Sphinn - How to Steal Competitors’ Keywords While Protecting Your Own

40
Sphinn It!

How to Steal Competitors’ Keywords While Protecting Your Own

Went Hot: May 6, 2008 - 4:35 pm
Posted By: DaveDavis 162 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://seoroi.com)
Category: SEO

Want to figure out what keywords a competitor is optimizing for? Want to avoid getting your keyword research ripped off? Gab shows how.

8 Comments

Who Desphunn This (0)

Comments

from DaveDavis 162 days ago #

Votes: 0 | Vote:

+ -

Great article Gab.

from plaboon 160 days ago #

Votes: 0 | Vote:

+ -

No offense man but this is some pretty bad advice. You want your site map to be prominent so the spiders (not to mention the visitor) can find all your pages. You never want to have it drill down into buried folders or use numbers as your anchor text. The methods you explain defeat all the benefits for having a sitemap both from a user and SEO perspective.

Not sure I agree copying others sitemaps for keywords is a great idea either because 99% of sites don't optimize their sitemaps and anyone with a few hours could probably build a better list themselves. Maybe it would help in the research process but I doubt it because the chances of finding a well optimized sitemap in your exact industry would take more time then its worth.

from Gab 160 days ago #

Votes: 0 | Vote:

+ -

Prominent to the engines yes ... prominent to humans no. If you read the comments at my site you'll notice I already had this discussion there, so I'm not going to repeat myself. If you need spiders to discover it, anchor text makes no difference. And humans hardly click on sitemaps; let's be honest here.

As to finding a well optimized sitemap ... I just did, in the time it takes to type in a URL. In case you're having trouble, try looking at the top ranked sites; the tactic is so popular with SEOs that many of them use SiteMaps when there's no need.

from DanThies 159 days ago #

Votes: 1 | Vote:

+ -

Tools like Optilink, combined with keyword databases, make your keyword strategy pretty transparent anyway. Going beyond that and using tools like SEMPhonic to extract keyword candidates from a site, using a keyword database to find the real search terms, can even take your research on a site well beyond their current keyword strategy. Bring stuff like the OCI tool at Adcenter Labs into the mix, and... well..

I get it. You're trying to stop humans who are intelligent enough to look at your site map, but not intelligent enough to use tools. I'd rather be #1 and give everyone a copy of my keyword list than give up a page full of useful links.

from Gab 159 days ago #

Votes: 0 | Vote:

+ -

Dan, thanks for sharing those extra valuable tips ! Always a pleasure to hear from one of the keyword research elite :D.

As to giving up a page full of useful links, if your site's built well, wouldn't the site map be redundant? I mean, SEO existed and succesfully optimized even deep pages prior to sitemaps' existence, right? If a sitemap's links are needed, but you still want to hide them from other folks, you can also look at linking to it in an inconspicuous way, such as a link buried in the privacy policy or TOS etc.

Also, if you read the comments on my site, you'll notice other people highlighted that the 'protecting your own' list doesn't work so well and shared your criticisms. Some great tips and some of your concerns were shared there and the discussion is pretty interesting.

from DanThies 159 days ago #

Votes: 0 | Vote:

+ -

True. If your site's well built, you have no use for a sitemap, yes, unless you're trying to do some elaborate PageRank sculpting thing... but I'd have trouble inventing a scenario where you needed it.

(But I've used a site map as a quick band-aid plenty of times, for sites where the redesign is going to take weeks to months)

from willneu 157 days ago #

Votes: 0 | Vote:

+ -

I don't see how this makes any sense what-so-ever, a sitemap is a great tool for increasing keyword coverage of pages within your website. While if your website has 100 pages then yea, granted you can probably get a decent structure internally anyway, but when you have 100,000 pages then a sitemap really does help.

This does just seem somewhat backward to me, going against everything I recommend to clients on a daily (quite literally) basis.....