New Backlink SEO Technique ?

Hey Guys,

As some of you may know, I have a competitor who has two very similar sites, both in the same niche, based on the same keywords. The main site suddenly dropped a lot, and the other one, which has been dormant for a year has gone to the number 3 spot.

Now this site has nothing going for it - a pathetic bit of keyword stuffing and cloaking but thats it. Nothing to give it such a high position in a very competitive niche.

It has only a few pages, poor optimization and only 18 backlinks according to Google. Even his other site, which fell to page 2 recently, is better quality (it was number one until a few months ago). and had more backlinks.

Then I checked Yahoo. The number 3 site has 400 backlinks in yahoo, but only 18 in Google. Could it be that Google still assigns some weight to these links even though it doesnt think they are worth showing?

Google doesn't publicly reveal competitor's backlinks. Yahoo does. Google still counts a lot of links that it doesn't show when you do the link: search.

You can see your own in Google Webmaster tools, but the link info isn't publicly available for competitors' sites. Google admits that they only show a small percentage of the links they count.

Hey Battman, it looks like I might have found my answer then. Thanks!