Do a lot of backlinks from the same website helps?

That is so NOT True...

An inbound link (or a backlink) actually comes from a web page - not a site as a whole.

The number of pages (with external links pointing to your site) that are indexed in the SEs = the number of backlinks your site has.

So, 1000 of links coming from a single site can never be considered as a single link. The search engines never do that. Trust me. I've seen several sites strongly ranking no.1 in Google for competitive long-tail keywords without an external backlink.

If it still doesn't make sense to you, then consider the popular blogs (with tens of thousands of posts) for a moment.

You'll see they rank higher for a couple of good keywords with a little or no external backlinks.

Look, even the OP of this thread has discovered such sites.

However, it's also true that an external link (if it's relevant and comes from a high traffic site) has got more power over an internal link, but in no way equal to the power of 1000 internal links. Period.

 

Option #2.

Not only is DoDo Me correct when they point out that 2500 is more than 1000 ; ) a variety of websites is more likely to get you links from some of the highly ranked sites. Check out Wikipedia's article by searching for Page Rank

 

A smarty pants

 

What is a good free tool to use to see where you competitors backlinks come from?

 

Yahoo Search. Just put linkdomain:yourcompetitorsite.com (for example) as a search string to find out the backlinks.

 

In general, the second one will be a better choice. But also the first one can become a good option if that one (have 1000 backlinks from) is a high PR and high traffic websites compared to the other 50 that are almost dead in terms of traffic or PR.

 

If 1000 links from the same site were as good as 50 links from 50 sites, I think we would all be sitting on the summit of Google!

 

Very true..