Analyzing Competitors Links. Totally Overrated or Useful?

well first regardless of whether you can get the links on a particular site it tells you what you need to counter it in terms of authority in links and even the kind of content to put on your own site

Second, it answers the huge question - who would ever link to my site naturally? You have all the answers there. People can claim all they want that no one will link to a local plumber but they are there in the serps and many have links. Thats where the tools come in. Two of them I use breaks the links down to where they come from - forums, blogs, government agencies, blog comments, related niches etc. If you had to do that by yourself it would take hours or even days.

Whatever you think about link building getting truly natural backlinks on top of anything else you do is where its at now in SEO and Google is only going to keep updating their algo to make that even more true.

I think why you see almost no talk of this here is that you really can't do this kind of SEO for cheap. It doesn't fit into a $99 plan because lets face it - the under $400 a month plans are based on link building automation.

Although link analysis tools like to make it sound like they'll magically reveal places where you can get links...it rarely works that way in reality.

You can't just copy their links and add one more to rank.

Just try to reverse engineer Google's backlinks and you'll see what I mean

But reverse engineering WILL show you some link opps that you would have otherwise missed.

Like I said, it also helps me see the current "state of the algo". I've noticed a few trends that no one's talking about by doing a lot of reverse engineering.

Once I see a trend I tweak my strategies to reflect it. Otherwise you're being reactive by listening to what other people say.