Hidden Backlinks

[kirstyseo]

Hi,

I hope someone can help me with this. We have a competitor who appears to be ranking No1 for a competitive search term with a very lame site and above some authoritative sites. He has been here for some time as well. When we check out his back link profile through OSE, Majestic and Ahrefs they show as only 3 backlinks from no PR sites.

However, someone pointed out that they could be using a link network that is blocking every crawler apart from Google, Yahoo and BIng.

I would like to know if there is a way to confirm this. For instance I know that we can use screaming frog to mimic Googlebot, however, if there a way to reveal the real backlinks to a site like this using any tools.

Thanks

[Chris.Menke]

I suspect that you're not going to find anything else but you could go straight to google and use the link:www.domain.com  search operator to see what Google shows as back links.  That search won't show you everything but should give you an idea if there's more to the picture than what's showing up in those services.

[DennisSeymour]

Oh it's hard to find those types of links. Try what Chris said. You should also try putting just the URL in the google search bar to see what else comes up. There are other tactics you can do but in the end it's worthless because you can't really do anything about it. Even reporting it wont help.

Ive seen plenty of those before the last update, but now most are nowhere after the update so the algorithm has gotten better detecting those "ghost" networks.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

I know it's probably matter of curiosity and frustration.  You just want to know why.  In the end, however, we know what tends to win out over time, a good site that is well optimized and created quality, new content that is remarkable and getting that content in front of people.  Oh, and doing an awesome job with your business.  So, just focus on what you need to do to grow your own company/website and don't worry so much about your competition.  It usually just wastes your time and makes you mad.  Not worth it.

Good luck with your site.

[kirstyseo]

Thanks for the advice, looks like they are creating a Silo effect and mass linking to the home page. Spotted a few links by using links:http://theredomain.com . To be honest at first because I didnt see the links I just wondered what they were doing so well to rank, but now I know they are not actually doing anything well at all, just guess I will have to sit back and wait.

Thanks

[brad.s.knutson]

You could try searching NerdyData for a search operator like below:

href="http://example.com

Make sure to leave the closing quotation mark out to account for any sub pages.

This may or may not  return some different results, it's worth a shot.