r/SEO • u/Illustrious-Map-1971 • 23h ago

Help Link Exploration Recommendations for Competitor Analysis?

In the past I've constantly watched my competitors ongoing using Moz free Link Explorer, watching the disovered and lost constantly, as I can't see the full picture.

Can anyone recommend a cheap ish software for getting a full back link profile for competition? Seems AI has gone to a lot of companies heads and causes their prices to increase.

In the past I've used SEMRush which used to let me pick competitors and run audits on them and find their back links, but what can people recommend that is inexpensive but does a good job of link research on competitors?

Looking to mimic back link profile of my competitors before establishing my own back links. I have rich content already I just need some external authority.

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u/RepoPicks 23h ago

Honestly I'd skip the fancy tools at first. Ahrefs free checker plus the Wayback Machine tells you most of what you need about a competitor's link profile. I did this on about 20 expiring .coms recently and a third had casino or adult spam in their archive, which a pure DR number never showed.

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u/Over-Cup-9103 13h ago

Ahrefs free checker plus Wayback is a smart combo, I've pulled that exact trick a few times. The amount of crap hiding behind a shiny DR score is unreal, you only catch it when you actually look at what the site used to be.

For a proper tool that won't destroy your budget, have you poked around SEO SpyGlass? It's not flashy but it'll give you a full competitor breakdown without the monthly subscription sting. The interface feels a bit 2015 but the data is thorough.

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u/RepoPicks 9h ago

Spot on about what hides behind a DR score - Wayback is the only thing that reliably shows you whether a site was actually useful or just a link farm. SpyGlass does the deep crawl well, but for what you're doing the free checker + archive snapshots already separate signal from noise without touching your wallet. I've seen enough DR-fluff sites fall apart the moment you check the actual history that I just stick with that combo.

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u/tsm1t 19h ago

One caution: don't try to clone the whole competitor profile. A link index can help you spot which pages/topics attract links, but no tool has the complete live link graph; treat counts as estimates and open the linking pages before acting. For your own site, Search Console's Links report is useful for examples, but Google says it is sampled and can be truncated, so it won't give you competitor coverage either. I'd use the free checker mentioned above to generate candidates, then prioritize relevant industry pages that cite a useful resource you can offer. Skip paid links, exchanges, or automated services meant to move rankings—Google classifies those as link spam.

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u/WebsiteSquadronPC 16h ago

Matt Diamante has a tool called linkgap dot io. I would give that a try. It gives you a very comprehensive list, including all the spam.