You’ve probably heard that if you just get a few more links than your competition you can outrank them. Well it’s not strictly true as some links are strong than others. Some links are considered of higher authority than others as they come from pages with high pagerank. If you don’t know what pagerank is see this post here.
But looking at your competitors link portfolio gives an indication of hat you need to do to out rank them. So how do you do it? You could ask them to tell you how many links they are at. Not very likely. You could go to Yahoo Site Explorer and do a url back link search there. This will not give you the full picture as they only show a select bunch of links. You could always do the old site semi colon search in Google, e.g. link:seo-city.co.uk. But alas like Yahoo they only show you a portion of your links as well.
Apparentely it’s to protect their algorithms. If you use the Firefox browser there is a free plugin that comes with it called Seo Fore Firefox. They give you loads of free data apart from just the number of back links a site has. They tell you the domain age, the pagerank and how many properties the website has across a wide range of social media platforms. They also draw the referring domains from the worlds biggest independent back link counter: Majestic Seo. They have been scouring the web for years collecting data and storing it all on their private servers.
Before you go head first into a slugfest with the website that’s been outranking you, have a check to se whether you’re up against a feather weight or a 900 pound gorilla.
