Hey guys, So I've been doing a little research on a competitor of mine with Yahoo site explorer. I wanted to see where he/she is getting backlinks from. Currently, this competitor of mine is in the #1 position for the keyword I want and his site is less than one year old. The weird thing is, it appears that about 90% of his links are coming from 2 blogs that he owns. The link to his site is in the blogroll of his blogs so it appears on every single page. He currently has somewhere over 1000 links pointing to his site mainly from these 2 low PR blogs. Does this seem right to you guys? It's just frustrating because I feel like most of my links are from high PR sites and my site is nowhere to be found for the keyword.
pgb, first of all, while Yahoo shows MOST of the backlinks, still you cannot get ALL backlinks from there. Personally, I try hide my donor websites from Yahoo by robots.txt if I am able to. The same trick could be used by your competitor. Second, backlinks are only a part of a google ranking algorithm. There are many other factors you need to check of the competitor website: domain age, content quality, regularity of updates, listings in catalogues (business.com, dmoz).
Absolutely correct. Don't worry about PageRank, worry about how the Content of your Site relates to the Content of the Site you are getting a link from. Quality over quantity each and every time. It takes time to 'beat' a competitor. Two quality tools that I use to gauge my websites ranking and my competitors are: www.backlinkwatch.com <--- Shows the majority of links along with anchor text, do/nofollow attributes, total outbound links, etc. www.seoserp.com/web_tools/google_top_1000_serps_checker.asp <--- Will show you where your site ranks for defined keyword/keyword phrases so you can track your progress. It lists the Top 1000 Search Engine Results, I'm sure you'll find your site does rank in there somewhere.
Sitewide links make it painful to analyze any backlink profile. Ignore the sitewides and see where else he/she is getting the links from.