Analysing competitors' backlinks?

[mascotmike]

I am doing some competitor analysis and one thing that I want to know is how many links my competitors have and how many different domains link to their sites. I got some figures on this both from the SEO Moz toolbar and from Majestic SEO. My problem is that the figues are massively different.

E.g. SEO Moz says 9657 links from 95 domains, Majestic says 4895 links from 1722 domains.

Who do I believe? And where do each of these tools get their data from?

[Guest]

This post is deleted!

[mascotmike]

Open Site Explorer gives the same data as the SEO Moz toolbar, it just takes a little longer to do.

[G-Force]

Hi Jennifer,

Both tools uses spiders to crawl the web and gather links into a database like search engines do.

Who to believe? Why not both! If you must really chose one of them, then I suggest your export the data to spreadsheets that you will then be able to analyse and compare in Excel.

Then, according to the result of your findings, chose the one that is the most accurate based on your criterias.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Jennifer,

Rand just made a comment today on another question in Q&A that addresses some of the differences between the figures from OpenSiteExplorer and Magestic. http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-there-is-no-even-close-correlation-between-majesticseo-data-and-open-site-explorer

Hope this helps!