Majestic is a longstanding sponsor of SMXL Milan, the biggest international digital marketing conference held annually in Milan.
I held the Majestic workshop. It was great meeting the people who use Majestic and network, exchange information, share experience about checking backlinks and link building.
In 4 hours, we had a great discussion and reviewed more than 130 (available to download). I suggest you read this post and then download slides and PDF transcript of this post – If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us – we’ll reply 🙂
Link Intelligence
Redefining Backlinks and Link Building Strategies
The workshop offered insights on how links play an essential role in defining relationships, and how all the link building tools of the Majestic platform can be put to use in many different ways to explore the web, expand the digital footprint and ultimately improve SEO.
It was the first time I publicly spoke about the new Link Context functionality and Link Density metric.
Link Context was first launched in September and the feedback is constant and positive: as an avid Majestic user, I too have been using Link Context and shared my experience and insights on how to use this link building tool that can save so much when performing backlink analysis during the workshop.
Participants immediately caught onto the potential of this innovation as I walked them through a few practical examples: we worked on different websites of very different sizes, shapes and topics during the four hours we spent together. To demonstrate how effective Link Context actually is, I examined the backlink profile of the biggest and very authoritative newspapers in Italy: Il Corriere della Sera.
A quick look at Site Explorer reveals all the power of a formidable backlink profile…
The Fresh Index count is more than 35 million backlinks with an increase of nearly 1 million links over the past 90 days: how do you manage all that information? For most “normal” users who manage data in excel, this amount of data will crash both Excel and your machine.
Thanks to the new Context tab in Site Explorer, Majestic provides a “shortlist” of the most significant links. In the case of corriere.it the shortlist is 30.000 links – it would take me days to “clean” and review all that data. At the workshop, we were able to filter all that data in a matter of minutes:
I was able to reduce the list from 30.000 backlinks to just over 11.000 in real-time: this was possible using the slider…
From here, we can go on to choose other options to identify links by Trust Flow, anchor text, Topical Trust Flow… and many other parameters – all in just a few clicks!
There was a great deal of interest about Link Context, especially amongst those Majestic users often facing the challenge to identify quality link building prospects for specific projects: Link Context will drastically reduce link scouting activities and totally eliminate that annoying, time consuming and repetitive work of manual validation of each and every link!
Related Sites
Using Related Sites for Backlink Research
Relates Sites are another very useful and extremely interesting piece of data produced by Majestic based on Link Context. These are the top sites Majestic have produced algorithmically from backlink data.
I explained how backlinks on a page are often “in company” of other links in the immediate vicinity, and how this data can provide very useful insights of either competitors or similar sites.
Similar Site Analysis help Digital Marketing & PR
The potential for relationship development became apparent as we worked on websites suggested by participants: links placed close to one another are a great starting point to discover new relationships and quality link building prospects.
We exported the data table to Excel via the “Export Data” option. We Also did some work with the “bucket” used to create a super shortlist of links from the different pages for training purposes and further SEO investigations using other SEO Tools in Majestic.
In a very short period of time, we built up an impressive list of backlink prospects for a small restaurant we had identified not far from MiCo, the venue where the workshop and SMXL Milan were held this year.
Majestic Campaigns
Agency delegates were keen to see Majestic Campaigns in action and wanted to know “everything” about campaigns and how they could be put to good use for their clients.
We reviewed the Campaign Sharing option and how useful it is in providing constant updates on the evolution of backlink profiles and Google Search Console Data.
Case Studies
I reserved a considerable amount of time for two case histories in different areas of interest, which confirmed how powerful Majestic can be when put to work.
Case N°1 – Brainstorming a Link Building Campaign
I think this is one of the most challenging and rewarding activities for a link builder. There are no rules, there is no quick fix, no shortcut that will help you on this one. No pain, no gain.
Everyone has a style, a unique approach and strategy and will bring to the table different results. In my presentation, I included slides about a recent link building activity (still underway) for an industrial client operating in an unusual niche: fish processing systems. Many approached me after the workshop to ask questions about the approach and the strategy I submitted to the Client for approval.
Case N°2 – Can SPAM Backlinks hurt your rankings?
This was more of an open question based on a case study of a very small football site, ranking in Google. The site was struck by a sudden and intense backlink profile attack with more than 10.000 SPAM backlinks – all nofollowed. The massive (and sudden) release of so many SPAM backlinks coincided with a sudden and significant fall in the rankings. Majestic was instrumental in identifying the attack and understanding the nature of it.
I’ll present both case studies soon here on the Majestic Blog – Stay tuned!
Download this Blogpost (PDF)
Workshop Slides
He has an engineering degree, has worked for major aerospace organizations including the European Space Agency (Noordwijk - Netherlands), and has been working on the web since the very beginning of the commercial World Wide Web in 1994.
With 25 years of hands on experience, Sante has reviewed and optimized hundreds of websites and successfully cooperated with small local companies and large multi-national corporations, offering a wide spectrum of expertise essential to the success of a project.
Sante is a seasoned bi-lingual SEO & web marketing consultant offering services in organic placement, paid search, and content creation, in both English and Italian.
Sante regularly attends and speaks at search marketing conferences and teaches, and offers SEO related courses. Sante is the Majestic Brand Ambassador to Italy.
More information on Sante:
Twitter: @sjachille
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sjachille/
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