How to Detect influencers backlinks and Leverage them through Social Media

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In social media the number of followers a user has usually correlates to a person’s influence on the social web. Even thought this can be true at times followers can be bought through contests, gifts, and purchased through other marketing agencies. Using these tactics will raise a person’s follower count however, will usually lead to a dead following (users only followed for the prize not because they are interested in the person or the topics that they’re talking about). Bloggers can dot the same type of tricks to generate content but there are some ways to find out where they’re getting their traffic.

Searching content backlinks is a powerful strategy when analyzing influencers and building a strategy for distributing content through the social web. In a previous post I showed you how to use Google Adwords and other SEO tools to identify content and influencers to engage with. While this post is to help you look into those influencers strategies on driving traffic and followers to their blog or profile. Understanding who’s linking to them can be a powerful tool to help you understand their true authority and in addition help you identify others bloggers or websites that would more than likely link to your similar but unique content as well. Consequently driving traffic and followers in the same manner that your influencers are.

Searching Content of Backlinks

To kick things off you’ll need to set up a Google Custom Search Engine using data from Open Site Explorer. There are two exports of data you can use, which are links and linking domains.There are pros and cons for both data sets that you’ll see below.

Linking URLs

Pros

• Searches content that only has links
• Reduces the amount of noise that you’ll receive in the search.

Cons

• Top links only get pulled – hard to identify niche networks
• Only 25 urls per domain
• Duplicate links limit domains diversity
• Limited content (5,000 annotations = 5,000 URLS)

Linking Domains

Pros

• Search all indexed content on a linking domain
• Find linking sources not included in OSE export
• Greater domain diversity
• More content (5,000 annotations = 5,000 domains of content)

Cons

• More noise
• Large linking domains like WordPress.com and Blogger.com have subdomains (lots of noise)
• Results that don’t have link

Setup of Custom Search Engine

It might seem a little scary at first but setting up your own custom search is quite easy. For this example we’re going to look at Open Site Explorer.

1) Perform search in Open Site Explorer

2) Pull linking domains for all pages on the root domain,  export to CSV

3) Get list from Excel

I used Find & Replace to add a * to the end of all URLs, for matching. You can sort by DA or linking domains. Google Custom Search Engine only allows 5,000 annotations, so only copy up to 5,000 domains.

4) Create Custom Search Engine

Go to Google Custom Search Engine.

5) Perform your searches

So here are the pages on domains that link to distilled.co.uk, that include “link building” in the content and “resources” in the title.

This solution gives you a new way to mine for backlinks opportunities using other influencer’s backlinks. You can also include linking domains from multiple influencers at the same time. However, you can only include up to 5,000 annotations at a time, so you might want to use some Excel filters to remove noise and duplicate entries. If you haven’t identified influencers in your industry here’s a previous post on how to do so. Additionally a great place to start is to look at your competitors as well.

Tips

Here are a few quick tips to speed things up.

• Remove massive domains – Large domains like wordpress.com and blogspot.com can produce a lot of noise.
• Use the –site:  search to reduce noise – If a particular domain is creating a lot of noise in your search, use a negative site search to remove it.
• Search brand mentions – A search for the brand can help find the linking pages on these domains.
• Search top anchors from OSE – Find the pages that include the anchors the site is targeting.

Example Queries

“powered by wordpress” “distilled”

Find pages that mention the brand “Distilled” and include “Powered by WordPress”. This is an easy way to find the blogs linking to Distilled.

“guest blogger” OR “guest post” OR “guest article” OR “guest column” -site:blogspot.com -site:wordpress.com -wordpress.org

Find guest blogging opportunities, but filter out domains that may create a significant amount of noise.

“powered by vbulletin” AND seo

Find vBulletin powered forums mentioning SEO.

“link building” intitle:resources

Find link building resource pages.

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