My main competitor has 40k back links

Should I even bother?

[freshfish]

Hello,
I have been debating over an issue and would appreciate some advice. I have been building a site in Niche A which offers a couple things that most other sites in that niche do not offer. Its a long term project and is not meant for adsense (i.e. short term profits).

Here is my main concern. There are several sites in that niche that are much more established – one of them actually has 40,000 back links (Yahoo & Altavista)…yikes! How can I compete with that? How can my site ever compete with that kind of back linking? Or should not even be concerned with this?

Thanks!

[EliteWeb]

Im assuming your content will be different, if so then yes you can compete with it. :D

[Philosopher]

The site may show 40,000 backlinks, but that does NOT mean that all 40,000 actually count. Are they all from different sites? More likely the bulk of them are from 1 or a handful of sites.

You can often get a fairly good idea of how strong those 40,000 links are by browsing through what Yahoo returns on a link check of the site. If it shows 40,000 backlinks, but then only displays 35-40 of them, then most of them are likely irrelevant (at least from what I have seen in most instances).

[stuntdubl]

Find out how many come from unique domains on unique IP's. Make your decision to compete based on that.

[Reflect]

Data mine your competitors backlinks and make requests to those sites to have them add you. Your competitor made it easy for you.

Take czaRe,

Brian

[freshfish]

Thanks for the info...

How does one go about "Data min(ing) your competitors backlinks"? I was thinking of going through the sites but manually it would take for ever to make that many requests

WOuld you be able to refer me to a software or site that would help me analyze the backlinks and the site's structure?

[Reflect]

Just hit Google. Put the query in link:domain (being the competitors). You now have a list of sites linking to the competitor. Now just start going through them. There is automated software that will do this but I tend to stay away and will not recomend any.

Take care,

Brian

[PatrickDeese]

How many of his 40K links are from his own site?

try: linkdomain:example.com -site:example.com