Backlinks are links that point to a website. Briefly, backlinks are votes for how important a website is in the Search Engine’s eyes. But people started adding a ton of backlinks to their website whether it was spammy or genuine to cheat the system but the search engines discovered this and put algorithms in place to catch the cheaters.
On the simplest level, you can just find out what websites link to your competitors (backlinks) by using some SEO Software and get those websites to link to your website.
Good, right?
Yes and No.
Which competitor backlinks are good and which ones are bad?
It would be nice to know which of those backlinks are helping your competitors and which backlinks are not helping your competitors. There are several SEO Softwares like Spyfu, Ahrefs, and SEMRush to bring up just a few that can help you with this.
Are the competitor’s backlinks spammy?
Moz, Ahrefs, SEMRush, and SEO Powersuite just to name a few can tell you the quality of a backlink by using its own ‘spam score’. Although these spam score tools are mostly accurate it is best to visit the websites manually to see if they are genuine or spammy.
How do you spot spammy backlinks?
Here are a few things to look for to determine if a website is spammy or not manually. The paid version of this course will have snapshots of examples and more details on what to look for.
- Poor Design (Is the website ugly?)
- Template Design (The same design is used over and over again but with different domain names.)
- Funny-Looking URLs (An example of this would be https://website1234.com.)
- Overuse of Subdomains (An example is https://site654.azure.com.)
- Lots of Ads on the Website
- The Exact Same Information used by Multiple Sites (Coupon sites and Shipment Tracking sites are good examples.)
If you get your competitor’s links to link to your website but leave out the spammy ones it will give you an edge over your competition.