry about is your site crawlable do you have the right content and are you building links and your competitor has to worry about those exacts three things and when you're doing analysis those are the main things you have to look at to analyze are they are they is that site crawled better than yours does that site have better content that yours does that site have better links building techniques and built practices and you do you know to put it in a nutshell those are the three main things yeah that's a good segue into one of the biggest factors which is off-site and you know you noted a few sub topics in terms of backlink analysis why don't you kick that off yeah I mean when I'm looking at off-site when I'm doing a backlink analysis for competitor there's a ton of things we look at but there's some of the basic ones are again if you're looking at a certain term and you're ranking for a certain page and your competitors ranking for a certain page and you look at the two pages specifically how many inbound links are there to that page if it's a home page or it's a deep page in the site how many direct links inbound from an off-site are to that page and at the same time you look at the overall site so how many site how many links to this whole site versus how many links to our whole site and the reason you look at that is because when we talk about that give you kind of an indicator are they better at link building you if they have 10,000 links and you have 200 you got a long way to go to catch up yeah I feel sorry for you then yeah and you know a great tool for that is free as it gets is the Yahoo site Explorer because when you do a search on a competitor site you can actually specify in terms of the backlinks you could say to this page only versus to the entire site so you can get a good perspective there and now another thing when you're looking at those links and this I don't think you get this I know you can't get this from Yahoo but something you want to look at again if you're looking for a specific term is anchor text of those links how often are they using a variation of that specific term versus how often are you using a variation of that specific term to your specific page that makes a huge difference yeah and one again another tool that I use for that is opti link which is a cool little program from windrow software because it can actually do a spider of a site and it will return kind of like I guess like the wind web crawler in a way but in this case it just focuses on links and it'll look for one linking to you and then it will outline all the text used in the backlinks so you can get an idea of just how focused they were when they were doing their link building or whether or not these are all just really just viral from good content because if you see it all the same you know that either buying them or they've done a really really intense link building campaign by calling people you know doing what it takes to get a link from a site exactly or they have they have the little page on their site that says if you want to link to us use this code and you get a lot of people to use it exactly yes if you can still do that these days without getting one back I don't know I mean I'm just I guess it wouldn't hurt to have it on your site if you want to but I don't know how often it be used yes but actually we're still talking about links but this is not an off site issue but it's still a link issue that can help a specific page you know we talked about anchor text from off site links but the anchor text in your internal linkage in your navigation linking to different pages through your site that anchor text is just as important as off site anchor text from specific targeted terms and if your competitor beats you on a phrase or not that's very true and actually I want to touch on that in a sec but before we do we're going to take a quick break SEO 101 will be back right after recess so you're telling me your affiliate program on the local pages affiliate network is performing as well as your handicap absolutely thanks to their top tier XML feed I'm able to monetize all of my traffic they handle all of my volume to anywhere in the world plus I also get high cost per click and the most exclusive of advertisers to work with you should join the club sounds good I can't wait to join but first let's work on that use the power of local pages with over five billion searches per month and the largest database of paid search listings let local pages affiliate network personalized your account and give you the search tools and solutions you need become a local pages affiliate today with local pages calm this is a test of the PR web content and news delivery system from PR web and PR web author calm if this was a real really state your story would reach more than 30,000 journalists 250,000 RSS subscribers and just 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know that's what I was going to say when you do some of these researches on competitors you might find that they've got very few inbound links from external sites most of them are counted from their own site freely frustrating sometimes because it doesn't make any sense I've seen some that are ninety five percent all their own pages and they're still kicking butt because they've got such a good anchor text system I guess in their site I still baffles me sometimes but I still think you know I will say is that internal anchor text and internal link structure is one of the most underutilized portions of SEO as a whole there really is if you become an expert in internal linking from anchor text structure standpoint your site is going to rock and just like you said Ross I mean you don't have to have nearly as many inbound links as your competitor might if you've got a good structure internally and you got lots of content and pages yeah good and good content and everything's very relevant to the site the theme is extremely strong you know that's all huge another one that's added in there too is local links now for me that means links from perhaps your local chamber of commerce and again this is focusing perhaps on local marketing now why is this person getting a better ranking than me well perhaps in the local seven pack because they have links from local entities and that's that's pretty powerful and how did they get them while the chamber they're probably maybe they were a guest speaker at a recent event maybe they they sponsored a recent event it could be anything maybe they won an award all these things are helpful and in some cases they've actually they found this link to them and they thought wow I really want to boost this because you know the chambers obviously got a lot of benefit and they are linking to that to build the power of that page so that that's again forwarded onto them there's a lot of clever ways to build that in popularity and I think to take take your local link thing just a step further especially for for you Ross to say you're in Canada and you're targeting Google.ca and you and your competitor both have exactly 20 links and all the links are the same weight but all yours are .ca links and only half of his or .ca links for the .ca version of Google you're probably going to do better yeah so from if you're not you know in the U.S. or targeting just .com type of sites if you if you're in a geo specific domain that's a big factor as well you go on and on on that one I mean everything could be a fact you've got a postal box or whatever instead of actually a firm address location it can be just go on and on and on the reasons why you may be doing better or they may be doing better than you. Another one is link networks I love this I love when I go in and I go in the look in the back and in the back of their sort of the back trunk and look at all the links pointing them and find it. Wow those will look alike hmm interesting yeah use tools like what's that site called who is that shoot domain tools on there you can do I think you have to pay for it now unfortunately but you can actually see who what other sites they own and you can also find out what is hosted on their own server they may have multiple sites on their own server which is a dead giveaway. Yeah you can do there's a bunch of reverse IP lookup tools out there you don't you don't necessarily have to pay for them yeah that's true but I just let you know though it's it's kind of weird because I actually had this come up last week or I was doing a reverse IP lookups to find out you know what domains were hosted on a specific IP address and I use domain tools because I actually do pay for it I remember it's a really good tool but I went and looked at some of the free tools and I used like four different tools four different reverse IP tools every one of them gave me different results so I had no clue which one was right so I ended up just combining them all and saying these are all the domains hosted on this IP. That's interesting I wonder I wonder if it's what they see from a different part of the net. Yeah I don't know I haven't had enough time to actually try to figure out why I got those results or which ones were more accurate yet because it'll be right yeah it just depends depends on you know how they're pulling it and what they're pulling you know how the different domains are configured might be pulled different by different tools. Okay well there's certainly a lot in that as well I mean just just reverse IPs and stuff that's awesome and you feel really good if you like the cat that cut the bird when you find stuff like that you're like yes I get to add some real juice to this result resulting report for the client is it's kind of fun. In other words article syndication if you notice that a lot of their links appear to be from places like EZine articles and all that kind of stuff you get a real idea that a lot of their links are not artificial but you know they're not nearly as a fish a fish it's not someone actually saying wow the site rocks no it's that they've got this awesome article that did very well and you can start to see that blog is their blogging is a huge key to their success. Correct and then that brings up a good point too it just kind of steps into the realm of social media when you talk about blogs. If all of a sudden the competitor decided to step into social media it's a new marketing strategy for them they're going to start getting if they do it correctly they're going to start getting some new inbound links from a lot of these social media profiles and people talking about them in social spaces again if they're doing that and you're not they have a big advantage over you because you're generating a bunch of new links. Yeah and another one is advertising partners yeah who who are they working with and and perhaps they're scratching each other's back if they are there might be a room for another back scratcher yeah why not take over give them a better offer it could be a number of things that are working yet and one I found it was a real gem a while back was a certain I don't want to give away in case it's still powerful but there is a oh well just gonna keep it out of yourself aren't you? Yeah all right it was the W3C has a sponsors page and at the time it was a pr9 and they had they didn't use no follows nice yeah and but that was juicy but if you're an ice cream truck salesman it's not real relevant no oh you know what I think it's a pr9 I'm not sure that would help it was like wow pr9 link to you we don't care what it's about but but but if you're a web developer jump all over there exactly so there's juicy one for you guys if that's still working um I know so powerful the time is only it's not cheap but you know if you think about it it is it's a thousand a year to get it out of that listing but yeah then that's that's cheap for a pr9 yeah most would sell their soul for that so that's pretty nice but last I looked it was no followed however and I looked again and it wasn't so who knows it's and not and then who knows the status of no follows anymore anyway is that just precisely yeah I don't know I do know that I would expect that it's still considered a uh negative you know it's certainly not going to help the links like if if someone no follows your link it's it's certainly not going to help you a lot right I don't disagree with that well I think uh we must be near the end of the show now and well I do I do want to say one more thing though yeah if you do in competitive analysis or you're having that competitive analysis done for you I think I don't know if you offer this Ross but something that I think find very valuable in clients if I'm very very valuable in the past is competitive tracking so you set up we set up this baseline of things you look at you know how much content are they having what's their linking lack are they participating in local or social or any that kind of stuff and if you track that on a monthly or even just like every couple week basis um you're gonna find you're gonna be able to track what your competitors are doing and keep tabs on them you know if you see that they start being social and all of a sudden they start doing a lot of social you know what their marketing strategy is and you can you know you can respond accordingly so I don't think a competitive analysis is it can be something it's like a one-time thing that you do but it's really an ongoing process in my mind I quite agree I mean at least when you're talking about a fairly substantial company that needs needs to keep it on top of the other guys that much I mean in a small business I think might that might be a bit overwhelming for them but true but but if a significant portion of your revenue is driven by your website I don't I don't care if you're a mom and pop selling you know teddy bear baskets out of your kitchen if all your revenue comes from your website and you have this main competitor that keeps beating you out then even at that point I think it's worthwhile staying on top of yeah well at that point like you say it's uh your livelihood and you better start doing whatever you can well I thank you for you know behalf of myself Rasta and CEO of step 4th web marketing and John karkut as you imagine for me was thanks for uh joining us today um my twitter id is at rasta and john's is at john karkut and I actually have made a list for our listeners so let me know if you listen hit me up on twitter um you know send me a tweet and I'll add you to the list we'll get us a big list of uh SEO 101 listeners excellent it could be embarrassing you know for the only two on there though we got ten so far but I think half of them are like you and me and some of us well thank you very much and keep in mind that the show is every monday at 5 p.m. eastern 2 p.m. pacific and uh you know if you've got any questions for us please do give me an email or john an email or just tweet us my email address is ross at step 4th dot com and john's is i'm jr karkut at mediaways dot com great have a great week off the holidays are doubly important this year so make your celebrations doubly special at Kroger we've got a huge selection of high quality meats on top of fresh natural produce like fresh never frozen prime great beef and our simple truth organic Brussels sprouts or delicious king crab legs with our private selection homemade potatoes and to say that doubly fast Kroger fresh for everyone get more ways to save at the buy five or more save one dollar each sale just buy five or more participating items and save a dollar each with cart Kroger fresh for everyone