First of all, Google does not display all of the links they find to a site and thus, this count will leave you with about 5 or 6 percent of the real links to your main competitors.
Yahoo! is much better at displaying all the links to a site however even this has it's shortcomings in the analysis process. Secondly, the number of links is only a fraction of what's important in their development.
To fully grasp how your competitors are ranking highly for your targeted phrases you will want to know a number of things about the links to their site including:
• how many links do they have?
• How many of these links come from the same sites?
• Are these sites relevant?
• What is the PageRank distribution of the links?
• Are these links image or text links and if text,
• what anchor text is used to link to your competitor's site?
Why Are These Factors Important?
These factors are important as they define the value of the link. To put it simply: the high value of link means that your Home Business Start site is of high value.
The number of links is perhaps the least important of these factors. A site can have 10,000 incoming links and if they are all from a single unrelated site with a low PageRank then the value of these links is negligible.
Knowing how many of the links to your competitor's site come from the same site or sites will let you know where they have bought advertising and also help isolate weakness in their link counts.
Multiple links from the same website are not given the same value as multiple links from different websites. If your competitors have thousands of incoming links that come from 5 different websites you have far less work to do that if they even had a couple hundred, all from different sites.
The relevancy of the incoming links is extremely important and gaining importance every update.
Unfortunately this is also the hardest factor to gauge as, "what constitutes relevancy?" and, "how exactly do I find out if my competitors links are relevant without visiting every one of their links?" can be problematic questions.
It is very energy-saving to use a top-software to tear apart the external factors our main competitors are using to hold top ten positions.
Gauging relevancy can generally be done with a simple thought: if I am on a site and the link makes sense to be there (for example, a web design company linking to a web hosting company) then it can be considered relevant.
Basically, if there are people who will actually click the link then it is relevant. Finding out if your competitor's links are relevant without visiting every one of their link partners is a different hurdle to jump.
Rather than visiting each-and-every link it is easier view only the most important ones; that would be the ones from high PageRank pages. But how does one do that?
