SEO mettle–Getting the back links...

We all know that getting the competitors back links is probably the toughest task in SEO field. It can be really cumbersome to analyze the links over and over for all the clients we are working for (unless you are using expensive software for doing the same). Lots of times the data itself is old, the links may or may not be relevant today, and many times we do not know how relevant the link we see in front of us is. So what do we do?

I stumbled upon the tool Yahoopipes, and interestingly, it has amazing tools to track our SEO project progress. Getting back to the point, it has a tool which can check the back links to a URL (the competitor in our case).

Just login with your Yahoo account and the tool is pretty straight forward to use. Add the feed to your favorite feed reader and you are ready to go. The links you get are the fresh ones and that is how you know what your competitors are up to. Also, that tells us that Google is giving importance to which websites.

You might not get all the links, but for a free tool, you wouldn’t want to miss out on any data that is available. Google alerts is another tool that you might use to monitor the back links and link activities for the sites you want to monitor, but lot of times the back links are contextual and hence we might miss out most of the links. Try this and let us know what your thoughts are.