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Announcing the New & Improved Link Intersect Tool

Filed under  seo

Posted by randfish

Y’all remember how last October, we launched a new section in Open Site Explorer called “Link Opportunities?” While I was proud of that work, there was one section that really disappointed me at the time (and I said as much in my comments on the post).

Well, today, that disappointment is over, because we’re stepping up the Link Intersect tool inside OSE big time:


Literally thousands of sweet, sweet link opportunities are now yours at the click of a button

In the initial launch, Link Intersect used Freshscape (which powers Fresh Web Explorer). Freshscape is great for certain kinds of data – links and mentions that come from newly published pages that are in news sources, blogs, and feeds. But it’s not great for non-news/blogs/feed sources because it’s intentionally avoiding those!

For example, in the screenshot above, I wanted to see all the pages that link to SeriousEats.com and SplendidTable.org but don’t link to SmittenKitchen.com.

That’s 671 more, juicy link opportunities thanks to the hard work of the Moz Big Data and Research Tools teams.

How does the new Link Intersect work?

The tool looks at the top 250,000 links our index has pointing to each of the intersecting targets you enter, and the top 1 million links in our index pointing to the excluded URL.

Link Intersect then runs a differential comparison to determine which of the 250K links to each of the intersecting targets are from the same URL or root domain, and removes any of those links that point to the top million links to the excluded URL/root/sub domain.

This means it’s possible for sites and pages with massive quantities of links that we won’t show every intersecting link we know about, but since the sorting is in Page Authority order, you’ll get the highest quality/most important ones at the top.

You can use Link Intersect to see three unique views on the data:

  • Pages that link to subdomains (particularly useful if you’re interested in shared links to sites on hosted subdomains like blogspot, wordpress, etc or to a specific subdomain section of a competitor’s site)
  • Pages that link to root domains (my personal favorite, as I find the results the most comprehensive)
  • Root domains that link to the root domains (great if you’re trying to get a broad sense of domain-level outreach/marketing targets)

Note that it’s possible the root domains will actually expose more links that pages because the domain-level link graph is easier and faster to sort through, so the 250K limit is less of a barrier.

Like most of the reports in Open Site Explorer, Link Intersect comes with a handy CSV Export option:

When it finishes (my most recent one took just under 3 minutes to run and email me), you’ll get a nice email like this one:

Please ignore the grammatical errors. I’m sure our team will fix those up soon 🙂

Why are these such good link/outreach/marketing targets?

Generally speaking, this type of data is invaluable for link outreach because these sites and pages are ones that clearly care about the shared topics or content of the intersecting targets. If you enter two of your primary competitors, you’ll often get news media, blog posts, reference resources, events, trade publications, and more that produce content in your topical niche.

They’re also good targets because they actually link out! This means you can avoid sifting through sites whose policies or practices mean they’re unlikely to ever link to you – if they’ve linked to those other two chaps, why not you, too?!

Basically, you can check the trifecta of link opportunity goodness boxes (which I’ve helpfully illustrated above, because that’s just the kind of SEO dork I am).

Link Intersect is limited only by your own creativity – so long as you can keep finding sites and pages on the web whose links might also be a match for your own site, we can keep digging through trillions of links, finding the intersects, and giving them back to you.

3 examples of Link Intersect in action

Let’s look at some ways we might put this to use in the real world:

#1: I’m trying to figure out who links to my two big competitors in the world of book reviews

First off, remember that Link Intersect works on a root domain or subdomain level, so we wouldn’t want to use something like the NYTimes’ review of books, because we’d be finding all the intersections to NYTimes.com. Instead, we want to pick more topically-focused domains, like these two:

You’ll also note that I’ve used a fake website as my excluded URL – this is a great trick for when you’re simply interested in any sites/pages that link to two domains and don’t need to remove a particular target.

#2: I’ve got a locally-focused website doing plumbing and need a few link sources to help boost my potential to rank in local and organic SERPs

In this instance, I’ll certainly look at pages linking to combinations of the top ranking sites in the local results, e.g. the 15 results for this query:

This is a solid starting point, especially considering how few links local sites often need to perform well. But we can get creative by branching outside of plumbing and exploring related fields like construction:

Focusing on better-linked-to industries and websites will give more results, so we want to try to broaden rather than narrow our categories and look for the most-linked-to sites in given verticals for comparisons.

#3: I’m planning some new content around weather patterns for my air conditioning website and want to know what news and blog sites cover extreme weather content

First, I’m going to start by browsing some search results for content in this field that’s received some serious link activity. By turning on my Mozbar’s SERPs overlay, I can see the sites and pages that have generated loads of links:

Now I can run a few combinations of these through the Link Intersect Tool:

While those domain names make me fear for humanity’s intelligence and future survival, they also expose a great link opportunity tactic I hadn’t previously considered – climate science deniers and the more politically charged universe of climate science overall.

I hope you enjoy the new Link Intersect tool as much as I have been – I think it’s one of the best things we’ve put in Open Site Explorer in the last few months, though what we’re releasing in March might beat even that, so stay tuned!

And, as always, please do give us feedback and feel free to ask questions in the comments below or through the Moz Community Q+A.

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