How to Do a Link Search (or…Keep Your Enemies Closer)
March 31st, 2008 by Mark“Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” – Sun Tzu
In your quest for a number 1 spot on Google, you need to know what the competition is doing. Specifically, you need to understand the number and quality of in-bound links they have to their site.
Once you know the number and quality of links your competitor has, you can compare it the number and quality of links your site has. Then you go to work trying to match and surpass them in link count and quality. Simple right?
Actually, yes, it is pretty simple, but not necessarily easy. Another time we’ll get into how you can beat them out on link strength, but today let’s just make sure you understand exactly how you stack up against your main competitors on link count.
We’re going to start with a simple link search on yahoo. In fact, open a new browser and do this right now.
Once you get to yahoo! go to the search bar and type in “link:yourdomain.com” or “link:www.yourdomain.com”. In the case of Court’s Lasik site I’d type in “link:coloradolasiksurgeryguide.com”. Whether you use the ‘www’ in the link search depends on whether you use the ‘www’ in your link-building efforts. I never use the ‘www’, so I search for links on my domain without it.
*Note: leave out the ‘http://’ when you do your link searches. Yahoo! adds it for you.
Okay, so now you’ve done a link search on your domain, and your screen looks something like this:
What you see in the screenshot is how many pages Court has in Yahoo!’s index (20), and then how many in-bound links they’re giving him credit for (95). I can scan through the links to see where they’re coming from. If I were creating a site about Lasik, and Court was my competitor, I’d be looking for what kinds of sites are giving him links. Specifically, I’d be checking to see if the pages he’s getting links from are about Lasik. If they are, I know his links are relevant, which means they’re stronger than if they were from pages about anything other than Lasik.
Now let’s take the search further. I want to see how many deep-links Court is getting to the site. As we’ve talked about before, you improve your relevance and legitimacy in the eyes of Google by having a nice percentage of your in-bound links pointing to pages other than your homepage.
So looking again at my link search on Yahoo! I’m going to modify it slightly. Do you see where it says “Show Inlinks”? Next to that is a drop down menu that currently says “From All Pages”. Click on the drop down and choose “Except From this Domain”. Doing this ensures that you’re only counting external links to your site.
Now go to the other drop down next to “to:” and select “Entire Site”. Here’s a screenshot of the result:
You can see Court has 432 in-bound links to his Lasik site that are not pointing to the homepage. So he has 95 links to the homepage and 432 to the interior pages of his site. That’s roughly 20% to the homepage and 80% to the interior. Now, that’s really good, and to be competitive in your niche you don’t necessarily have to have your ratio that strong. You could have 80% to the homepage and 20% to the interior of the site and be completely fine.
The point is, if I was competing with Court I would now know approximately how many links he has, where they’re coming from, and where they’re pointing. The next step would be to start building links so my site is stronger than his, which lets me pass him in Google’s rankings.
You better watch out, Court. 
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March 31st, 2008 at 10:19 am
Nice post
I use:
http://www.dnscoop.com
Tells: age, PR, Yahoo Links, Alexa, IP info.
Which is a nice little summery of your competitions strength.
March 31st, 2008 at 10:43 am
Mark…Excellent info on analyzing competitive sites.
Will this method also evaluate the strength of a YouTube listing on the front page of Google? I’ve seen many YouTube videos being very competitive. Are they using the same method of quantity & quality of links to get there?
P.S. Are you & Court working together? Just curious.
March 31st, 2008 at 12:12 pm
You got me with the youtube question John. Anybody have any insight on how those videos end up so high in the SERPs?
And, yeah, Court and I have been partnering together on some projects for a year or so. You’ll be seeing the fruits of our collaboration here in the next couple of months.
March 31st, 2008 at 10:51 am
Tremendously, Tremendously useful post. I’ve used this tool before but now I feel i really understand what I’m looking at. THANKS COURT!
March 31st, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Holy crap, this is the first time I have looked into using Yahoo Site Explorer., and boy am I in for some really hard work to even come close to ranking above my competitors.
It goes to show you that you better do your homework first, and make sure you have both the patience and resources to out rank your competition.
This is one tool I will add to my arsenal and use prior to even contemplating building a site.
Thanks Mark, good post.
March 31st, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Thanks for sharing this breakdown. I had 355 to my normal domain, and it said I had 571 to the Entire site.
So would I subtract 355 from 571?
March 31st, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Great post Mark. i’m wondering the same thing as Link Building Bible- do you actually subtract one from the other and the difference being the deep links?
March 31st, 2008 at 6:01 pm
For both of you guys –
In the Lasik example above, the first search showed the links only to the homepage, and the second showed ALL external, in-bound links. So, yes, you would subtract the links to the homepage from the links to the entire site, and that would give you the number of deep links. That’s how I came up with the (approximately) 20/80 ratio for Court’s Lasik site.
Does that make sense?
April 1st, 2008 at 7:05 am
Yes Mark… thanks for clarifying. I thought that was the case, but I wanted to make sure. Thanks for continuing to make a great contribution to Court’s community of readers.
March 31st, 2008 at 2:57 pm
I’ve just done this for your site Court – you’ve got a lot of links! – but there is a huge difference between the number of links according to Yahoo and Google. I’ve noticed that Yahoo includes links from blog comments etc which don’t show up as links according to Google, wouldn’t you be better to look for your links using Google Webmaster Tools?
March 31st, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Well right now Julian I have 99,600 in Google Webmaster Tools and 102,000 in Yahoo Site Explorer.
Last week I showed only 60,000 in Google Webmaster Tools because it doesn’t update that often. The difference is more in the update rate than the links that are counted.
March 31st, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Gotcha, well that tells me I should stop using SeoQuake (the Firefox addon) as it only gives you 2,450 in Google and 94,000 in Yahoo, I guess it doesn’t update very often. Bit of a shame cause it’s a really convenient tool.
March 31st, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Yeah interestingly Julian the amount of links shown in Google Webmaster Tools is very different than the number you get when you search for link:domain.com in Google. The link:domain.com search is only meant to be a sample, and is the one used by SEOQuake.
March 31st, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Very interesting. Using this tool, my main competition for the Red Deer Digest has 28 in links not from that domain, and they are a professional newspaper that has been in existence for a while. My site is only 2.5 months old, and I’ve got 726. Their pages indexed are 7142, however,and these must still give them a big edge since their footprint is so big. I have only 90 so far, so I better get busy to even up the score.
March 31st, 2008 at 10:56 pm
How come I have 11,000 backlinks in yahoo and ZERO on Google webmaster tools?
April 1st, 2008 at 2:02 am
This is so helpful! Thanks for this tip Mark! Now I need to learn how to get quality in-bound links..
April 1st, 2008 at 2:31 am
i recommend everyone gets this plugin http://www.joostdevalk.nl/seo-tools/link-analysis/
it does a number of things one of which is to display the pagerank of links in site explorer tool. very useful when determining which links are you competitors strongest.
April 1st, 2008 at 4:27 am
Excellent Post.
This will be a tool I use again and again…
Thanks
April 1st, 2008 at 5:57 am
Several blogs show multiple links to mine, either because of the structure of their blogrolls or, in at least one case, because the site aggregates every post I make. How does this affect page rank, or is it irrelevant?
I’d like to see a good post explaining pagerank, the Google “sandbox” and new blogs, sometime. My blog is exactly three months old today and has a pagerank of 0, despite over 10,000 incoming links (many of them multiples)
April 1st, 2008 at 8:57 am
This is a very useful weapon in analyzing your competition and will be very useful in getting one’s own act together. There is just a caveat, too much of this can bog you down and cost you the quality of your own site.
April 1st, 2008 at 10:08 am
Great tips! It can be confusing though. At one point i was doing a bit of competition research and noticed that one of my competitors with 20k backlinks was ranking over the other with 750K. Looking into their backlinks closer would have been a tedious task.
April 1st, 2008 at 11:28 am
Very useful.
Nice post.Thanks for sharing!
April 1st, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Yes, this is extremely handy, although Yahoo! inlinks don’t tell you much about the nofollows on their links or the number of mostly worthless sitewide links they may have.
April 1st, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Hey Court-
Great post.
I know we talked about this via email. According to the Yahoo, I have 2310 inlinks for my entire site and I am at #8 on Google for my keyword.
The top 2 have 2500 and 6000 inlinks respectively.
The #3 guy has 908 and the #4 guy only has 68.
Any thoughts on why #4 is beating me with a non-blog site and only 68 links?
April 1st, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Scott link aren’t the only thing that’s used to calculate a ranking. Have you checked out old that person’s site is? If they are a lot older than yours that could be the reason.
They also can have more link strength than you without having a higher link count.
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:45 am
I’m not sure I completely understand yahoo’s tracking of incoming links.
When I check my site, it shows numerous links from the same blogs just different pages, where I’m not linked to.
What is happening here?
Hope this makes sense.
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:46 am
You can do the same thing with the SEO for Firefox free plugin
and SEO Elite will tell you all the links your competition has, so you can match them link for link, then beat them out
Thanks,
Dan
http://danielmcgonagle.name
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:23 am
Does yahoo present all incoming links? I created an incoming link from a squidoo page a while ago and it’s not showing.
Is it maybe more reliable to use the google webmaster tools?
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Google webmaster tools should show you most of the backlinks Google is aware of. The problem is filtering these and removing links from the same domain.
April 10th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Fantastic post, it’s almost good to know exactly what your competitors are getting links for. Getting those linking strategies going really helps push your site up in the rankings!
June 24th, 2011 at 8:23 pm
Tremendously, Tremendously useful post. I’ve used this tool before but now I feel i really understand what I’m looking at. THANKS COURT!
June 29th, 2011 at 9:18 am
And of course you have a lot more chances for success