Who links to Your Competition?

Lately, people have been discussing in our Hippo discussion group how to determine who links to your competitors.  So I want to show you the tool I use.

But first, why is important to know who links to your competitors?

In case you have not heard, a major part of the Google algorithm is based off of off-page factors.  In other words, they look at links from other sites to determine if they should rank your site.

So how many links do you need to rank well?  The correct answer is “More than your competitors”.  Remember, as I wrote earlier, don’t chase Google.  Chase your competitors.

Given those two points, you need to go build links.  Conversely, you could actually remove links from your competitor and it would have a similar effect.  In other words, you can go get six links, or take three links from your competitor and have them link to you.  Same effect.

This is easier said than done.  However, if you can figure out who is linking to your competitors and why, you may be able to not only get some ideas, but you could actually call or reach out to the owners of those links and explain why they should link to you instead.

So how do we do it?  In the discussion group, a couple of online tools were listed, namely Link Diagnosis and Backlink Watch.  Both were recommended by Ty and are online web-based tools.  They work good, especially for the price – free!

But I prefer SEO Elite.  Here’s how it works…

(The screenshots are small, but you can click on them to see more.)

You can choose the site you want to review links for.  Then choose which search engines to use to find the links.  Lastly, you choose what additional information you want on the report (Google PR, Age, Whois info, etc)

Then, you can review the results…

I tend to sort by Google PageRank and investigate the top ones to see if I can imitate (or steal) the link.

The only bad part is that it is not free.  The price for SEO Elite is $167 and you can buy it here.  Please don’t be turned off by the long scrolling copy.  (I hate that too.)  It really is a good product.