How To Steal Your Competitor’s Backlinks and Outrank Them

Would you like to know how to steal your competitor’s backlinks and rank ahead of them?

(“YES, THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I WANT TO KNOW”)

Great, because this is exactly what I’ll be showing you how to find your competitor’s backlinks and get more links to your own site.

By using your competitor’s backlinks strategy, and copying their techniques to improve your SEO, you will be able to steal a portion of their success.

This requires little effort; all you need to do is just follow the step-by-step guide mentioned in this article.

In this article, we’ll find the solution to the following key problems:

  • How to find your top competitors and analyze their website
  • How to check competitor backlinks
  • How to perform a backlink audit of your competitor’s website
  • How to spy their best backlinks
  • How to build links to your own site

If you are ready, let’s get started to rank ahead of your competitors and improve your visibility in SERPs.

Step #1 Build a list of your competitors and analyze their sites

This is the first and most important step to perform competitor analysis. Find at least 3 to 5 competitors along with their website’s URL.

If you try to analyze your top 10 competitors, you’ll get confused with a lot of backlinks and can’t figure out your competitor’s strategy properly. So, I recommend you to start with small to make a big difference.

If you don’t know who your competitors are, just do a quick Google search with a keyword like “best books to buy” and make a note of the top 3-5 URLs.

quick Google Search to find your competitors

After finding your top competitors, the next step is to analyze their backlinks by using a backlink analysis tool. For this step, I’m going to use the SEMrush tool which is my favorite SEO tool too.

With SEMrush you can get huge information about your competitor’s website that will help you to rank ahead of them.

To get started, go to the SEMrush dashboard and enter the domain of your competitor’s website in the top search bar of SEMrush.

For instance, I’m considering Bloggersideas.com blog for a while as one of my competitors.

Competitors domain analysis with SEMrush

On the results page, scroll down until you see the list of backlinks under the “Backlinks” heading.

Backlinks analysis

Click on the “View full report” to find the full details of the backlinks of the competitor’s website.

Here’s a screenshot of bloggersideas.com backlinks analysis.

SEMrush backlinks analysis

This site has a whopping number of 23,264+ backlinks in total. Among them, 88% of backlinks are do-follow and the remaining are no-follow. As we know that, there’s no use in finding sources of no-follow backlinks so we’ll just focus on where the do-follow links are coming from.

SEMrush dofollow backlinks analysis

The above screenshot reveals the dofollow link sources for bloggersideas. You can find out all of their backlink sources just by following this step.

In this way, you can find those link sources and use them for your own site.

You can also know their anchor text for each link so that you will get an idea of what kind of content you need to use to attract dofollow links.

For further details, if you head towards the “overview” section of the backlinks analysis, you will find the history of the links gained and lost in the last 3 months, 1 year, or all time.

Backlink Analysis Overview

Their lost links are a golden opportunity for you. You can get your competitor lost backlinks for your own site by creating better content around those topics. This way, you can get a better search engine ranking and increase your website traffic.

Step #2 Analyze the backlinks of your competitors

After finding your competitor’s backlinks, it is important to know exactly which links are doing the most work.

As you want to improve your website ranking so make sure you’re getting high-quality backlinks. Otherwise, you’ll get hit by Google penalty which would hurt your SEO.

To check the quality of backlinks of your competitor’s website, you can check their domain score and trust score from SEMrush’s backlinks overview section as shown in the screenshot below:

Quality of backlinks

NOTE: If the site’s Trust score is significantly lower than its Domain score then backlinks from such sites may trigger Google penalties.

As my competitor site’s trust score is greater than its domain score, it means I can use their backlinks for my website without any worries.

Another method to check Google’s penalty of any website is by checking whether the site is being indexed by Google or not.

Just type site:example.com Google search bar. If you see results showing on SERP, it means the site doesn’t have any penalties. But, if the site is not being indexed, it means it gets penalized by Google and you don’t need to consider that for your backlinks profile.

Step #3 Conduct a link profile audit on your competitors’ sites

This is another important step to perform competitor analysis. As we are going to use their backlinks, so it becomes more important for us to check the link profile of our competitor’s website.

You have probably performed the link audit for your own website but what if we use it in the same way to check the toxic score of the domain.

Here, I’m going to show you the backlink audit for my own website with the SEMrush Backlink Audit tool. You can use it the exact same way for your competitor’s websites.

Here’s the screenshot:

SEMrush Backlink audit

Here you easily find the toxic score on the website.

In this way, you can collect a list of healthy backlinks of your competitor’s website. Rather than focus on their all backlinks, I recommend you to focus on 5-10 high-quality backlinks for every given site.

Step #4 Create a spreadsheet of all worthy links

When you are done with a list of high-quality backlinks of your competitor’s site. Now the next step is to create a spreadsheet of all those backlinks with the details of their anchor text, domain authority, and page authority.

You can use Excel or Google spreadsheets to do this task. The final result should look more or less like this:

List of Backlinks

Step #5 Time to build

Now you have done with the complete list of competitor’s backlinks so, it’s time to build them for your own website.

Firstly check what techniques your competitors are using to get backlinks. For example, if your competitor got a backlink from a forum, then go to that forum, signup, and add your URL there within your post as a reference.

Forums backlinks are fairly straightforward but depending on the forum and its rules, it may take a little more time to add URLs there.

When posting in forums, try to create helpful content with your link. In this way, you’ll get appreciated by people and there are more chances, they will click on your site’s link.

If your competitor got a backlink within a content, it means the competitor published a guest post on the site like this one:

Many blogs also give authors a free backlink in the author bio section. They are high-quality backlinks that increase the blog’s authority and traffic as well. If you want to build that type of backlink, you need to submit a guest post of your own. (If you want to find high-quality guest posting sites, just follow this article).

Yes, this step alone takes time and some serious efforts as many site owners don’t accept guest posts easily. Many of them will ask for a paid post so it is best to avoid those sites, which require costly payments.

There are many other ways sites get links such as blog comments, social bookmarking, directory submission, and infographic submission etc. But, as I mentioned earlier, guest blogging is effective and straightway to build high-quality backlinks.

My Favorite Backlink Research Tools

There is a number of backlink research tools (free and paid) available that can help you to analyze competitor’s backlinks. You can select any one of these tools based on your requirements and get a positive result on your online marketing search campaigns. Listed below are my top 5 backlinks analysis tools that I use for my clients.

  1. SEMRush
  2. Ahrefs
  3. Majestic
  4. Moz’s Link Explorer
  5. CognitiveSEO Backlink Explorer

Conclusion

After reading this article, you get to understand how to get competitors backlinks and use them for rising your own SEO strategy.

You can easily outrank your competitors if you find and build quality backlinks for your own blog.

Give this a try and you will be pleasantly surprised with the results you get.

What methods do you use to find your competitors’ backlinks? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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15 thoughts on “How To Steal Your Competitor’s Backlinks and Outrank Them”

  1. Hey Kanti,

    You’ve shared an awesome guide about link building and how one can copy the same strategy. Guest posting is a proven way anyone can build brand recognition and backlinks from authoritative sites given that they know how to write quality content and pitch properly.

  2. Hi! Kanti
    Your post is very helpful for me to create some quality backlinks by using the same strategies that you showed here.
    May I know If links coming from anchor text through High authority sites than How can get a link from there. Please answer me!
    Thanks! for sharing

    1. Kanti Kashyap

      Hi Binod,
      Thanks for your comment.
      As per your query, if a link coming from a High authority site is a contextual link (within the article), then the blogger might have submitted a guest post there. You can also get a contextual backlink from the same site by submitting a relevant and high-quality guest article there.

  3. Hi Kanti, You have nailed it. Such a wonderful article with lots of Information. I will use these strategies to create backlinks for sure.

  4. SubhaVaastu

    Dear Kanti, your article helping society for getting quality backlinks. I appreciate this article and your writing skills.

  5. Thank You for helping for getting quality backlinks.I hope this will help me in building High Quality backlinks.
    Can You please suggest me some tools to check Domain Authority & Alexa Rank?
    Worth Reading.
    Keep Sharing…

  6. Greetings, Kanti. Your content aids society in obtaining high-quality backlinks. I value your writing abilities and this content.

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