What is your tooling to find PBN backlinks?

[Daniel from Linxact]

Do you use any kinds of tools that help you find PBN backlinks of competitor domains? I would like to know for market research reasons. Any answer appreciated!

Sincerely,
The Data Scientist

 

[Steptoe]

I maintain accounts with various 'smaller' SEO tools that look to emulate what Ahrefs, SEMRush etc do. Many of them have their own crawlers which either don't get blocked by default by the standard block lists that PBN/link network owners use, or don't disclose the name of their crawler and/or what IP ranges they use. Of course they're never as extensive or fresh as the big players, but you can find lots of interesting stuff.
I don't want to name names for this very reason

 

[HenryObi]

Do you use any kinds of tools that help you find PBN backlinks of competitor domains? I would like to know for market research reasons. Any answer appreciated!

Sincerely,
The Data Scientist

Add your target competitor's website to your Bing Webmaster Tools' backlinks tool, under the tab 'Backlinks To Any Website'.

In no time, Bing would give you access to a good portion of their backlinks. That is how I was able to figure out that a small competitor of mine was no small competitor and the site was in fact owned some guy with other much bigger sites.

BTW, Bing tool doesn't capture all website backlinks, neither yours nor your competitors' but it does a good job of capture enough for you to figure something out.

 

[Daniel from Linxact]

I maintain accounts with various 'smaller' SEO tools that look to emulate what Ahrefs, SEMRush etc do. Many of them have their own crawlers which either don't get blocked by default by the standard block lists that PBN/link network owners use, or don't disclose the name of their crawler and/or what IP ranges they use. Of course they're never as extensive or fresh as the big players, but you can find lots of interesting stuff.
I don't want to name names for this very reason

Interesting. Yes, this works for some PBNs, but many just whitelist Googlebot. Those can't be found by any common backlink checker.

Add your target competitor's website to your Bing Webmaster Tools' backlinks tool, under the tab 'Backlinks To Any Website'.

In no time, Bing would give you access to a good portion of their backlinks. That is how I was able to figure out that a small competitor of mine was no small competitor and the site was in fact owned some guy with other much bigger sites.

BTW, Bing tool doesn't capture all website backlinks, neither yours nor your competitors' but it does a good job of capture enough for you to figure something out.

I've heard of this method. This is great, yes!