The strategy to steal your competitors backlinks is something we utilize on a daily basis for our own websites (and clients) to gain a competitive edge in the search engine rankings. Reverse engineering your competitors’ backlinks is not that difficult to do, and you can build a very natural profile slowly but surely giving you a great foundation to build on. Stealing your competitors’ backlinks is a good way to catapult a new website quickly into competitive search engine rankings or improve rankings of your existing website(s). Below are the steps we use at Upshot Media Group to steal competitors’ quality backlinks.
Create a list of your competitors’ websites
If you do not know your competitor sites then you have 2 options. You can do an organic search in google for one of the competitive keyword phrases you wish to rank for and make a list of the top 10 results that show up on the first page of Google’s organic listings. The second option is to plugin your own website to a tool such as ahrefs Positions Explorer, SimilarWeb or any other web service with similar functionality.
Finding All Of The Backlinks
After you have your 10 competitor site urls we need to use some backlink checker tools to see who is linking to their websites. There are an absolute ton of tools (both free and paid) to choose from, but we use ahrefs and semrush at Upshot for our Search Engine Marketing Strategies. If you have the budget we recommend using ahrefs as this seo tool by far has the most in depth backlink database of any other tools we use. Go through and one by one enter your 10 competitor websites into your backlink checker and export your competitors backlinks using the csv export feature.
Analyze Your Competitors Backlinks
At this point you will want to combine all 10 backlink csv lists into 1 file and do some analysis. The first thing you will want to do is to remove duplicate backlink url’s so that you have only unique backlinks in your master backlink file. Secondly, I recommend removing any backlinks from your master backlinks file that have the “nofollow” tag as those won’t provide you any quality link juice. After this, sort your backlinks in your master file by “PR” (page rank) or “DA” (domain authority, also sometimes “DR”) and remove any backlinks that don’t have a PR/DA value of some kind. This should leave you with a quality master backlinks file that you will want to target for your link building campaign.
Replicating Your Top 10 Competitors Backlinks
Now you just need to go through each of the links in your master backlinks file one at a time and see how your competitor got their link on that page. You can open each link in your browser and look for the competitor backlink which should give you an idea of how they were able to achieve that link. It can sometimes be a directory listing, social media post, forum post, or blog comment. In many cases it will be relatively easy to replicate the link for your own website and in some cases it may be a bit more challenging such as submitting a guest post or creating a power page that you get other sites to link to. As you work through each link, please highlight your master backlinks list of which links you have replicated and you should get a feel for this process as you work through all the links. I realize this can be time consuming, but it is worth every minute you spend once you outrank your competitors and get a ton more traffic and ultimately more business.
After you have completed the link building process you will have all the backlinks of your 10 competitors! This typically results in your website leap frogging your competitors on the 1st page of Google!