Discover hidden competitors links

[jediviper]

Hey guys,

so I had this discussion with a fellow SEO guy about how to discover the links or the PBNs of competitors, when their sites are blocking Ahrefs, Semrush etc.
In this case, I think it's almost impossible to track these links.

I wonder if any of you have any other ideas to share.

[JorgeV]

Hello,

You take the title of an article from this competitor, and you run a search on this title... it will return most of suspect pages ...

[saladtosser]

I'd be VERY careful in building any links these days, even if your competitors have these links. I've been testing building links on one of my test sites that I don't care about, and every time I build a couple of links literally a few days later the sites rank lower and lower, clearly google still penalises links and I believe they track you through browsers or sites that have analytics installed. I just wouldn't risk building a single link to a site I care about personally. If you do build links use Edge and a VPN..... and never visit the website your linking 2 while using the VPN or they will spot the pattern and penalise you! Just my observations.

[edited by: saladtosser at 11:57 am (utc) on Apr 20, 2021]

[jediviper]

@JorgeV
How running a search for a single page in Google will reveal their most important backlinks?

[jediviper]

So no new replies.
Either there is no other way or people don't want to reveal any more info about this..

[engine]

One of the problems is scanning for the links if they are blocked by spiders. Using the standard methods are unlikely to show anything of value.

If the search engine doesn't show it you have to question the value of the link in the first place. It won't necessarily show the link itself, but the link may have a positive or, most likely, a negative effect. PBNs are old and pretty much territory not worth working on, unless you're happy to trash the domain.

Note1: Google is not the only search service. ;)

Note2: Watch out for malware.

[martinibuster]

>>>How running a search for a single page in Google will reveal their most important backlinks?

Syndicated content. That's one way.

There are many other ways. Just get creative with Google web searches. They're easy to find.

[FranticFish]

Here's what I'd try:

1) Via exact match anchor text search

This I think is that JorgeV was saying. Google today returns substantially different results for the same phrase when it's inside speech marks. So look at the title / h1 of a ranking page and then search for that in speech marks to find other indexed pages with that phrase.

Won't help you if someone has been careful to vary their anchor text, but then they might be doing one or more of these...

2) Via domain name (or url) search

Again, using speech marks. If the domain name or url is not the link maybe it's mentioned elsewhere on the linking page.

3) Via brand name search

As above.

4) Via the names of their reps (e.g. Brett Tabke or Jim Boykin might reveal mentions for WebmasterWorld) or their social profiles (e.g. their @ handle for Twitter).

[jediviper]

One guy that I met claims that the LRT tool can track such hidden links.
Has anyone experience by using this tool?

[brotherhood of LAN]

>2) Via domain name (or url) search

Definitely. Since lots of people want "anchor text variation" with PBN style links, in those cases a % of them will be the domain, or link.

[lammert]

Talks of the functionality of tools is prohibited by the ToS here.

Wouldn't it be better to spend your energy on improving your own web presence instead of trying to decode small aspects of another's SEO strategy? Even if you discover part of a hidden link farm, what would you do with that knowledge? And how would you know if their linking strategy is helping your competitor, or is hurting them because Google discovered the link farm and took anti-spam measures accordingly?

[JS_Harris]

Your visitors don't care about your competitor's PBN links, neither should you. In fact it's probably better to focus creation resources on building a good site rather than an army of sites and pages to push a bad one.

Just saying.

[jediviper]

Come on guys, really? We shouldn't care about the competition? Is this what you are trying to say?
Well, I don't about you, but I would really like to know all aspects of the game. And a very big percentage of the knowledge of the market is what the competition is doing.

You go and tell me, what you are going to do, if you just started working on a new website and you realise that for a main kw it's ranking on the 2nd page, when other competitors with less years on the market, with similar website and products and with almost 0 links manage to rank at the top 3 positions.
Aren't you going to analyse everything you can about link profiles, etc?