Whenever we look up backlinks for our own sites, or when someone does it for us. We are always quick to point out that “O, it hasnt picked up all my backlinks, i have thousands more then that”. And yet, why is it then, that when we are checking competition for a particular keyword, we forget about this flaw?
While talking to some people online about what keywords they were going after, and what competion they were up against. I was suprised to hear, “Well they only have X backlinks”. While yes, that is what Yahoo Explorer tells you, that isnt actually how many links they have. Not to mention, google is usually light years ahead of Yahoo in terms of picking up fresh backlinks.
Ontop of that, people then went on to say, “If the user only has 100 backlinks, then i should only need to get 101 and be beating them”. Even forgetting about the “Quality” of these backlinks. Once again, the count is incredibly low, and even if yahoo shows 100. It could be a new site that recently destroyed the competition with an xrumer blast!
So next time your looking through the competition for a keyword. Take the backlink counts with a grain of salt. And realise that at times, you may need to get 3x or even 4x the amount of backlinks that are showing, for you to be able to rank higher.
