7 Proofen Tricks to Get a Goooooooooooogle of Links

SEO is a race. And in any race learning from your competitors makes you a better runner. Even when you’re running first it’s sometimes good to look back and check the runner-ups. And if you’re not the yellow jersey guy, you absolutely should examine the leaders: their gear, their training, their strategy. In SEO the most interesting thing about your competition are their links.

Whether you like it or not SEO is still pretty much about links. Good link profile can make up for almost any lack of optimized content and other onpage flaws. Love or hate, the best thing you can do about it is embrace the fact and run with it.

So let’s go through some tricks that will enable you to look deeper into your competition’s link profile granting you access to the restricted areas: their locker room, dirty laundry and even the briefing hall where they plan their link building strategies.

Let’s Talk Competitive Link Research

Finding out where your competitors’ links come from is not all that hard. You just go to Yahoo! or Google and type in link:www.your-competitor.com to get a list of inbound links to the site.

Yahoo’s much better in that respect as it tends to give more extensive and accurate data. The problem here is that there’s a limit of 1,000 links per website which is often not enough as the fattest link sources get left behind the limit fence.

Here’re some tips to break through to the other side.

Note: If you’re lazy like me skip to the end of the article where I’ll share a tool that does it all much quicker.

Trick 1: Search for Links to Particular Web Pages of a Competing Site
Trick 2: Exclude Internal Links
Trick 3: Exclude Links Coming from Certain Domains
Trick 4: Check Links Coming from Certain TLDs
Trick 5: Exclude Links Coming from Certain TLDs
Trick 6: Use Different Combinations of the First 5 Tricks
Trick 7: Use the Above 6 Tricks in Different Search Engines

See the detail of these 7 Proofen Tricks on my blog :
http://snapseo.blogspot.com/2009/11/7-tricks-to-get-goooooooooooogle-of.html