How to Check Competitor Backlinks (And Steal Their Strategy)

Why Competitor Backlinks Matter

Building backlinks from scratch is brutal. Cold outreach response rates hover around 1-3%.

Competitor analysis flips this. Instead of guessing which websites might link to you, you know which websites have already linked to similar content. They’ve demonstrated they’re willing to link. They’re infinitely more likely to respond.

Finding Competitor Backlinks

Ahrefs Site Explorer

Enter competitor’s domain, navigate to Backlinks report. Key metrics:

• DR (Domain Rating) of linking sites
• Traffic to the linking page
• Anchor text
• Link type — dofollow vs nofollow

Semrush Backlink Analytics

Similar capabilities. Some prefer Semrush’s filtering. Enter URL, get full backlink profile with authority scores and anchor text distribution.

Moz Link Explorer

Uses Domain Authority (DA). Spam score feature helps filter low-quality links.

What to Look For

High Authority, Relevant Sites

A link from a DR 70+ website in your niche is gold. DR 10 random blog is noise. The top 100 linking domains probably account for most ranking power.

Editorial vs Spam

Look for:

• Links within article body text
• Contextual anchor text
• Pages with actual traffic

Skip profile links, forum signatures, comment spam.

Link Type

• Dofollow (no rel attribute) — Full link equity
• Nofollow (rel="nofollow") — No ranking credit
• Sponsored (rel="sponsored") — Paid placement
• UGC (rel="ugc") — User-generated, low value

Your competitor might have 1,000 backlinks, but if 800 are nofollow comments, that’s not impressive. Filter for dofollow editorial links.

Patterns

• Lots of industry publication links? PR/news angles
• “Best of” lists? Resource page link building
• Guest posts on specific blogs? Contributor relationships
• Tool/calculator links? They built something useful

Step-by-Step Process

1. Identify Real Competitors

Search your target keywords. Who shows up on page one? Those are your backlink competitors.

2. Pull Their Profile

Export from your tool:

• Source URL
• Target URL
• Domain rating
• Anchor text
• Link type
• First seen date

3. Clean and Filter

• Remove duplicate domains
• Filter out DR below 20-30
• Remove obviously spammy domains
• Focus on dofollow

Go from thousands of rows to 100-300 meaningful opportunities.

4. Categorize

Group by type:

• Resource pages — Pages listing helpful links
• Guest posts — Contributed content
• Mentions — Press, interviews, roundups
• Directories — Industry-specific listings
• Broken links — Opportunities from dead pages

5. Verify Links Are Real

Backlink tools scrape data. Sometimes it’s old. Links get removed. Sites change nofollow policies.

Before outreach, verify that links you’re pursuing are:

1. Still live on the page
2. Actually pointing to your competitor
3. Dofollow
4. On an indexed, crawlable page

Replicating Competitor Links

Resource Page Outreach

Find the page, check if your content fits, send a short email: “I noticed you list tools for [topic]. We recently launched [your thing] which does [unique benefit].”

Success rate: 5-15% for well-targeted pitches.

Guest Post Opportunities

Those blogs accept outside contributions. Pitch topics competitors haven’t covered.

Broken Link Building

Competitor backlinks pointing to 404 pages = opportunity. Create equivalent content, offer it as replacement. You’re helping them fix a problem.

Common Mistakes

• Chasing quantity over quality — Many of those 10,000 links are spam
• Copying instead of learning — Understand strategy, apply to your situation
• Trusting old data — Verify before investing effort
• Targeting impossible links — Competitor got NYT coverage from $50M funding round? Unless you’re raising too, skip it