Read a competitor's link profile before you copy it

Backlinks are the wrong yardstick

Pull the link profile of any established competitor and the first number that jumps out is the biggest one. Here's a real profile from a national brand in property restoration.

596,564 backlinks. It's the number that ends up on a slide. On its own, it barely means anything.

The one underneath is what matters. 13,980 referring domains. Divide the first by the second and you're at roughly forty-three links per domain. Nearly every one of those 596,564 links is a repeat vote from a site that had already voted. Sitewide footers, template navigation, franchise directories and blogroll modules can churn out hundreds of thousands of link counts without adding a single new endorsement.

The honest read of that profile isn't "they have 596,564 links, I need to match it." It's "they've earned links from about fourteen thousand different sites, and I need to work out which of those are actually reachable."

Bradley Benner, who runs link building at Semantic Mastery, thinks the third-party numbers deserve even less credit than that:

And so I totally believe 100% wholeheartedly that third-party metrics are useless. What we should be focusing on is relevance to strengthen those entity associations.

He'll grant one legitimate use, and the ordering is the whole point:

If you want to use a third-party metric like DA, DR, Trust Flow, whatever, as kind of a secondary metric after determining that a potential link source is relevant to what it's going to be linking to, then fine.

Relevance first, metric second. A link profile report is a shortlist generator, not a scoreboard.

The number everyone chases and nobody can spend

The other headline on that panel is rank, a 0-100 authority score. It's the number most often set as an objective, and the one least connected to actual outcomes.

You see this pattern in founders constantly:

A lot of people want to increase their domain rating, entrepreneurs especially, because that's what everyone talks about and what companies are marketing. Like, we'll buy you all these backlinks to increase your domain rating. But is that going to get you any organic traffic?

The question answers itself for most link campaigns. Authority scores are third-party inventions calculated off link graphs. Google doesn't read them. They correlate with ranking because both correlate with having a lot of good links, which means moving the score without earning the links moves nothing.

Read the score as a rough weight class, not a target. It tells you whether a competitor is in a different bracket to you or roughly your own, which is genuinely useful to know before you decide whether to compete on links at all.

Two numbers nobody reads, and the opportunity hiding in them

Look at the bottom half of that same panel. Backlink spam score of 23.0. Broken backlinks: 2,217. Broken pages: 529.

Spam score is a read on the neighbourhood a site's links come from. A profile in the low twenties is normal for a large brand that's picked up two decades of directory listings and scraper mentions. What it tells you is that a fair chunk of those fourteen thousand referring domains aren't endorsements you'd want, or ones you could use. Filter them out before you treat what's left as a target list.

Broken backlinks and broken pages are the interesting ones. 2,217 live links point at URLs on that domain that no longer resolve, spread over 529 dead pages. Each one is a site that decided this topic was worth linking to, whose link now goes nowhere.

That's the most reachable link opportunity going, and it doesn't ask you to out-produce anyone. You find the dead page, find who still links to it, check whether you've got something that genuinely serves the same purpose, then tell them. It works because you're not asking for a favour. You're reporting a broken link on their site and offering the fix.

Worth running the same check on your own domain first. Sites that have been rebuilt more than once often find a double-digit percentage of their earned links landing on 404s, which is link equity you already paid for and can win back with redirects alone.

Running a link gap in Role SEO

Same story as the keyword gap. Role SEO doesn't ship a single "link gap" report that diffs two domains. You pull the backlink profile for each side and let the agent handle the comparison, which means you set the quality filters instead of inheriting someone else's defaults.

Using the Role SEO MCP, compare the link profiles of
[mydomain.com] and [competitor.com].

1. Pull the backlinks overview for both. Report backlinks,
   referring domains, rank, and spam score side by side. Compute
   links per referring domain for each, and tell me what that
   ratio suggests about how their links were acquired.

2. Pull their backlink profile grouped one per domain, filtered
   to dofollow links with a low spam score. This is the
   shortlist, not the full list.

3. Cross-reference against my referring domains. Return the sites
   linking to them and not to me, sorted by domain authority, and
   for each one show which of their pages earned the link.

4. Separately, pull their broken backlinks: live links pointing
   at URLs on their domain that no longer resolve. For each,
   show the linking site and the dead target.

5. Run step 4 against my own domain too, and tell me how much of
   my own earned link equity currently lands on a 404.

For the step 3 list, judge each source on topical relevance to
my business first. Tell me which ones you would not approach and
why.

Step five is the one to run before any of the outreach ones. Recovering links you already earned is cheaper than earning new ones, and it's usually a redirect rather than a campaign.

Where to start

Not with the competitor. Start with step five on your own domain. Then, on the competitor side, ignore the link total entirely and read three things: referring domains, links per domain, and broken backlinks.

If their links-per-domain ratio is high, their advantage is thinner than the headline suggests and their real domain count is within reach. If it's close to one, they've earned links from a lot of different sites, which is a genuine moat and probably means competing on content depth rather than on links.

Either way, the terms you'd build pages for come out of keyword gap analysis, and whether this domain is even the right one to study comes out of finding your real competitors. A link profile is the last thing to look at, not the first.

Competitor backlink analysis FAQ

How do you run a competitor backlink analysis?

Pull the backlink overview for the headline metrics, then pull the link-level rows grouped one per referring domain, so you're seeing distinct sites rather than repeated links. Filter to relevant, low-spam, dofollow sources, then compare that list against your own referring domains. What's left is the reachable gap.

What's a good spam score?

There isn't a universal threshold, and the score is a third-party estimate, not a Google signal. Read it comparatively. A large old domain in the low twenties is unremarkable. A young site with the same score has picked up links it probably didn't earn. Use it to filter a prospect list, not to judge a site.

Should I try to get every link my competitor has?

No. A big chunk of any competitor's referring domains are directories, scrapers and syndication that carry no value and wouldn't accept you anyway. The reachable slice is usually a few hundred domains at most, and the genuinely relevant slice is smaller still.

Why does my competitor have hundreds of thousands of backlinks?

Almost always because a small number of sites link to them many times each, through footers, sidebars, templates or a franchise network. Divide backlinks by referring domains. A ratio far above one means the headline count is repetition, not endorsement.

Are broken competitor backlinks worth chasing?

They're among the best opportunities you'll find, because the linking site has already shown it'll link to this topic and its link is currently broken. It works when you actually have a better replacement for the dead page. It fails when you're just asking for a swap.