Best tool to track competitors backlinks?

siteexplorer works for me, its free too

I ran a comparison between SEO Elite, Market Samurai, SEO Spyglass and Backlinkwatch.

SEO Spyglass came out far ahead of the rest. The only one I'd like to test against those is IBP but I suspect SEO Spyglass will still come out near the top.

The numbers lined up like this:

SEO Elite around 500 IBLs tracked
Market Samurai 1000 IBLs tracked
SEO Spyglass approx 3500 IBLs tracked

backlinkwatch brought back 1000 pieces of data on IBLs but did note that there were close to 3500 backlinks total...but since it's just harvesting from Y! site explorer (same with Market Samurai) it could only provide direct data on those 1000 links.

Anyone have a copy of IBP laying around that could do a harvest for me to compare. It was scraping the backlinks on a Terry Kyle article on goarticles that during that week was outranking Angela's for the term "Backlinks" on Google.

simit

seo spyglass is the best because of the level of detail, if you need something simple just use yahoo site explorer

Traffic Travis or Market Samurai are your best bets. SEO Spyglass sucks imho, theres nothing it can do that Traffic Travis cant, and it costs about $600 compared to Traffic Travis which is free

vote for MS

oinky222 said:

Traffic Travis or Market Samurai are your best bets. SEO Spyglass sucks imho, theres nothing it can do that Traffic Travis cant, and it costs about $600 compared to Traffic Travis which is free

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Hmm ill try that thank you

lhouket said:

Seo Spyglass +1 vote

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best choice in my opinion for tracking your competitions backlinks, followed by market samurai

simit said:

I ran a comparison between SEO Elite, Market Samurai, SEO Spyglass and Backlinkwatch.

SEO Spyglass came out far ahead of the rest. The only one I'd like to test against those is IBP but I suspect SEO Spyglass will still come out near the top.

The numbers lined up like this:

SEO Elite around 500 IBLs tracked
Market Samurai 1000 IBLs tracked
SEO Spyglass approx 3500 IBLs tracked

backlinkwatch brought back 1000 pieces of data on IBLs but did note that there were close to 3500 backlinks total...but since it's just harvesting from Y! site explorer (same with Market Samurai) it could only provide direct data on those 1000 links.

Anyone have a copy of IBP laying around that could do a harvest for me to compare. It was scraping the backlinks on a Terry Kyle article on goarticles that during that week was outranking Angela's for the term "Backlinks" on Google.

simit

Click to expand...

i have IBP and I am only getting about 1000 backlinks for the site you mentioned, same as Market Samurai and Traffic Travis. i have a cracked version so if you want to test it out yourself i can upload it for you.

can you explain how you are getting 3500 backlinks from SEO Spyglass? i keep running it and I'm getting a message saying "1138 backlinks have been found, but you are only able to view 1100 of them". how are you seeing 3500?

also, i checked the article with a site i just discovered called "MajesticSEO" and was getting over 1800, which is way better than what im getting with my other software, but nowhere near as much as you are getting with Spyglass. can you please share your methods for getting such valuable backlink data?

Please keep in mind Blekko is a col new player and they return TONS of backlinks. SEO SpyGlass supports blekko since yesterday and you can use it in the free version as well

Obviously you can use the simple "link:" operator but it's definitely more handy to operate via a table-based interface. just my 2 cents

So there are a some decent tools available. It sounds like many of them simply use Yahoo site explorer. Some may use/add results from Google. That's a start, but I want to understand how one would find *all* backlinks. Even if commercial software could be bought that provides this, I still want to understand *how* to do it. Can anyone offer some concrete suggestions?

Long term, I really want to be able to search for arbitrary text (e.g., javascript code) that is not indexed by Google, et.al., but that's another thread. I use Amazon EC2 (elastic cloud computing) a good bit. I've seen mention there regarding a now deceased Alexa service called 'grep the web', with which you literally could run grep across web page source via map/reduce/hadoop.

Yahoo site explorer ('except from this domain', 'entire site') shows 14 inbound links for 'host{.}com' and 13 for 'www{.}host{.}com'. So far so good.

Blekko shows 3 pages, with an additional 20 from yahoo.

In experimenting with Google, I'm seeing weird results, specifically:

A search for 'host{.}com' returns 2,200 results.
A search for 'host{.}com -site:host.com' returns 2,140 results.

Ok, but:

A search for 'link:host{.}com' returns 0 results. (There is no space between the ':' and the 'h'.)
A search for 'link: host{.}com' returns 68 results. (There is a space between the ':' and the 'h'.)
A search for 'link:host{.}com -site:host.com' returns 31 results. (no space between ':' and 'h')
A search for 'link: host{.}com -site:host.com' returns 30 results. (is a space between ':' and 'h')

WTF? I see no pattern. And why does 'link:host{.}com' find nothing, but 'link: host{.}com' finds 68 pages?

Enlightenment appreciated.

--Ma

I use Lewi in the services section for $5 he can pull all the links he kicks ass!!

I use SEO Elite

Yea, SEOQuake is a cool firefox addon to show you a lot of data.

I personally use Market Samurai for competitor backlink data AND anchor text analysis.

It really kicks ass. Traffic Travis is fairly good as well.

SEOQuake is free, and the latter 2 softwares can be found here on BHW in the download section.

Hope I could help,

Doc

Majestic SEO...paid, but definitely makes a difference.

Going to check out that seo spy glass everyone is talking about

Hola oinky,

Sorry I missed your question earlier. Hit me up in a PM and remind me to send you the settings I use with SEO Spyglass and to ensure we're harvesting from the same exact URL.

s

oinky222 said:

i have IBP and I am only getting about 1000 backlinks for the site you mentioned, same as Market Samurai and Traffic Travis. i have a cracked version so if you want to test it out yourself i can upload it for you.

can you explain how you are getting 3500 backlinks from SEO Spyglass? i keep running it and I'm getting a message saying "1138 backlinks have been found, but you are only able to view 1100 of them". how are you seeing 3500?

also, i checked the article with a site i just discovered called "MajesticSEO" and was getting over 1800, which is way better than what im getting with my other software, but nowhere near as much as you are getting with Spyglass. can you please share your methods for getting such valuable backlink data?

Click to expand...

Well yahoo siteexplorer API permits to scrape first 1000 backlinks.SB,IBP and other use yahoo API..In order to access all the links you need to crawl through each page in siteexplorer.