Improve your link building with link intersection

Link intersection refers to the link building tactic, of taking inspiration from your competitors' links. Link intersection is primarily used as a way to discover new potential link building opportunities. When you do link intersection, you will often want to find topics your competitor covers that you also cover, and then look for websites that has linked to your competitor in regards to that "intersect".

The amount of competitors you can track at once depends on what Morningscore package you have. Each package contain a different number of website credits, that you can use to track websites.

It's important to mention, that competitor sites only use 0.5 credits each, instead of the 1 credit that non-competitor sites use. If you are for example tracking 3 competitor sites and 1 non-competitor site at the same time, then you are using 2,5 credits in total.

When choosing competitors you should generally try to choose pages in a similar field to you. This will ensure that you can get better inspiration for new link building or keyword opportunities, which is especially important in link intersection.

Choosing a competitor that is bigger than you can be helpful, when it comes to gathering inspiration for new target keywords or  potential link building opportunities. But be careful with this as these sites often go for very sought after keywords and links, which can be tough to get for a smaller site.

Similar sized competitors are as an effective way to compare yourself to the competition, and discover both what your website's strengths are, and which features could be improved.

Knowing which links your competitors have built can improve your SEO performance drastically. One of the biggest benefits your SEO can gain, comes from discovering new potential link building opportunities.

Your competitors will often be in the same field as you. A lot of sites that write about your competitors might be specializing a certain topic related to your competitors fields, and by extension your field. This means that discovering and reaching out to these pages can be a good way to secure more backlinks for yourself, and even contacts for later promotions of your brand.

As you probably already know, links and link building are an essential part of boosting your SEO, so this makes link intersection an invaluable tool for anybody who seeks to rank highly on Google.

Links and backlinks are very important for SEO. Google have a lot of factors it takes into account when ranking pages, but one of the important ones is the authority of the page. Authority is a way for Google to estimate the quality of a page, based on links. Authority is simply put based on how many links a page has from other pages.

This is because Google views outgoing links to other pages as recommendations of those pages, thus raising both their authority and perceived quality in Google's eyes. This then makes following recommendations from those sites a lot more valuable to Google.

Nofollow and dofollow links are link building terms, that are a very important to know if you want your SEO to benefit from link building.

If a link is marked as "nofollow", it means the link will not give as much value to the page it links to, as it normally would. The term "dofollow links" can feel a bit redundant as it really just describes normal backlinks without a nofollow tag. When it comes to link building and SEO, dofollow backlinks are of course better than nofollow backlinks. This does however not mean that nofollow links are completely worthless as they still provide some value, just less than they normally would.

If you go to the "all links" tab in Morningscore you will be able to see a purple bar, with a number besides all of the listed link. This number represents you links "value".

Value is a metric used to describe how valuable a link is, and also helps you decide which links could be worth building, when looking at a competitor's links. The value of links is also a part of what helps us calculate your Linkscore.

If you click on the URL at the left side af the data you will be able to see the link value of each of your individual links. The link value is based of the metric "Domain authority", which is one of the factors Google looks at when ranking websites. The domain authority is based on how many pages point towards the website in question. In this case more pages means better links.

This is because Google sees links as a recommendation of the site. So therefore, a website will be able to give valuable links if they have a lot of already valuable links pointing towards them. Our value metric in Morningscore is an approximation of the domain authority that Google uses, as the exact values of specific domains are only know to Google.

Please note that these numbers are approximations, as only Google knows the exact number of link value, each site can give you.

We calculate the value by comparing the number of external links leading to a specific page with the number of external links leading from that page.

Link building itself is not against Google's terms of service, but some kinds of links and link building methods are heavily looked down upon by Google. Link intersection, which is covered in this article is luckily not among them.

Of course you can still utilize link intersection, and still end up with links that violate Google's terms of service like bought links, or links from link farms. A lot of these bad link building practices are being struck down by Google, but the can still work. Google does however always work on ways enforce their rules more effectively, so it is not recommended to utilize bad link building practices.

Bad link building methods can stil work currently, but the links you built could become worthless in the future if Google manages to make bad link building harder. In a worst case scenario, bad link building could lead to a penalty from Google in the future.

So in conclusion you should try to stay away from bought and low-quality links or other types of malicious links.

This question depends a lot on the size of your business, as well as the field you are in. While having more relevant quality links can never hurt, it is important not to get blind sided, by link building if there are other aspects of your website you need to work on.

As a rule of thumb, you should usually have at least as many links as your similarly sized competitors. This can however vary on your field, but it is stille a good idea to set this as a goal post.

If you aren't sure how many links your competitors have, you can find out by using Morningscore.

Your linkscore in Morningscore represents of how well your overall link building would fit a real life business. Linkscores are divided into specific tiers, based on the quality of your link building as seen below:

When judging your Linkscore, you should think about how well the tier you have been assigned compares to the actual size of your business. If you are an international corporation, but your linkscore is at the Lemonstand tier, then you should probably work on your link building.