Backlinks are the latest gold-rush of the internet.  Everybody is after them, everybody is looking to see how many their competitor has…  And it seems everybody is trying to stay one step ahead!

The truth is you never get a clear picture of what a competitor’s backlinks are.

Nobody will ever give you all that data – and even a composite from multiple sources are not all that useful.

Yahoo used to give the most complete picture.  But since Yahoo decreased the data it was providing over a year ago, and is now terminating that data all together, those numbers have become increasingly meaningless to me.

Let me elaborate.

Our member’s have long said that they can out rank their competitors with as little as 1/10 the amount of back links.  This happens for a variety of reasons.  One, of course is that a website silo structures offer a competitive advantage over non-structured sites by establishing the theme on the website on-site, lessening the need for it to be established off-site, hence fewer backlinks needed.

However the issue today goes much deeper than that.  Backlink spamming has become a popular sport.  I say sport because most spammers are pretty frivolous with their strategies, rather than approaching them from a streamlined-business perspective.  This is largely due to the automation they use.

Look at your average backlink spammer – they don’t take the time to understand what makes a backlink valuable, so they tend to grab huge quantities of links from places that either:

1) are on a page that already has an excessive number of backlinks
2) they are on a page that uses “no-follow” in conjunction with their backlinks
3) the page where the backlink resides has little or no page rank in and of itself, so it passes nothing of value.

This causes an enormously inflated number in your backlink reference. It used to be that you could spot those easily and discard them, but with more and more people outsourcing backlinks from spammers, the forest is becoming pretty dense.

Personally I prefer PageRank. Even though this value is not updated as often as it used to be, it’s still the best way to tell how much link juice is being provided to the page in question.

Here’s a chart that gives you a pretty good indication of how many backlinks you need to be able to achieve a page rank – it’s a range because page rank is a range; with a lower bound and an upper bound.

This gives me a lot more accurate idea of what my marketing campaign has to look like to beat out the competition.

If my top competitor is a PR4 then I’m going to need somewhere between 101 and 554 inbound links from quality PR3 pages to beat him.  (Across the top, come over to “3″, because I’m using PR3 inbound links, and then look down the chart for row 4 and 5, because that’s the range for PR4).  Since a silo structure out performs the average site, I’ll set my goal at 101 inbound links, then see where I am ranking.

Other professional SEO firms use competing pages as their definitive guide for pricing out ranking to their customers. This is not so easily put into a concise table as page rank, so we automated it into our DWS figures. (our update that will tweak these numbers is happening with the 3.5 update on Nov 23rd)

We worked with several SEO firms to get these numbers in alignment with their experience and I feel pretty comfortable with what we have come up with.

There are a few times when you will see the page rank rather high for a low number of competing pages, and that’s my one caveat with this system; however our next point release will factor page rank into our current competing pages algorithm.

In my mind I have our two tools broken out – TLKT (The Last Keyword Tool) is where you do the keyword research and DWS (Domain Web Studio) is where you build your blueprint based on your business rules. As you set up your project you tell DWS how much you want to spend and then DWS looks at a keyword and knows, based on the number of backlinks needed, how much it will cost (obviously you also have to include how much your inbound links cost, but DWS holds your hand to help you figure that out).

Just to take this one step further, our focus at the moment is revealing how to lower those costs . We have been working hard to come up with a step-by-step plan for marketing promotion and syndication that will allow you to create content once and then re-purpose/syndicate that content. In this way, you get the most bang for your  buck with content creation. We are currently developing systems that will allow you to get tens to hundreds of links from a single piece of content. (Part of the One Feed To Rule Them All System)

This has a two fold effect; it dramatically reduces the amount of original content needed to rank and it will net you heaps of “real-time web” traffic through social media and third party platforms – much of it with the push of a button or two.

Sue Bell and the Network Empire Team

Comment from the Development Team:

Yes, there are several tools that will remain on the market after the Yahoo Backlink Tool disappears. The Yahoo tool was supposed to be offline today, but at the time of this writing, we can still use it to check our backlinks. We will publish our reviews and a list of the current SEO Backlink checker tools that are still on the market within the private membership area. But again, we want you to understand that we seldom use them, because we really don’t need to using Website Silo Architecture, Krakken, and Domain Web Studio.

Tags: backlink data, backlink tools, the truth about backlinks, truth about backlink tools, yahoo backlink tool, yahoo backlinks