How to Ethically Steal Your Competitors' Backlinks

by Venchito Tampon Jr | Last Updated on October 24, 2021

 

Why competitors backlinks?

First off, we have to understand the reason why links from competitors are good types of links. 

Let me give you two main reasons. 

First is that these competitors’ backlinks are niche relevant.

So if you’re an absolutely beginner, you want to be looking for websites that are topically relevant to your brand. 

And given that those publishers and bloggers linked to your competitors, and you directly compete with your competitors, chances are what you’ll be getting from your competitors are directly connected to your blog topics.

Relevance is a critical success quality factor in backlinks. And this is something you should always consider when you try to build backlinks to your website. 

Second, not only that these competitor backlinks are niche relevant. But they are also easy to prospect.

When you are prospecting for backlink opportunities, you’re likely to be using Google with advanced search operators and phrases to help you find pages on the search results that best suits your prospecting needs. 

But in the case of reverse engineering your competitors’ links, you only have to use a simple tool to find all pages that linked to your competitors. 

So let’s jump into how you can get your competitors’ backlinks.

How to Ethically Steal Your Competitors’ Backlinks

There are three steps that you can choose from based on where you’re at right now.

Find your competitors’ top linkers. 

The top linkers are not the ones who linked to a website once. They are the linkers who repeatedly link to pages of websites because they found value in those content. 

So how can you find these top linkers who constantly link to your competitors?

Get the domain of your competitor’s website. Plug it into Ahrefs’ Link Explorer.

We’ll use Tuck, a sleep product review website as our example.

I’ll get tuck.com and plug it into Ahrefs’ Link Explorer. On the Backlinks area, right at the Backlink Profile section, I’ll be able to see all the websites that linked to tuck.com

As of this recording, there are 9,620 unique websites linking to Tuck.

That’s a lot!

So out of these 9 thousand plus linking websites, how can you find the quality prospect websites you should be looking for.

And not only that, how can you find those top linkers who repeatedly link to the Tuck website. 

Here’s a strategy that you can follow. 

Get all of the top 10 to 20 pages of your competitor.

On Ahrefs, you can see it either on the Top Pages section or Best by Links section.

The next thing you want to do is to use Link Intersect to see the websites to at least two of the top pages of your competitor.

So first is to insert all top pages in Link Intersect one by one.

 

Then click “All Intersections” on the top section and only check 3 targets.

This would give you websites that linked to your competitor at least 3 times. 

So these are your competitors’ top repeated linkers. 

You do the exact steps I shared earlier to your other competitors, to also see their top linking websites.

Find your competitors’ linkable content.

Any page that earns hundreds of backlinks or that have the potential to acquire more links can be considered as a linkable content.

Chances are your competitors have linkable content in place. You just have to know what those pages are.

For this specific activity, you can use Ahrefs to find linkable pages of your competitors.

Insert the domain URL of your competitor’s website to Ahrefs’ Link Explorer.  

Then go to Best by Links. 

Here, you’ll see the Best Pages by Incoming Links.

You can sort these pages from highest to lowest referring domains to see the highest linkable content. 

By checking each of the page, you’ll see what types of content gets links.

 

Here are some tips for you:

1. Create similar content. If there is a broken linkable content, you can also create a version of it. You can click on the drop-down button and click “view on Archive.org to see its latest version. 
2. Get all pages linking to a linkable page. Click on the drop-down button again and click “Backlinks”. Now, you’ll see all pages linking to the linkable page. 
3. Once you create similar content, reach out to all of the linking pages and ask them to link to your newly published piece. 
4. Do step 1 through step 3 to all of the top linkable content of your competitor.

Find your unearned links from competitors.

You may have to find all of the top linkers of your competitors, and even their linkable content, another strategy to steal your competitors’ backlinks is to find your unearned links.

What are these unearned links?

These are backlinks you’ve never earned for whatever reasons, such as you haven’t reached out to them yet or they haven’t seen your content as a good reference.

How to find your unearned links from competitors?

You use Ahrefs Link Intersect tool. 

Get all your competitors’ domains 

Insert them into Link Intersect one by one.

Then click on “all intersections”, either check only two or three targets, whichever you prefer. If you choose 3, it only shows you websites that linked to at least three of your competitors. 

To get more results, I prefer to just choose two targets.

Now, you have a list of all these websites linking to your competitors.