Whether your a web designer offering SEO services or you own an online business and are trying to rank to the top of search engines, finding your competition’s backlinks is an essential step in your link building campaign. Why would someone need to know what backlinks the competition holds?

Firstly, this is a great strategy for trying to get the similar links your competitors have. Secondly, finding how they think, what methods they approach and if it is a winning method could literally put your website to the top. Do they pay for links? What about their activity on forums, blogs, social networking websites? Are they doing article marketing? These are some questions that can be easily answered when finding their source for backlinks.

As with any method SEO-related, this can be done with free tools or paid tools. For free ones, we have Yahoo! SiteExplorer as first one. Although it can be really useful, this will not show more than 1,000 links and will not disclose important facts like anchor text, sites’ IPs and other essential for getting a complete view over a company link building strategy.

The second tool can be found both in the free version and paid version, it is literally an awesome piece of software everyone should make use of – SEO SpyGlass. Although it is limited to 1,000 links by Yahoo, this can squeeze about 2-300 more backlinks than the SiteExplorer, but the beautiful thing about it is that can reveal impressive data about the backlinks. This includes the anchor text, if a backlink is dofollow or no nofollow, pages’ PR, domain IP and many more, thus making this tool a must for anyone “spying” on their competition.

Last, but not least, here comes the MajesticSEO. These guys provide the most comprehensive reports for almost any given website. Owning their own index, they can reveal hundreds of thousands of backlinks a website has with the anchor text for each and any backlink, in just a matter of minutes. Claiming they hold their hands on an index with about 2.5 trillion unique URLs, their subscription packages start from as low as £ 9.99 each month and definitely worth every penny.

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