If you are working in the field of the SEO then getting higher position in the google is the biggest concern for you. For this purpose people uses this technique to find his competitors inbound link and this technique is working well. The problem in technique is, you cannot find the full or many links of your competitors.
Dose any one knows footprints which can find your competitors site inbound links, especially google links back links .
Note: google link:domain name command dose find the whole or majority of the keywords. Some seo developer has made some foot print which can be helpful to find compitative back links. I am looking for that footprints please reply and share with me.
It’s generally acknowledged that Yahoo Site Explorer gives a much better list of links (and you can hide internal links so it only shows inbound ones) than Google - use the same syntax, search for link:domain.com in Yahoo and that’s what you get.
Of course, this doesn’t guarantee that Google is indexing the same inbound links. For that, your best bet is to register your site on Google Webmaster Tools and use that.
Even if you find out which sites you’re competition is using to retain a high SEO ranking, there’s much more analysis that will need to go into it:
Is the content on both linked pages relevant to each other?
Is it a nofollow link?
What is the anchor text on the link and is that relevant?
Does the linked page support the addition of more links? If so, is the page still effective? (i.e. link farm)
Reverse engineering SEO is generally an effort in frustration due to all the tiny variables at play. It’s better to spend the same amount of time properly distributing content so that the links to your site are natural and actually worth something.
Google’s index of public inbound and external links for a website is very old. Often more than a month. Don’t use them for finding inbound links. You’ll need to use a service that crawls websites and logs them, such as http://ahrefs.com or something.
No, footprints are for refining contextual searches, not for finding links. If Google had a more up-to-date list of links for each website (what you see in Google Webmaster Tools for your site) then that’d be a worthwhile pursuit.
Yahoo Site Explorer is now RIP. It’s why software like Market Samurai and a lot of other SEO suites have been having heavy hits - it was free and now they are either developing their own spiders to archive backlinks or having to find new sources of link data.
If Google showed you your competition’s backlinks, that’d work.
That’s why you need to use a service like serpiq.com that can easily analyise keywords and the top 10 for that type of context. Even then it only helps further refine your knowledge of a website, not all the hidden variables that are both unique to each niche and a website’s SEO profile that only hours of research from someone who has a ton of experience (not these, Indian E-mail spammers that offer SEO services or someone who knows how to “optimize” your on-site stuff) can shed light on.
When I first started out, I did a lot of reverse engineering SEO and I found it worked out very well, but I think I just got lucky that Google happened to show some backlinks to my competitor’s site that turned out to be very good for my search results.
Since then, with other sites, my experience has been what Jeff Walden spoke of - an effort in frustration. Also, there are sources that will show you backlinks, but as StevieD said, there is no way to tell if Google is using the same inbound links in its algorithm. Other sites can only tell you the links exist, they can’t tell you anything else. Of course, even if Google lists a link in its “link:” search, there is nothing that necessarily tells you that the link carries much weight. If the site on which the link is located is completely unrelated to your site, that site’s high Page Rank doesn’t necessarily send much link juice to your site.
As mentioned Yahoo Site Explorer is a sound resource for checking out competitor links, you can also
Syndicate competitors RSS feeds through Outlook to see what they are up to on a daily basis
Utilise Google Alerts to see competitors link building activity. Please note in the wake of the Panda update the results emanating from Google Alerts is a lot thinner than previously.
Another than Google, you can check in Yahoo, in this the links came which are crawled by yahoo, and some of them may be Google has cached it, so how can you find those links, check all the yahoo links, then check whether the link is dofollow or not. If yes then Google must crawled the same one.
But one more things is that it is not necessary that we can also get the link from the same site, we can just follow some blogs and forums.
API stopped working on the 15th of this month, and the web interface will be gone by the end of the year. Even then, the backlinks aren’t that maintained since it’s pulling Bing data, and Bing is following Google’s lead in only wanting to show usable results to people using their webmaster section.
SEO Spyglass got their link data from YSE. The API has been down since the 15th. Magestic and SEOmoz’s tools are okay, Magestic is better, but their data is still not as accurate as it could be. I’d still suggest you look into serpiq.com before them, since you’re going to be paying a ton for SEOmoz, for a less quality of service/price ratio.