Inbound link checker for competitors websites

[Milo]

Hi all, can anyone recommend a good programme to view other websites inbound links. I know the link: www........ operator shows some, but not all. I have found something (weblink SEO), but was curious as to whether there was something better out there.
Cheers.
Miles

[mjtaylor]

The site: operator shows only a few in Google but a rather more complete list in Yahoo.

[Milo]

Thanks MJ, that shows the links within a website. What I meant was the links a website actually has pointing to them.
Cheers.
Miles

[full house]

try to use SEOpen... its an addons for FF.

[mjtaylor]

I'm sorry, I was tired. I meant link:domain.tld.

[Milo]

That OK MJ I'm lost though as to what the operator should be. I tried link:www dot my site dot com .tld and it did not work.

Thanks full house but that tool just show the link operator results, not all the links.

[SEOCipher]

I would definitely suggest using Yahoo! Site Explorer for competitive link research (see https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com). It's free and the data is pretty exhaustive. You'll only be able to access the first 1000 results, but that's probably the best free info you'll find. The 1000 result issue can become a problem when the competitor has a site-wide link from a site with tons of link importance/popularity/equity, as Yahoo! will report a lot of them. In other words, hundreds of those 1000 results can be from the site, which isn't all the useful.

I've been meaning to try SEOmoz' Open Site Explorer (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/), which they are hoping can replace Yahoo! Site Explorer if it goes away, but I don't know how helpful the free data is. I think it's primarily an upsell for their more robust link tool, Linkscape (http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape). Good luck.

[CReed]

The 1000 result issue can become a problem when the competitor has a site-wide link from a site with tons of link importance/popularity/equity, as Yahoo! will report a lot of them. In other words, hundreds of those 1000 results can be from the site, which isn't all the useful.

No problem. Use the negative operator to remove site wide links from the results. You can use multiple instances to remove more than one domain which has multiple links to a site.

linkdomain:www.competitorsite.tld -site:competitorsite.tld -site:sitewidelinksite.com -site:anothersitewidelinkeddomain.com -site:multiplelinksfromthissite.com etc., etc.

[SEOCipher]

Hi CReed, thanks for the response. I guess I was thinking too far within the Yahoo! Site Explorer box. That result would technically be a Web result (doesn't redirect to Yahoo! Site Explorer), but the data you want would be there. I'll have to give that a try.

[SuperMan]

I use Market Samurai for checking backlinks of competitors. It is excellent and one of my tools of choice. Check it out