When your link building for your site it is always better to get relevant links. Now there are many ways of finding relevant links, search engines, direcories, forums but one of the best ways is to see whoose linking to competitor websites or high profile websites in your niche.

There are two ways available to analyse competitors back links, one is the “link:” operator in Google, the other is Yahoo SiteExplorer. Now Google’s link operator will only show a handfull of a sites backlinks but SiteExplorer will show all backlinks but will only let you export 1000 of them.

Another problem we have with backlink analysis is the “no follow” tag. Not all links are valued equal and Google came up with PageRank to aid in solving this problem. PageRank is a value of authority assigned to a single webpage. An outbound link from a page will carry some of that PageRank. To allow webmasters control over their outbound links as webmasters do not always want to dilute their PageRank, Google introduced the “No Follow” tag. The “No Follow” tag informs Google not to pass any PageRank to the link, thus making the link have no benefit towards search engine rankings.

Not all Search Engines adopted the “No Follow” tag and Yahoo is one of them, so the problem with SiteExplorer is that it includes “No Follow” links and “Do Follow” links in its results. Well I’ve found a solution.

I’ve just begun using a firefox plugin called SEO Link Analysis by Yoast de Valk. SEO Link analysis adds to Siteexplorer the PageRank of the page that the links originate from, the Anchor Text used in the link, and offers colourcodes to explain if the link is a DoFollow link or No Follow link.

Below is a screenshot of SiteExplorer, before and after SEO Link Analysis has been installed:

SiteExplorer before SEO Link Analysis

SiteExplorer after SEO Link Analysis has been installed:

SiteExplorer with SEO Link Analysis installed

I hope this helps you with your competitor analysis!

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