This is part two of a two part series of articles discussing the best way to size up the competition when trying to optimise your website to get first place listings on Google. If you haven’t read the first part of this article, don’t worry just do a search on this site for “SEO- How to Spy on Your Competition (part 1)” and I will see you back here for part 2.
Indexed Pages
There is some debate on the subject if a larger website is better than smaller ones. The thing to remember here is the quality of relevant content and not the number of pages. To check the size of a competitor’s website go to Google and type this search query in the search bar: Link: www.yourcompetitorsdomain.com. This will return a list of all the pages Google has indexed for this particular website. This however will not tell all the pages just the ones Google has indexed. This will however give you a good idea what you’re up against in terms of the size your website needs to be.
I disagree
I would like to point out that I’m sure that many of the things I have mentioned in this article may cause some debate which is healthy. I would like to stress that even if your website has more links, more keyphrase specific links, and more pages this will not mean that your website will rank highly for a specific keyphrase. This is because the search engines also take into account many other factors including how your website is structured, if there is any duplicate content and who you are linking to and many more factors that Google won’t tell you about.
Automate the Process
This may seem like a lot of work and luckily there are ways to speed up your research. Help is at hand though as there are a few software applications and websites that can speed up this process for you. However Google doesn’t like this kind of tactic. Why? Because the take up bandwidth on the Google servers which is a fair point. Google used to give you an API key to allow you to do this, however sadly don’t anymore. Moreover if you do have an API key that key will still work.
