Finding Links to Your Web Page and Those of Your Competitors

We've talked all about the importance of link-building and how fostering many, high-quality, and diverse inbound links is probably the singlemost powerful thing you can do to improve your page's search engine rankings. But how do you track who is linking to your page? Also, what if you want to find out who is linking to your competitors? Here are two quick-and-easy tips:

The first and simplest way to get a read on links is by using Google's "link:" operator. Search for "link:yourwebsite.com" and Google will return pages that are linking to the page you include. Even though this is not a complete list you can use it as a good representative sample.

Second, if you're using Google Webmaster Tools (more on that in a later post) it'll give you a fairly comprehensive analysis of the links your site is receiving. Drawback here is that you can only do this for sites you have control over, and not those of your competitors.

A lot of SEO sites out there have their own backlink analysis tools but at the end of the day I find that many of them are based on the Google link: operator and it's equivalents in Yahoo and MSN and just using one of those is good enough for 90% of use cases.

External Links for SEO: Link Quantity vs Quality vs Diversity

Now that you've learned how building up inbound links to your web page from external websites is probably the single-most important element in SEO, you're embarking on a campaign to foster inbound links to your site. But how do you decide what links to go after and how to prioritize across various opportunities?

As a general rule of thumb, you want to have as many links from a diverse set of the most reputable sites possible.

First let's take quantity versus quality. You can think of the PageRank algorithm as a summation of all the links you receive, weighted by their authority. So, for example, if you receive 5 different links from 5 different sites with "authorities" 2, 3, 7, 7, and 9, you could say that the total "authority" gained by your site is 2+3+6+7+7, or 25. On the other hand, if you received 3 different links from 3 different sites with authorities 9, 9, and 9, you would have received 9+9+9, or 27 "authority points." In our example, you would have been better off with fewer, but higher quality, links.

That tradeoff between link quantity and link quality should be fairly clear. Of course, keep in mind that obtaining a link from a more authoritative site is oftentimes more difficult, and thus may require more time and effort on your part to obtain.

The third variable I'll throw in here is the issue of link diversity. Let's take the example above with the 3 links. In a situation where all 3 links are from the same single site (from different pages or from different parts of the same page) versus where each of the 3 links comes from a different site, the option where the links come from more diverse sites is better and thus likely to rank your site higher.

It's even said that search engines may grade sites as being more or less diverse from each other based on past link patterns and other factors. Thus, there are also varying grades of "diversity." Make sure to keep in mind link diversity when building your inbound link profile as it's yet another factor that engines look at which you should take into account!