Explore Your Competitors’ Backlinks Beyond Yahoo Site Explorer

July 10th, 2008 by Ann Smarty | 12 Comments

I have previously covered numerous ways to explore your competitors’ backlinks via various web-based and desktop tools and even with the help of FireFox Extensions.

Still all of these tools rely on Yahoo or Yahoo Site Explorer to retrieve the link profile data.

This time I am going to look into 2 alternative search engines allowing to explore backlinks of a site. Neither of them is any better than Yahoo, but what’s important they are different providing you with other data you might have missed.

1. Exalead provides a wide variety of sorting options enabling you to find sites you’d never come across otherwise. With link: operator you can:

search only for blogs; commercial or non-commercial sites; forums;
set language preferences;
set geographic location;
filter results by choosing the site’s related key term.

Exalead

(Note: I broke the screenshot in two columns to make it more readable)

What’s more, Exalead advanced search also provides for a number of great options to enhance your link: search:

inurl:keyword (sample search);
filetype:pdf;
intitle:(keyword)

2. BlogPulse tracks blog mentions for any URL you indicate. While being a good addition to Technorati blog reactions search, BlogPulse allows for better tracking options and also works for non-blog sites.

BlogPulse

Comments

12 responses so far ↓

Jonathan Volk on Jul 10, 2008 at 6:45 pm

Thanks for the info. I’m definitely going to add them to my list of tools.
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SEMatze on Jul 11, 2008 at 1:10 am

Hello again Ann,

“You are the (Wo)Man!” …. when it comes to link analysis. I really enjoy your posts about link analysis. Can’t wait for the next one. Thanks again for two new ways to approach link building and analysing.

Cheers, SEMatze
Lindop on Jul 11, 2008 at 5:48 am

Cheers Anne, I’m looking for less reliance on Y!SE (it goes down so often these days) - I was aware of Exalead but not BlogPulse so I’ll start hammering that for backlink info too.

Thanks for sharing.
David Lindop
bursa evden eve on Jul 11, 2008 at 10:53 am

thank you…
Nesco Food Dehydrator on Jul 12, 2008 at 10:06 pm

Now that Google in their keyword tool is giving out search volume numbers, something that we never really expected from them, when do you think they might finally give out true link numbers, similar to Yahoo site explorer?

Not quite sure I understand why they have to keep that secret…but then again, I’m not Google.
Ann Smarty on Jul 13, 2008 at 12:05 pm

@ Nesco Food Dehydrator : I do understand why they keep that secret. Smart people will find the way to discover what really worked with G; hence more manipulation… I still can’t believe they will ever start giving out the full backlink report…
Trezora - Art Glass, Fashion Jewelry on Jul 13, 2008 at 7:02 pm

Just tried exalead on my art glass and fashion jewelry website and was not impressed. Showed next to nothing in terms of relevant backlinks and showed a bunch of those DMOZ type links like www. universitybooks. com/directory.asp?section=/Shopping/Crafts/Jewelry/Glass
that have zero value. Yahoo is still the best.
Humpy Leftnut on Jul 21, 2008 at 4:41 pm

I found a way once to limit Yahoo Site Explorer to only showing one backlink per domain.. But I can’t find it again!! Anyone know how to do this? When you do a normal link: in Yahoo SE, if the same domain links to you from 100 different pages, it becomes a bit useless.
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Anon on Nov 1, 2008 at 8:48 am

Thanks for the tips, I now can see how some companies may have written programs to bot this type of information then sold the program to do all the work for you.