How to Find Backlinks for a Competitor's Website

Summary: In this real estate SEO tutorial, you'll learn to analyze the websites of your competitors, in order to find valuable backlinks that can boost your search engine rankings. It's quick, it's easy, and it's completely legal.

Many SEO firms make search engine optimization seem highly complex, as if you need advanced training to perform it. Here's a secret they don't want me to share with you. SEO is not rocket science, and you can do it for yourself.

In fact, most of SEO comes down to three things: (1) having keyword-rich content on your site, (2) having good website structure to maximize visibility, and (3) having a lot of quality backlinks from other websites.

Let's say I'm a real estate agent in Austin, Texas. When I do a Google or Yahoo search for "Austin real estate" phrases, I find a certain agent's website right up at the top of the search results. This is prime placement, and you can bet that agent is getting a lot of exposure from such rankings.

But how did he or she earn such high placement? You can be fairly sure that it comes down to the factors mentioned above. For one thing, the website owner probably knows a thing or two about real estate search engine optimization. He probably has keyword-rich content on the website that matches the search query you did. And (most relevant to this tutorial), he probably has a lot of backlinks from other websites to his. This last item is the most important of all — it's what separates top-ranking websites from all the rest.

In this real estate SEO tutorial, I'm going to focus on the last of the three items mentioned above. I'm going to talk about backlinks and how to find them. Specifically, I'll show you how to quickly and easily identify all of the links to your top-ranking competitor websites.

Even people with a basic understanding of real estate SEO understand the importance of inbound links from other websites. Search engines use them as a measure of popularity. In other words, having a lot of quality backlinks from relevant websites to your own site will help you climb up through search engine rankings over time.

Well, with Yahoo Site Explorer, you can quickly and easily find out which websites are linking to yours. You can also export this information into a spreadsheet for further use. Nice, huh? Here's how to go about it:

Steps for Finding Backlinks

1. 1. Go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
2. 2. Enter your complete URL (including "http://") into the box at the top of the page.
3. 3. Click the "Explore URL" button.
4. 4. On the results page, click on the link at the top that says "inlinks" (these are the sites linking to yours).
5. 5. In the first dropdown box, select "Except from this domain" (this will exclude your own internal links).
6. 6. In the second dropdown box, select "Entire site" (this will show links to your entire website, not just the home page).

There you have it — a list of all the websites that link to yours. And it can be exported into Excel too!

Yahoo Site Explorer in Action

The image below shows results for one of my websites (ArmingYourFarming.com). You can see that I've entered the full URL of the website I want to research. "Full URL" means I've included "http://" before the www.armingyourfarming.com.

I clicked on "Inlinks" to see the sites that link to mine. Next, to exclude my own internal linking, I selected "Except from this domain" from the first dropdown. Lastly, I select "Entire Site" from the second dropdown, because I want to know about links to my entire site, and not just the home page.

This also tells me where my most powerful links are coming from, because highest-ranking websites are usually listed first. This makes sense to me, because I know the Home Buying Institute is a high-ranking website.

Analyzing Competitor Websites

Now here's the real value of this technique. Everything you just did for your own site, you can also do for websites that get top ranking for your key phrases. Hmmm ... a list of all the websites linking to your top-ranking competitors. Sounds like a roadmap to link-building success, if you ask me. Want to know why a certain agent's website sits at the top of Google or Yahoo? Well, it probably has a lot to do with backlinks, and now you know how to find them. It's ethical, it's smart, and it will help you mirror the search engine success of your competitors.

SEO Tutorials >> Finding Backlinks