While I have the advantage of a few extra hours in my working day (Seattle – London jetlag is getting my brain in gear at aproximately 5am, so I’ve promised myself to use the time productively, instead of staring at the ceiling).I thought I’d share a tool combination to find your competitor’s best links, and go on to fetch their contact details quickly and easily.

You’ll need:

- The SEOgadget Links API Extension for Mozscape - Our Free Link Cleanup and Contact tool What we’re going to do is, first, devise a query in the Excel extension to get the best link from a diverse set of domains. We’ll need to make a Links API call, and to get a nice rich diverse set of domains in our results, we’ll use the domain_to_domain scope (Returns a single link each from a set of root domains linking to any page on the specified Target’s root domain).

Here’s the query:

=SEOMOZ_linksAPI_toFit(A7,"domain_to_domain","domain_authority","external+follow","TargetCols=8","SourceCols=103079215109","LinkCols=8",100,) We’re basically saying, show me 1OO linking domains ppointing to my domain, sorted by domain authority. I’d like to see external, and followed links. Sed me the linking subdomain (TargetCols=8) a large slice of the linking URL metrics (SourceCols=) and I’d like the normalised anchor text (LinkCols=8). Here’s what the results should look like response fields have been translated into their friendly names: Look at that beautiful data! 100 rows of the best links to SEOgadget.

Paste that data into Link Cleanup & Contact

And there you go – best links, and a lot of contact details for outreach. Of course, you’ll need a compelling pitch for all of this, or an angle, but in any case you have some great data as a starting point. My current favourite is fnd the best links to your competitors product pages, and let those people know about your newer, more up to date, better priced stuff. I think that’s because I’m knee deep in retail strategy right now. One last thing; if this feature is useful, we’ll just build it into Link Clean-up and Contact. Thoughts welcome! PS – wanna use our new alpha API? Sign into Cleanup & Contact and then go to http://tools.seogadget.co.uk/use_api/ - 1 request per second, maximum, please people. I’ll post more about this very soon. Enjoy!

Image credit: Eva The Weaver