How to find more links to a website than search engines will show you

Search engine updates come and go but links remain strong. And it looks like link building is here to stay as the single most powerful SEO tactics. The question is where do you get relevant links that will drive your site up in the search results?

One of the most effective but often overlooked aspects of link building is competitive intelligence. The concept is simple. Find out where your rivals get their links, take over their link sources and blow the big guys out the water. Right now I'm gonna tell you a little secret of how to find links to a website and take advantage of the hidden link sources of your competish. And you're going to learn how to bypass the search engine's limit of 1,000 links per site and learn more about the linking profile of any website.

Step 1: The easiest way to find links to a website is to go to Yahoo! and run a search for "link:domain . com" (without quotes and spaces). The "link:" operator is used to get a list of links pointing to a site. Once you hit search you'll be automatically taken to Yahoo! site explorer where you'll get a list of links.

Step 2: In the 'Show links dropdown' choose 'except from this domain' to exclude all the internal links that are of no much use to you unless you're interested in the navigational structure of your competitor.

Step 3: You can just go through the links in your browser or you can export them by pressing 'Export first 1,000 results to TSV' link in the upper right-hand corner and explore them later.

Step 4: Now that you've got a list of links you need to weed out the poor quality ones and select the best link sources that you can use for your own website.

I bet you have 2 questions: Why Yahoo! and not, say Google? And why only 1,000 links?

- Well Yahoo! is the best source when it comes to finding links. Google knows about as many links as Yahoo! but for some reason it only shows a random sample that's often very outdated. Why 1,000 links?

- I'm not really sure but all search engine have that limit, maybe it's their thing. Anyway here's a trick that gets you past it:

Step 5: Alongside with the link:domainname operator, search for links to internal pages searching for "link:domainname. com/pagename" (without quotes and spaces)This way you'll get a list of links pointing to a particular page that you can add to the main list you have.

Step 6: If you see that there're a lot of links coming from one website add the following modifier to your query: "- site:sitename. com" (no quotes, no spaces) to exclude the links from this domain. The links from this site will be replaced by new links in your 1,000 links so you get more data.

Step 7: Remove the dulicates and you have your 1,000+ links list. Sounds like a lot of work? Yeah, I know. All right, I'm going to share the tool I use to have all these steps done for me. It's called SEO SpyGlass and it's the only tool that can find more than 1k links from the search engines. It does the above steps and more getting you 6 to 8 thousand links per domain. There are a lot of backlink checkers out there: backlinkwatch, webconfs, iwebtool, SEO Elite, etc. but SEO SpyGlass is the only one that delivers more than a thousand results from the search engines. And it helps a lot with the link analysis
as well, helping you pick the best link sources: high PR, relevant websites, with few links on the page where you can get a link with your targeted anchor text.