Greetings I was wondering how should I determine my competitors amount of backlinks in a search engine. Let's take google. If for the keyword "foo", before my site appears sites like competitor.com/dir1/page.htm , should I look for backlinks to that page or just to to competitor.com? Is "link:competitor.com/dir1/page.htm" the correct syntax in google? Or google counts backlinks to the domain name regardless of the subdirs the page is in? Thanks in advance
you need to take into account the links directly to the page and the internal linking structure. I use OptiLink to analyse both, it fetches the links from the SE and you provide a list of pages on the site (i use Xenu to get this) then you can see how the page is linked and most improtantly the anchor text used. So, in answer to your question, links to the page are important but links to the site are also important as they increase the value of the internal links.
Keep in mind that the link: operator does not work 100% accurately on Google, and hasn't for some time. Google shows (in their words) a selection of links. Google counts ALL links including internal links, so you are going to have to look at the sites internal navigation system as well as external links. I suggest you use MSN & Yahoo to gauge backlinks rather than Googles link: command.
I noticed Yahoo shows much more backlinks than any other SE. I have over 5000 in Yahoo and just 440 in Google (but I know why...). Is there any similar command to "link:" in Yahoo too? What are Optilink and Xenu?
Agreed! MSN caches more links IMO than any other website. But, if you are only looking at how many "important" BLs your site has .... you should use Altavista. Just use the link: command like you would on Google. Don't waste any time with Google, as it doesn't show all BLs and BLs are only updated one in a few weeks. Zinho: On Yahoo, you need to use linkdomain: instead of link: to check your BLs.
Thanks dfsweb, I noticed Altavista is the only to show back links even for inner pages. I used link:www.mysite.com/dir1/page.asp and it showed me the backlinks count to that page. This is very different from the other SE and helps a lot while testing for link popularity and weight spread in the coop. Do you confirm this? Thanks
I use this site to get a quick glance of all those guys... http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ Not sure if you've seen it before.