Tools to Identify Your Competitors’ Links

The following tools can be used to obtain a list of locations on the
Internet that are linked to your competitors’ Web sites:

AltaVista

http://www.altavista.com

To find out where your competitors are linked using AltaVista, simply

enter the competitor’s URL in the search area like this: link:
yourcompetitorsdomain.com. This returns all pages in AltaVista with a
link to your competitor’s Web site.

Excite and Other Search Engines

Just enter your competitors’ URLs and see what comes up. (Be sure to

include http://.) If anything, the search query will include all indexed
Web sites that contain the URL searched.

Google

http://www.google.com
Enter your competitor’s URL in the search box like this: link:

your competitorsURL. The results will contain all Web sites linking to
your competitor’s Web site.

HotBot

http://www.hotbot.com

Enter your competitor’s URL in the search box and change the default
from “all the words” to “links to this URL.” When you type in the
URL, remember to include http://. The results will contain all Web sites
linking to your competitor’s Web site.

Link Popularity

http://www.linkpopularity.com

Simply type in your competitor’s URL and it will give you a list of all the
sites linking to that particular site (see Figure 16.2).

Link Popularity Check

http://www.linkpopularitycheck.com

Use this tool to compare your Web site to up to three other competitors’
sites using their link popularity check. In addition to a comparison graph
of the number of links each site has, it also gives details on where those
links are coming from.

WebCrawler

http://www.webcrawler.com/WebCrawler/Links.html

Enter your competitor’s URL into the search query box to find out how
many links are provided to that page. WebCrawler provides the names
of all the referring sites.