SEO is a race. And in any race learning from your competitors makes you a better runner. Even when you’re running first it’s sometimes good to look back and check the runner-ups. And if you’re not the yellow jersey guy, you absolutely should examine the leaders: their gear, their training, their strategy. In SEO the most interesting thing about your competition are their links.
Whether you like it or not SEO is still pretty much about links. Good link profile can make up for almost any lack of optimized content and other onpage flaws. Love or hate, the best thing you can do about it is embrace the fact and run with it.
So let’s go through some tricks that will enable you to look deeper into your competition’s link profile granting you access to the restricted areas: their locker room, dirty laundry and even the briefing hall where they plan their link building strategies.
Let’s talk competitive link research
Finding out where your competitors’ links come from is not all that hard. You just go to Yahoo! or Google and type in link:www.your-competitor.com to get a list of inbound links to the site.
Yahoo’s much better in that respect as it tends to give more extensive and accurate data. The problem here is that there’s a limit of 1,000 links per website which is often not enough as the fattest link sources get left behind the limit fence. Here’re some tips to break through to the other side.
Note: If you’re lazy like me skip to the end of the article where I’ll share a tool that does it all much quicker.
Trick 1: Search for links to particular web pages of a competing site
Alongside with link:www.your-competitor.com search for link:www.your-competitor.com/products.html or link:www.your-competitor.com/services.html and so on.
Trick 2: Exclude internal links
You may examine the internal linking structure of your competition if you want to gain some insight on their navigation and marketing steps. But as we want to find more external links, let’s exclude the internal ones.
You can do this by adding -site:site.com operator to your search query. Type in link:http://www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com or linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com“
and you’ll get a list of external backlinks only.
There’s a dropdown option in Yahoo! site explorer that does the same.
Trick 3: Exclude links coming from certain domains
The -site: modifier lets you exclude links coming from specific sites. So, whenever you see a large chunk of links coming from same domain add -site:thisdomain.com modifier to your query and the links from this site will get replaced with new ones.
You can add -site: multiple times in one query so that you have something like this:
Trick 4: Check links coming from certain TLDs
This is a little known trick. The site: modifier actually lets you get a list of links coming from domains with certain TLDs: .com, .org, .edu, .co.uk and so on. Just type in link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.gov or linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com site:.gov and you’ll get a list of .gov sites linking to your rival.
Note: Do this in Yahoo! regular search, not site explorer
Trick 5: Exclude links coming from certain TLDs
This is an even lesser known trick. You can exclude certain tlds from the results with the -site:.tld modifier. Usually the biggest chunk of links comes from .com’s so add a -site.com modifier and you’ll get lots of new link data.
Trick 6: Use different combinations of the first 5 tricks
Try link:http://www.your-competitor.com/page.html
-site:your-competitor.com -site:.com
Or link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.org -site:wikipedia.org
Give it a thought and I’m sure you’ll come up with lots of your own. Feel free to share your findings in the comments
Trick 7: Use the above 6 tricks in different search engines
Don’t limit your searches to Yahoo! and Google, go to AltaVista, Alexa, (Bing doesn’t give you link data, so forget about it) but then there’re Exalead, Excite and tons of regional search engines. Search them, remove the duplicates and you’ll have a goooooooooooooooogol of competitor’s links to study.
Note: Some search engines have a different set of operator so you’ll need to type domain: instead of link:.
Getting it all done fast
This sure seems like a lot of work and it is. Moreover, getting the links list is only the beginning and the easy part of competitive link research. Once you get the list you need to analyze each link, weed out poor quality sites and only leave the ones you can get a link from. Now THAT’s a lot of work.
I’m too lazy to do this all by hand, besides I value my time too much to waste it on such kind of work. That’s why I use SEO SpyGlass an advanced link analysis tool that employs all the tricks described in this article (plus some more advanced ones I don’t even know) to get up to 25,000 links per domain, which is much, much more than any other tool can get.
SEO SpyGlass also finds all the data I need to analyze the links:
> Google PR of the domain and linking page
> The URL and title of the linking page
> The anchor text and description
> Whether the link is still on the page (sometimes the link gets removed but search engines will think it’s there till they reindex the page).
> Whether the link is no-follow or dofollow
> How many other links are on the page
> How much link value the link passes
> And some other data like TLDs, domain age, country, etc.
If you want to do competitive link research seriously I’d strongly recommend trying SEO SpyGlass out. And of course you can always use my tricks whenever you want to run a quick background check on that new guy on your block.
54 Comments on "7 Tricks to Get a Goooooooooooogle of Links"
Awesome Article
thanks for sharing
I am going to follow your instructions. It is well written and seems easy to follow.
I breed kittens and my site has a lot of info and photos on that breed. yet if I do a search in google for my breed (search South Africa) the site that comes up is a general site with only a link and description to my site regarding American Curl cats. ( not a total loss but that is not logical)
I hope to get to the bottom of it with your information.
thank you
Hello. Absolutely stonkingly good information. A truly timeless post thankyou.
Thanx for sharing, great informative article! – Sue
Great article
Thanks for the info
good ideas
Good Info
awesome just awesome article bro its awesome i love it
You guys always have good stuff and this is it. Thanks.
Interesting article – thanx!
- sue
wow, thanks for this info. Very usefull. I will try it for my blog
Hi,
I already do this trick, but I’ve learned more about this tricks when I read your article. More importantly if you want to have a good PR you must have a link coming from .gov .org and so on… Google trust this…hehe
Thank you again for your informative article.
Wow interesting post I never seen like this before, Thanks for sharing. I’ll try it right now
thanks for the article!
Good articles,I like this “-site” modifier, I always follow my competitors’ sites.So it’s really usuafull to me. I also transtlated this article into Chinese and post in my blog.
Tried the Spyglass application, but its not giving me half the inbound links I actually have. Will try and search the SE´s myself instead using your other tips.
Thanks for the the step…
Nice bit of information.
Great article thanks for the info.
This is a very informative article. Thanks for the info and many ways to check things out.
Very informative. Thanks a ton.
Google doesnt update inbound links very frequently but you can always check “contain the term” to find competitor links. Just put “www.sitename.com” in Google and there you go ….
Man…These are secrets that you do not divulge without getting paid!
thanks for the info
Some great original SEO link analysis tips….keep it up, man!
And oh ya, I play guitar too!
I wouldn’t flat say that this is a bad article there are some ok tips for anyone new to back link analysis but your article has nothing to do with the headline ? “7 tips to getting links” totally misleading there is not a single tip to getting links in the article.
This is a wonderful tips. Rock on
it’s good,,,i hope it can be improve me….
Thanks q at info,good information.
Good article. Have been chasing links of my competitors and it helps find good link sources. The extra information about refining searches is very helpful. Thanks
Hi,
Not too innovative art. but rather commonly known issues. But good to you for tidy up!
Rafal, audiobook fan!
It is definitely a great writeup. However one will appreciate tools performing similar task free of cost and same will be of a great use for smaller scale sites like our site
I tried your tip on our own website.
When I am logged in at Yahoo webhosting – Yahoo shows me 203 links to our website.
When I use your tip link:www.keepbanderabeautiful.org
only 7 links are shown.
Did I something wrong?
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Hi Richard,
First of all I want to thank you for sharing your idea’s regarding the backlinks. With the help of this article I was able to analysis my competitors backlinks. I have not yet used your SEO Spyglass. I will try that and update you regarding the tool.
Thanks mate
It’s nice post to me
It will may be helpu
It will may be helpu
Great article and im gunu be testing your software in about 2mins when its installed
will post back here to let all know what I think of it, but its looks great so I hope its as good as your article 
Hi Richard
Great article this confirms some of what i already knew but was not sure enought to say anything,
many thanks
Thanks for article mkiosonline
It’s nice post to me
Thanks for article mkiosonline
Thank you all for the comments.
@Victor
Thatnks for the critics, though I don’t think the title is all that misleading. Actually it is about getting links – lists of links to your competitors. And that’s basically the list of websites you can attempt getting a link from.
The techniques of actually acquiring links from your competion’s link sources depend on each site in particluar. I’m sure that the readers of site-reference know a lot of ways to get a link from a site.
P.S. If you feel like sphinning this one up, let’s bring site-reference to the top!
You have deep knowledge. I still have to learn many thing.
can’t find anything usefull
I am a small business owner learning to improve my SEO. Thanks for showing us the way.Damn it I did not know how to use Google or Yahoo to find competitor’s links.
Great man..
thanks for sharing information..
Thanks for this gold information. What’s a really nice post!
I still don’t get it
Some good tips there, thanks for sharing. Didn’t know about getting rid of the internal links from search results, so great to read. Cheers.
Is this still applicable?
Thanks a lot. I didn’t know that site: and link: can take operators like “-”. Very useful.
Thank you for information. I already have downloaded the software. Thank you.