You can have Backlinks for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner

[Mike Anthony]

Haven't taught SEO for awhile now but just recently started again so I've been sharing some tips. Last post was sooo much fun I thought I would keep going. People are always talking about backlinks being the key to ranking and they are right.

Of course the questions is how do you get them? there are tons of ways including creating great content, buying them, buying packages, working on partnering opportunities with other site owners etc. Most seasoned SEO types know they don't really have to buy packages or wonder about where to find opportunities to get backlinks.

The opportunities are steering at us right in the search results for the keywords. Sometimes people call this reverse engineering. Its merely looking up the links of your competitors. You can find ANY kinds of links you are looking for in endless quantity and get this - many won't disappear, won't be spammy and don't have to be "boosted" because they are not indexed.

First a good tool and then some observations -

The easiest free way to do this is to fire up your firefox browser and head on over to

Link Diagnosis - examine your link competition

at the top they have a link for you to install their tool. Click the link and follow the instructions. You will have to restart firefox but once you do you will be able to check backlinks on any site you visit by clicking your right mouse button and selecting linkdiagnosis 2.0

Note: a few tips on the tool. By default it searches all the pages on a site but that is time consuming. Sometimes its better to just copy and paste the url of the page you are researching into linkdiagnosis' search field - go to filters on the link diagnosis page (under http) and select single page on site settings. You can also check to turn on PR if you wish (you will know what I am talking about when you go there)

That search will show you what sites are pushing your competitors page up the rankings. Many searches you will find that they have links that you just can't get at a drop of the hat. Truth is that most sites contrary to what you might have read in other threads don't rank on easily attainable backlinks. They rank because of natural or natural looking (read bought) backlinks.

Still knowing what they are can often tell you how to get them in the long run too. You can find sites in your niche that are open to giving links (if they are deserved) because they already have given other sites links. This will give you in time REAL on page PR links that are hundreds or more times more powerful than say forum profile links.

PLUS if you know the right search results to go to - you will find sites that are more dedicated to ranking by easily achieved backlinks (forum , web 2.0, profile links) and you will be able to find them as well for free. This is standard ordinary competitive analysis of a sites backlink portfolio.

How do you know what sites are ranking with weaker backlinks? Well generally theres a correlation between whats on the site and the kind of links they are using. If its really light on content and its hard to see why anyone would link to it - theres your big clue (just a clue though).

Last point to getting as many backlinks as you have the time to search for (and believe me there are some links that are so easy to find you will get them in hundreds at a time) - when you visit the sites that are linking to your competitors page - don't forget to look around . Sometimes there are even more hints of where to find backlinks the competitor is using because remember - No tool really shows all the backlinks that a site might have.

Happy link building

P.S. if anyone is having problems using link diagnosis let me know. If it doesn't get too overwhelming I'll try to help out whoever I can. Its not hard.

[seanpearse]

looks good mate thanks for the share i've been looking for a tool like this for a while.

[satrap]

Great share Mike. Thanks.

By the way, I know you didn't make this tool so you may not know how exactly it works. I couldn't find this on their site, any idea how it calculates which are "the most authoritative backlinks from each domain" as it says installing the tool will allow you to see those backlinks?

I would guess its based on domain age, pr and other similar factor. But I would be interested in learning more. Thanks anyway.

[Mike Anthony]

fairly old thread but thanks. link diagnosis is still decent but nowadays post yahoo site explorer it takes more than one tool to dig into backlinks. Probably next week I'll do an update

[retsek]

Old thread, but a very evergreen strategy. And you don't have to limit it to just your direct competitors.

I've been finding SEOmoz's OSE to be a useful tool for since PR has become a poor (unreliable?) indicator of how strong a site is.

[fahimk123]

thanks for sharing mate, really helpful