Building your own website and finding ways to attract visitors requires a lot of research. Whether you are looking to find traffic through search engines or ads, there is a lot ahead of you.
You will find that much of this research involves identifying your biggest competitors and analyzing how they are promoting themselves. They say that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, and it’s especially true on the Internet!
One of the oldest tricks in this book is to find sites that link to your competitors and see if they give you a backlink. This backlink can be through a directory, a guest blog post, or dozens of other ways. In the old fashioned way, this could be done with the help of Google’s smart search operators.
It has become a little easier now. Host.io is a promising domain name data provider that shows backlinks for millions of domains. In addition, it also includes data about where the domain is hosted, what Google Analytics ID it uses, what other domains redirect to it, and the domains with which it shares a common IP address.
Combining all of this data can help you create a marketing strategy in the face of competition with your site. In this article, let’s take a look at all the data that Host.io provides and how you can use it to your advantage.
Domain name targeting
The first step in this extremely simple process is figuring out which domain you’re looking for data in. Go to Host.io and enter your domain name in the field.
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Above, we have entered the domain name for Online Tech Tips. All that’s left is to click on the Search Details button.
Understanding the data
As simple as that, you have a wealth of domain name information at your disposal. Let’s take a look at all the data presented here and see what they are for.
The first data table is unnamed, but contains all the basic information about the domain name.
It includes the domain name, meta description, the IP address of the server it is hosted on, the country the server is located in, ASN, server architecture, Google Analytics ID, and the website encoding format.
Much of this information is readily available using resources like Host.io However, one unique bit of data is the Google Analytics ID, which can be very useful. A Google search for this exact string can help you find other websites that may be owned by a domain operator. It can give you insight that you might not otherwise be able to find.
It is also useful to be able to find out who is hosting the website. In our example, Online Tech Tips is hosted on Amazon Web Services via Pagely. Look at this – you now have some valuable information if you ever want to start your own blog, right?
Backlinks
The following table provides a list of up to 25 domains that link to the domain you were looking for, sorted by Alexa traffic rank.
This is incredibly valuable for SEO purposes and there are many services that require you to pay for such data.
This gives you an idea of ??which other websites have content that may be relevant to the domain you were looking for. Using this data, you can check those domain names and see how your competitor is getting backlinks. You may even find ways to place your own backlink on these sites, which will increase your site’s authority in search results.
Clicking on any of the domains in the Backlinks section will take you directly to the Host.io page for that domain.
Redirects
The Redirects table displays up to 25 domain names that redirect to the domain you’re looking for, sorted by Alexa traffic rank. Since Online Tech Tips doesn’t have redirected domains, let’s take a look at the 25 redirected domains that Yahoo! there is.
What you can get from this data really depends on the domain you are looking for and how deep you want to look.
In the Yahoo! example, we see that the foreign domain extensions point to their .com domain. This tells us that the Host.io server from which it is searching is located in the United States and that the foreign domains Yahoo! redirect based on geolocation.
We can also see domains such as altavista.com and alltheweb.com listed. A simple Google search for these domains reveals that both were search engines of the 90s and Yahoo! eventually bought out.
You can find some very interesting information by looking at domain forwarding. How you use it really depends on your own strategies.
Shared IP address
Checking domains with the same IP address as another can provide information that is either extremely useful or completely useless. You have to understand a little about how web hosting works to fully understand and appreciate this data, but we’ll explain.
Many small, low-budget websites are hosted on the same server as several others. This is called shared web hosting where dozens of websites share the same hardware and IP address.
For shared hosting websites, the domains in the shared IP address table will be completely unrelated websites that host them. They have no relationship other than being owned by people who have chosen the same hosting company.
However, more professional and larger websites will use a dedicated server. A dedicated server can contain one domain name or multiple domain names from the same client. Above, in the case of online tech tips, you can see that this is true – these are all our family domains!
You will understand why this can be so valuable when you study your competitors. Host.io can open your eyes to many other domains owned by the same developer. You can get even more information by visiting some of these websites.
Host.io is an extremely useful resource that goes deeper and gets updated more often than many of its competitors. Many of these sites require prepayment or show very little results (eg DomainTools
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