How to Raid Your Competitor’s Backlinks
Backlinks (links from other people’s web sites that go to your site) are a major contributor to how well you rank in search engines. Here’s a method to get more links coming into your web site through finding out where your competitors are getting theirs.
It’s pretty simple–head to Yahoo.com and, in their search engine, type in the search term
linkdomain:www.YourCompetitorsSite.com/
You, of course, want to replace YourCompetitorsSite.com with your competitor’s domain name. Yahoo will then tell you all the different sites that are currently linking to your competitor’s site.
For example:
linkdomain:www.stopforeclosure.com/
will show you all the sites that Yahoo is aware of that link to StopForeclosure.com.
Here’s what I can do with this information:
If I wanted to compete with StopForeclosure.com in the search engines, the first place I would look is at those site that are already linking to them. Some of these sites are directories that list many web sites, some are sites I can submit articles to and they’ll link back to my site, and some are complimentary businesses to my business.
Many of those sites will allow me to place my link on their site for free. Some have requirements that I must meet first. Some will charge a fee.
These sites won’t only boost my search engine rank, but may also bring traffic to my site as well.
Narrowing it down:
On thing you want to realize is this–if you’re looking to boost your search engine rank, you’re not interested in contacting every single site that links to your competitors. What you’re interested in are the sites that have the highest rank and are relevant to the topic you want to rank well for.
In our “stop foreclosure” key word example there were a ton of sites linking to them. I’m only interested in contacting those that have a high page rank and sites that are about foreclosure and foreclosure related topics.
That means if Rosie’s Flower Shop, with no page rank, is linking to StopForeclosure.com, I’m not interested in talking to them. But if Jim’s Real Estate Blog with a page rank of 4 will link to my site, I’m all over that.
One way to weed out the flower shops from the list of sites you find using the linkdomain: command is by asking Yahoo to give you results by topic. If you type in
linkdomain:www.stopforeclosure.com/ -site:stopforeclosure.com real estate
Yahoo will give you a list of sites linking to StopForeclosure.com that have the words “real estate” on their site.
Pretty cool, huh? Give it a shot and see what happens!
I’ve got a lot more tips and ideas to share with you, but sometimes there’s not enough hours in the day to create tutorials on all of them. Other times the ideas are too good to just give away. My best tips and strategies are shared on my daily conference call and in my advanced tutorials (highly recommended). Learn more about the Conference Call and Advanced Tutorials here.