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Now it is in the fashion to talk about the reasons why more backlinks mean more business for internet entrepreneurs. The truth is that backlinks are important and it is difficult to get other people to link to you no matter if you are a guru or just a budding webmaster. How about some industrial espionage?

But don’t worry. The method I will talk about would neither harm your reputation nor earn you a prison sentence In fact this information is available for everyone, I’ll just tell you how to get an advantage of it. You can check your competitor’s link building strategy for free and without much effort. Yahoo has this wonderful service called LinkDomain. You can find it on http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. It allows you to snoop on your competitor’s link building strategy so that you can avoid making mistakes of submitting your links to sites that has no PageRank potential. So here is my step by step guide:

1. Open http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. In the search box you can enter whatever address you like, for example, YourCompetitor.com, click “Explore URL”.
2. You are given a list of results. This is not yet what you want. Click on “Inlinks(number)” at the top left section to get the information about sites that link to YourCompetitor.com
3. Now adjust the two dropdown boxes. Select “Except From This Domain” in “Show Inlinks” field and “Entire Site” in “to:” field. Now you have a list of all sites linking to YourCompetitor.com.
4. Click on “Export results to: TSV” at the top right section. It is a comma separated list containing the inlinks or backlinks, it is your choice how to call them. A new dialog would come up, save the file and open it.
5. Open the saved file in Microsoft Excel or whatever spreadsheet editor you use. Now you see a smooth list of sites that link to your competitor.
6. Select the C column and delete it. It is just a waste of space and time.
7. Select the B column in your Excel file and choose “Sort Ascending” -> “Expand The Selection” -> “Sort”.
   Now you have your list sorted by URL name. You have to get rid of duplicate backlinks. There are some macros around that can help you to automate the process but it is fairly easy to do manually. Just delete each row that contains any kind of subpages. For example, if the row 11 contains www.SomeWebsite.com/page1.html and the row 12 contains www.SomeWebsite.com/other_page.html, you have to delete the row 12 and all the following rows that come from the same domain.
8. Now that you have a clean list of backlinks, select the first 100 entries (do not select the header row) of the B column only. Copy it.
9. Go to http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-lookup/. This tool is the best one to check the Google Page Rank in bulk. Paste your selection in the box, delete the odd blank row at the bottom and click “Go”! After a while this bulk Page Rank checker will give you the results. You will be surprised about how few of these sites actually have any PageRank. Now just go back to your spreadsheet and enter the PR in the column C near the corresponding URL. Leave blank those cells that have no PR.
10. Select the next 100 of addresses and repeat the step 9.
11. Once you have done with checking the PageRank, select the column C and sort it ascending (similar to step 7.). You will now have a small bunch of high PR backlinks at the top of your list. Delete all rows that have no PageRank. You don’t need them, right? You are not interested in backlinks that cannot give you any link juice.
12. Explore the short list of high PR sites and see if you can get them to link to your own site as well. If it is a forum, participate with a signature link; if it is a blog, add quality comments; if it is a relevant informational site, try to form a partnership with its owner. And never ever spam or add anything irrelevant.
13. Pick up the next competitor and repeat form the step 1. This method will save you time, reveal the link building strategy of your competitors and determine which sites are worth to have your links added.

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