Identifying Source Of Backlinks

[RatRaceWatch]

So one of my websites has been doing decent but there is another site going after the same keywords that is crushing the competition. He just grasped the #1 spot, and is barely a few months old, I'm still in shock.

The site has been building anywhere from probably 70-100 backlinks a day. Most of the backlinks look like high pr contextual backlinks that will not go off the front page (blogroll side link included), and some are kind of like BMR, except even though the post will eventually go off the front page, the websites are more graphically pleasing so I can tell it's not BMR.

Without revealing the niche, I was wondering if anyone knew a way to get down to the source of these backlinks.

Either this person is paying a hell of a lot money, or he's got some secret, that I am just dumb-founded about.

Once again, he has: High PR Blogroll Links/Posts, that will never go off 1st page because there are no other pages from PR 6 down.

And many posts on a sites that are similiar to the style BMR uses, but more graphically pleasing.

What are your thoughts to approaching this?

Thanks,
Ryan

[ichl13]

I'm guessing he's either paying a hell of a lot of money like you said, or he just has a network himself. Either way you're probably not going to beat him unless you spend a lot of money yourself.

How does his site look? How many pages indexed etc? It could be that even though his site is number 1, if it's complete rubbish then he'll either get penalized by google or people will just bounce right off his site. If you add awesome quality content to your site and lots of it, you could probably establish yourself as the authority and people will naturally link back to you

[bdunndchi]

You can use a backlink checker (google it) just like you would to check your own backlinks. It should be able to tell you where the backlinks are coming from. I always keep a check on where my competitors are getting their backlinks, and then I'll try to get one from the same sources.

[RatRaceWatch]

I know what the specific backlinks are, I just use SEO Quake right now. I'm just in shock over how fast this guy built up.

He's got 24 indexed pages, PR 0 , with LD: 1,171. He shot up on to the first page a couple of weeks ago, and now he owns both the #1 and #2 spot. One of his subpages has #2. He's added on 500ish backlinks in the past 6 days.

The site isn't that impressive, and he only has one adsense block from what i can tell.

[ichl13]

I wouldn't worry too much then if its not aiming to be authority. Content is king and if your niche happens to have returning searches or visits, you'll win in the long run because your site will actually be useful.