Dudes and dudettes, prepare yourselves to be inundated with the knowledge of cool backlink tips! Cool knowledge. From the guy who invented cool. That's right. Diamond 'Do-Follow' Dave is in the house and ready to blow your minds with some backlink report formatting and filtering tips. I'm a busy man so I'm going to keep it short and sweet, just like the classic guitar heroics of "Eruption."
Do you have what it takes to be a data wizard? Of course you do!
Let's plug in and get on stage-- no time for sound checks or tuning!
First you get your bodacious data. Radical!
This is where the data hails from. This is its hometown:
That's right, it's Majestic SEO!
More specifically: Majestic Historic Index > Root Domain > Backlinks
WHOA! You're there!
Click “Download Data” at the bottom of the page in excel format. Now you're cooking with gas! Whoa!
You're in for a real bummer if you don't keep in mind that with a basic subscription Majestic will only supply the top 2500 backlinks without processing an advanced report. But take a chill pill! One way around this gnarly fact of life is to download referring domains instead, or utilize WebMeUp to download backlink URLs. HEAVY!
Click the top left triangle clicky button between column “A” and row “1.” You know the one! C'mon, you can do it.
This will highlight all of your super sweet data! Click the right edge of column A and drag to the right until you can see your SourceURL listings properly. Every column expands together, wow! Radical! Depending on how non-massive your computer monitor is (I have two of them because I sell so many records), consider double clicking the right edge of each column, excluding SourceURL, to nicely format it to the largest cell of data contained within it. That's a nice, mellow format. Whoa!
Delete unnecessary columns like you kick opening bands off stage when they've played for more than 15 minutes. Gotta make room for the headliners, man! I like to keep “SourceURL”, “AnchorText”, “SourceCitationFlow”, “SourceTrustFlow”, “LinkType”, and “TargetURL”.
Totally Tubular Backlink Report Formatting! Whoa!
Freeze the top row by highlighting all of row 1 and then clicking “View” > “Freeze Panes” > “Freeze Top Row”. Back on the “Home” tab, I like to increase the aesthetic value of my backlink reports by highlighting the top row with a color and applying bold formatting. I like yellow. The sun is yellow and nothing's hotter than the sun! Ow! Sometimes I’ll use orange, but we’ll get to that in a different episode.
Utilize the magic power of filtering! The only thing more powerful than filtering your data is the power of rock 'n roll. That's a fact, Jack!
This is why we have computers. Who has the time to read all 2500 cells of this spreadsheet? A robot. Robots don't party, but you do!
Highlight your whole sheet with the triangle clicky button again, click the “Data” tab, and then click on “Filter.”
You’ll notice more triangle clicky buttons have appeared at the top right of each column. These are filter buttons! Life is awesome!
Click the filter button, and then type in a desired query in the search bar. Do you want to see where your competitors have been guest posting? Type in “blog” and click ok. WHAMMO-BAMMO!
Your brain is probably flowing with all sorts of creative juices now. The same creative juices that songs like "Panama" and "Runnin' with the Devil" were born from! Awesome! To perform another search, check the “select all” button, click ok to clear your text filter, and type in another query. “Rss” is another great one for discovering sites with content feeds. “Gov” or “Edu” will isolate results from those highly sought after authoritative domains. Triumphant Guitar Solo!
For maximum return, download multiple reports from several competitors. Copy and paste all of the reports into one master spreadsheet. Build it and they will come! Go crazy and frankenstein an Open Site Explorer backlink report with Majestic data. The more backlinks you compile together, the more opportunities you will discover. And that is 100% true. Trust me, I'm Diamond 'Do-Follow Dave' and I invented cool baclink tips.
As for you? Congratulations, you’re a data wizard now!
Scroll down for your reward...
Don't say good ol' Diamond 'Do-Follow' Dave never gave you anything! Goodnight, Cleveland!
