Determining competitors' backlinks?

[marketroid]

I have a list of keywords I want to score high on. To be higher than my competitors who currently occupy the top 10 on google, I need to have more (and better quality) backlinks than they do. How do I find what links to them? Google had a links:example.com function which would show you what linked to a site, but it appears they've removed that function.

 

[BuzzHamzaDotCom]

I'm not qualified to comment on your hypothesis, but on Google try link:example.com , not links.

Also a Google search for "backlinks finder" returns a load of tools, but they all seem to be broken at the moment! I used one just a couple of weeks ago but I can't remember what it was called. It gave you the first few links for free and then you had to cough up to get the whole report.

 

[fisicx]

To be higher than my competitors who currently occupy the top 10 on google, I need to have more (and better quality) backlinks than they do.

How do you know?

Their sites could be more mature, have better content, better on-site SEO, have good reviews, one really good inbound link, more efficient code and a whole lot more.

To find out their links go buy some software. Don't use the free tools, they will only give you part of the picture. Majestic SEO seems to get good reviews.

 

[marketroid]

OK, now that I've had a look, the top 10 results on Google have between 4,000 - 350,000 backlinks each. Ow. And yet, they're only PR4-5 mostly, with one page at PR2!

How are these "links:" results arranged? By descending order of importance?

 

[Clicky Leap]

To find competitor's link try SEOmoz (free 30 day trial available) or Majestic SEO.

Both of them will give you a list of competitor's backlinks. Much more to this as you should be able to identify 'good' and 'bad' links.

 

[fisicx]

And yet, they're only PR4-5 mostly, with one page at PR2!

Ignore the PR score, it means nothing. I've got pages at #1 with 0PR.

It's not the number of inbound links either, it's the quality of those links. 3990 could be junk and just 10 of any value.

Don't chase the same links as you competitors, go get your own and investigate keywrods that aren't so competitive.

 

[Annoying Donkey]

How are these "links:" results arranged? By descending order of importance?

G doesn't want you to know which links are important, so take a guess

 

[Sean John]

What is the most reliable source for checking another sites backlinks?

 

[Mark Walters]

To see who is linking to your competitors you'll need to use a backlink checker. I personally recommend Ahrefs.com, however, Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer are good also.

I don't know where you got the figures for your competitors backlinks, but 4,000 - 350,000 seems a lot. It's links from individual IP addresses that's more important than the total number of links anyway.

 

[DPA PPI Claims]

Mark is spot on, Open Site Explorer is the place to be for analysing BL's.

Don't get bogged down in PR, number of links etc.

Think about your business in a traditional marketing fashion, if a website recommending you (thats what a link is) would be beneficial because they have lots of traffic, authority in the niche, social media following etc then you need to give them a reason why they should link to you.

This could be anything, there is many ways, for getting blogs to link to you, try publishing their content, sharing it on your social media and then tell them about it!

 

[PDC]

I need to have more (and better quality) backlinks than they do.

In reality I'd say you need a better website, well optimised with good content. Chasing after backlinks is a short cut which is fast becoming outdated from what I've seen.

 

[Cynic]

Scrapebox, Link Ontolo, SEOMOz

 

[marketroid]

Well, "building quality content" isn't going to work. Google will just ignore the site. If you're not on Google, you can't get people to visit your site, plain and simple. I built the best website in the world for a very narrow niche (no, seriously I did) with only a single relevant keyword to optimize. I never got anywhere with Google until I miraculously got the top search result to link to me. Bingo, #5.

And yes, some of my competitors have 25 million backlinks. Here's one with 131,000 and here's one with 228,000. (edit: had to remove links, not enough posts. If you want to see it, search for "packaging" and then do a links: search for the top 5 results)

 

[SimonAntonySEO]

Hi Marketoid,

The Google link: functionality hasn't behaved properly for a year or two now, but there are some quite neat ways to check competitors backlinks. This is an entire industry in itself though! And it really depends on how much time and resources you want to dedicate to this. Firstly, some of the quick methods: a Google search that worked well in the past (not quite so well now, but still will return some interesting results) is:

sitename.com -site:sitename.com

Into the Google search bar (list all pages that contain sitename.com that are not from sitename.com). If this works it will return some links and generally some of the better ranking ones near the top - and the poorer ones lower down.

The problem with this method is it now returns also just sites that contain text sitename.com (may not be actual links). If you find this happening it would be worth trying "sitename.com" -site:sitename.com (with quotes) and is also worth trying with the www form if you don't have any joy with the above.

As Clicky Leap already mentioned you have SEOMoz's Open Site Explorer (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/) which has a reasonable tool there, but one I found that is particularly effective is Majestic SEO (http://www.majesticseo.com/). Despite the name, they actually work very well, they have their own crawlers and have been going longer than Open Site Explorer. You can analyse your own sites backlinks with this for free, but would need to be a paid user to analyse competitors backlinks. This will also alert you as to when the links appeared - and will present the information in all sorts of interesting ways.

Getting links in all the places your competitors have won't necessarily guarantee you will outrank them for the same searches, but can be excellent way to get additional ideas of good sites you might get additional links back to your site.

Good luck!

 

[Charleston_Financial]

i have used majestic seo, very easy to use and has a free function

 

[WebProfitsConsulting]

If you really want a thorough view on a competitors backlinks you're going to have to use more than a single paid tool. I've yet to find a single tool that shows every single backlink.

I tend to use a combination of seomoz, seospyglass, market samurai and majestic and then with a bit of clever excel work you get a view that I think covers 95% of the backlinks present.

 

[adams.mark]

SEO spyglass is a tool which provides some effective results for competitor backlinks. With the link they provide the details like page rank, IBL, link text, nofollow or not, domain age domain IP, alexa and many more. I found it is very useful in analyzing competitors. Hope this will help you.

 

[eventdomain]

Chasing after backlinks is a short cut which is fast becoming outdated

Not many sites offer the freebie anymore - the only ones left doing it are start-ups and some industry sites wanting to establish themselves link-wise. But the free link industry died due to hoards of greedy freeloaders, and the sites with any worth have given up on handing out freebies as they've been taken advantage of too much and decided to give the world the finger, and who can blame them with the amount of spammers about.

Many refuse to believe, is that once a site has a certain number of links and becomes established (say, hits a link-cap of 3'000 links), the site/s WILL stop exchanging links and go paid.

Most sites just have silly link pages which arent resources of value, so once its filled with a few hundred mixed-bag of links, it looks naff, overloaded and who wants to be on a deep link page with 300 or 400 other links that have zero value to actual visitors.

1. If there's no search value, then the links on that page won't be searched/clicked on.

2. This is the crux of the matter - a website needs content to be of value. You got to give a reason to search.

and I think most fail at that stage - big-time.

 

[SDGSteve]

Have yet to find a backlink tool that seemed any good. Recently started optimising and backlinking for a site, decided to test a few out. I built 200 links and using a range of about ten different backlink checkers and software packages they reported results ranging from 0 to 14,000, only three were in the ballpark between 100-400.

To the original poster; backlinks are only part of the story, I've had sites high in Google with hardly any links but they had great on-page optimisation, for all you know your competitors each spent six figures on SEO getting those top spots, don't rely on any one method, you have to work across all fronts.

 

[eventdomain]

for all you know your competitors each spent six figures on SEO getting those top spots

Ofcourse.... that's why they cannot be shifted.

 

[mindhunter]

You can use alexa toolbar to explore any site's backlinks!

 

[ukbf0001]

Try these seo tools for size - http://www.link-assistant.co.uk

 

[BonusSEO]

backlinkwatch is free and pretty decent. You will have to google it as I can't post URL's sorry!

 

[johnlaster]

Only quality backlinks are not the biggest factor for getting top ranking on major search engine. You need to optimize your website on page first. If you add your keywords properly in your content, header tags, meta tags and alt tags, definitely it will work for you.

You need to protect your website from spammy links and keyword stuffing. "Content is King" so you must have unique content on every page of your website.

After on page completion you can go for off page activities like:
Article syndication
Social bookmarking
Blog commenting
Blog posting
Guest blogging

If you do these activities effectively you will definitely rank well.

 

[smithlost01]

open site explorer and backlinkwatch are two sites from where you can see the backlink of competitors.

 

[Steve Sellers]

I have a list of keywords I want to score high on. To be higher than my competitors who currently occupy the top 10 on google, I need to have more (and better quality) backlinks than they do. How do I find what links to them? Google had a links:example.com function which would show you what linked to a site, but it appears they've removed that function.

Safe yourself the time mate and pay someone to do it. I wasted a lot of time when I first set up trying to do stuff like this.

If all you want it to find their backlinks then hire Fizicx or someone to do if for you, will save you a whole lot of time that you could use to actually generate income for your business.

I dont envisage it will take long with a programme like scrapebox though.

 

[ukbf0001]

Google wont give you that information anymore (no surprise there) , they'll give - I think - 10 or so links, if that. SEO-SpyGlass will do the trick

 

[webgeek]

We're using Ahrefs.com to look at competitor backlinks and SEMRush.com to look at competitor keywords.

If you have one in particular that you'd like researched, just fire me a PM with the domain you'd like to check up on and I'll send you the report for free (1 per person, subject to limiting in case some crazy demand appears).

 

[Steve Sellers]

If you have one in particular that you'd like researched, just fire me a PM with the domain you'd like to check up on and I'll send you the report for free (1 per person, subject to limiting in case some crazy demand appears).

Good man.