Harvesting backlinks is probably the toughest task in SEO. But first, we need to know what kind of backlinks can help us, or in other words - what kind of backlinks Google likes. The answer is right in front of you.

It's in the SERP!

Finding your competitors backlinks is good, but you probably have many competitors. It's a time consuming task to scan thousands of backlinks over and over again. So, we have to be focused on the first result page.

What's new?

Now, in this point, you have already marked your competitors, scanned thousands of backlinks, maybe got some idea of what your competitors did, found some link networks and cartels and starting to see the big picture.

All this data is actually an old data. Maybe they got their backlinks 4 years ago, maybe they are irrelevant or maybe Google doesn't care for them that much. Is it possible that all this hard work is for nothing?

Spy your competitors!!

What I'm going to show you is something that everybody can do in 10 minutes, but it's pure gold for those who can't afford expensive software.

The ingredients:

1. Yahoo account
2. RSS reader
3. List of your competitors websites

Recipe

1. Login to Yahoo.
2. Go to Yahoo pipes and search for "Backlinks to URL" by ForrestBthe. There are a lot out there, most of them are the same.
3. Click on "Clone".
4. Click on "Edit Source".
5. In the "Enter site url" blue box, enter one competitor url in the "Default" field.
6. Click on"Properties" on the far top-right.
7. Change the name to "[competitor name] backlinks"
8. Save and run the pipe.
9. Grab the RSS to your RSS reader.
10. Repeat the steps and create RSS channel for each one of your competitors.
11. optional: Merge all RSS channels into one RSS channel using online-services or develop one of your own RSS merge script.

Now you're going to get a big chunk of backlinks in your RSS reader. Most of them are out of date and you need to wait several days until Yahoo linkdomain tool will deliver your competitors precious new backlinks 24/7.

Remember - Linkdomain is a limited tool and shows partial results, But you can't say no to that kind of free info. Can you?