How I Reverse-Engineered My Competitor's 218 Backlinks (Only 19 Actually Mattered)

This is not going to be a white-hat post, we do encourage a lot white-hat though. We always test everything and have always tested.

We recommend to read this other guide: Why Black-Hat Link Building Is Training You to Fail.

Before showing the method, you need to understand the basics of a good link:

• The website where you're getting the link from HAS to be topically connected to your website or at least have a lot of topical authority (based on rankings) on your topic.
• The website needs a little bit of traffic, otherwise if Google doesn't even crawl it, it won't even be worth it.
• Ideally you want to get links from websites that NEVER got penalized (even if they had just one penalization 1 year ago), but this is hard.
• Ideally it would be cool if you get traffic from the content you'll publish on that website.
• The website needs to have a history of high-quality content published (so not spammy AI-made posts), otherwise it will get penalized sooner or later.

Now, it's impossible to have a 100% scientific way to do link building (but you'll be definitely near to being scientific):

We'll use the tool called Semrush, why Semrush? Because it has the biggest database out there and we compared reports multiple times with other platforms and Semrush is the platform that discovers the most links.

The issue though is that we cannot know if Semrush knows ALL the links that are actually pointing to an URL, sure it's the platform that, as of June 2025, has the most probability of finding the most links, but if your competitor got links from sites blocking Semrush, unfortunately there's no way for Semrush to find that link.

Most PBNs for example tend to block crawlers of tools like Semrush, Ahrefs etc. so you'll need other ways to find those, and will likely involve manual research (if the link is even indexed, because actually Google gives the power of a link even from just crawling it, you don't need to index it). So if that PBN link is not even indexed, there's almost no way to find it. (Unless you wanna go out there and build your own crawler.)

Now, what you wanna do is simple.

Go to Semrush and search the keyword you wanna rank for.

As an example I'll use "crypto exchange".

Now scroll down to the "SERP Analysis" section and click "URL" instead of "Domain".

This is what I see:

Now, let's focus on the "Ref. Domains" metric. It looks very scary, the first result has 1.2k referring domains. But money.com did it with just 218 referring domains, beating bitstamp.net that has 11.4k referring domains so how is this possible?

Let's get scientific.

I'll click the referring domain profile of "https://money.com/best-crypto-exchanges/".

Now I'll click:

• the "Active" filter
• the "Follow" filter. Why? It's good to do the same procedure with Nofollow too, but technically speaking, Follow links are the ones passing actual juice. So it's good to calculate how many Dofollow and Nofollow links each URL has.
• And I'll add an "Authority Score" filter of min 15. Why 15? Because the Authority Score of Semrush in my opinion gives good guidance on understanding the authority of a website based on its link profile combined with their current traffic. So it's kinda safe to assume that if a website has at least 15 AS, it means it has a little bit of traffic and is not a dead website. (But you can test as you want.)

Now you remember they had 218 referring domains in total? Now they only have 40 after all the filtering. So imagine how much "trash" they actually had.

Now 40 referring domains are still a good number, but let's understand how many links come from pages in the same niche/vertical of money.com and how many links have content related to the content of the https://money.com/best-crypto-exchanges/ page.

So out of 40 referring domains, only 22 come from websites in the same niche/vertical of money.com and only 31 have content related to the content of the https://money.com/best-crypto-exchanges/ page. BUT only 19 referring domains come from websites in the same niche/vertical AND have related content to their page.

So see? To effectively compete with this page of money.com link-wise we need at least 19 referring domains that come from websites in the same niche/vertical AND have related content to our page.

218 referring domains looked scary, but the reality domains that drive the most power are only 19. Obviously you might need a bit more, you need to do this analysis for the whole top 10.

As mentioned earlier too, you also need to run the same analysis for their Nofollow links.

You need diversification, you cannot only have Dofollow links for all your URLs, it will look unnatural.

Also, remember the guy with 11.4k referring domains? With just the basic filters he has 1628 referring domains in total. Way less but also why is he down there? Simple: he does not satisfy the intent of the SERP at all. But this is a link building guide, so let's not go off-topic.

Yes it takes effort, this is the effort that link building agencies don't want to take, they are lazy. But they're very quick at sending invoices.

Now, to get all these links, after you analyze the whole top 10, you should have a list of all their powerful referring domains. Contact ALL OF THEM. Literally all of them and try to get a placement too.

Then figure out other creative ways to get links too. Check what links they might be missing. Maybe there are some good guest post opportunities, but you probably know all the most common ways to get links, the internet is full of guides.

Now at least you know exactly how many links you need for each page and you know how to determine their quality. So go ahead and start building!