How To Find & Steal Competitors’ Backlinks

Why Backlinks Matter for SEO

Backlinks are links from other websites that lead back to your site. They signal to Google that your content is relevant, trustworthy, and authoritative. While some backlinks occur organically, actively pursuing link-building opportunities can significantly boost your SEO.

A strong backlink profile is critical for ranking well on Google. It’s not just about the number of links but their quality and relevance. High-quality backlinks from reputable sites enhance your credibility, improve rankings, and drive traffic.

However, low-quality backlinks, such as those from spammy or irrelevant sources, can harm your site. They might trigger penalties or even cause Google to de-index your site. To stay ahead, focus on acquiring quality links from reliable sources and avoid outdated strategies like link farms.

Backlinks remain one of the most important factors in achieving higher search engine rankings, alongside producing excellent content.

Why Stealing Backlinks Is a Smart Link-Building Strategy

Stealing your competitors’ backlinks is a highly efficient method to boost your SEO.

Unlike creating backlinks from scratch, this approach capitalizes on existing, proven opportunities, saving time and effort. Competitor backlinks are already validated by other sites, making them a shortcut to improving your authority.

The benefits are clear: first, you can secure industry citations from highly relevant websites, which strengthens your backlink profile.

Second, it’s often easier to obtain high-quality links this way compared to traditional methods like guest posting, where competition can be fierce.

Finally, redirecting backlinks from your competitors to your site increases your visibility and helps capture a portion of their audience.

However, success depends on a strategic approach. Ensure the backlinks you target are high-quality and avoid spammy links that could harm your site.

While the method has risks, when executed carefully, stealing backlinks can give you a competitive edge in search rankings and traffic.

How to Find Competitors’ Backlinks

The first step is discovering where your competitors are getting their backlinks from.

Then, an SEO tool or competitor analysis tool will come in handy.

SEO experts widely use SEMrush and Ahrefs, but there are some other excellent tools out there as well.

Run a backlink analysis on several of your competitors’ sites to determine which sites are linking to them the most.

What you’ll want to look for here are trends.

Are there any websites that are linking to multiple competitors?

Also, consider the type of website linking to your competitors – the niche they are in, and the style of blog posts linking to your competitors’ sites (how-to guides, blog posts, etc.).

If a website is linking to a competitor, there’s a good chance the website owner would link to you as well.

However, that’s not always the case.

It’s more likely if the referring page is a guest post or if the website accepts guest posts.

SEMrush also allows you to compare the backlink profiles of different domains and search for competitors with backlink profiles that are most similar to yours.

However, what I find more useful is seeing a competitor’s top-performing pages – which pages on their site are bringing in the most backlinks.

That will be useful, and I’ll explain why later.

When using SEMrush, you can export lists of websites you want to target in your “stealing competitors’ backlinks” campaign.

How To Steal Your Competitors’ Backlinks

Once you’ve figured out which websites are linking to your competitors and which blog posts on your competitor sites are getting the most links, it’s time for action.

Here are a few efficient ways to steal competitor backlinks.  

Reach Out to the Same Backlink Provider

If you see a backlink provider linking to a competitor multiple times or linking to multiple competitors, reach out to them!

They likely accept blog posts and are willing to collaborate with new bloggers.

Simply offering to write a new guest post will only put you alongside your competitors, however, as you won’t be removing existing backlinks.

However, there is a way to replace a competitor’s backlink with your own.

While not always guaranteed to work, read on to learn how to do it.

Create Better Content Than Your Competitors

If you have better content than your competitors, you can suggest that the link provider replace their link with your own.

For example, let’s say the backlink provider wrote a post on the most important aspects of digital marketing.

They mentioned email marketing, but they didn’t have room to include a complete guide on email marketing.

So instead, they linked to a competitor who had written a complete email marketing guide.

If you can write an email marketing guide that is even more comprehensive than your competitor’s, you can effectively steal your competitor’s backlink and replace it with your own.

The backlink provider will be happy to do that, as they want to offer their readers the most value.

Not only should your guide be more comprehensive than your competitor’s, but it should be better written, have better formatting, include better images, and so on.

Let’s go back to what I said about determining your competitors’ top-performing pages to attract organic backlinks.

The same strategy that I just mentioned applies to stealing organic links.

If your competitor’s top-performing page was their comprehensive email guide, and many other bloggers were linking to that whenever they mentioned email marketing, you know what to do next.

Create an email marketing guide that is better and a lot more comprehensive than your competitor’s.

You’ll be able to steal future backlinks that would otherwise organically go to your competitor.

Repurpose Competitors’ Broken Links

There’s another sneaky way to steal competitors’ links, and it doesn’t necessarily require you to have the best content or guide on a particular topic.

You’ll need to find people linking to your competitors’ old and broken URLs to do that.

Your competitor might have broken URLs for several reasons.

Perhaps they took down a blog post.

Perhaps they restructured their site but failed to redirect the blog post correctly, resulting in a 404.

However, you shouldn’t be too concerned about the reason for the broken URL.

Instead, what matters to you is that it is an opportunity ripe for stealing your competitors’ backlinks.

To start, you’ll want to run a broken link analysis on your competitor’s website.

Again, I recommend using SEMrush, as it includes a Broken Pages report listing all of your competitor’s broken URLs.

The next step is to sort the results by the number of backlinks each broken page gets.

The more backlinks it is getting, the more likely you will get results from what you’re about to do next.

Using SEMrush, click on the backlink section in the report next to each broken URL (it will be a number highlighted in blue).

That will bring up the specific URLs linking to the broken page.

You can then reach out to the bloggers linking to the broken page and let them know that a page they link to no longer exists.

They certainly don’t want to send their readers to a nonexistent page and inconvenience them.

That would reflect badly on them.

Therefore, they will likely be happy to replace the broken link with one of your functioning pages.

Be polite when reaching out.

Draft an email that goes something like this:

Hi [Name],

I noticed that your blog post [Insert Hyperlinked Blog Post Here] links to a broken and nonexistent page [Insert the page it is linking to, in parentheses].

I happen to have an excellent resource on the topic myself – [Insert Your Blog post Here].

No pressure, though!

Just trying to be helpful.

All the best,

[Your Name]

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Not everyone will respond.

Some bloggers will ignore you or delete your email without reading it.

However, if you reach out to enough bloggers, you’ll get at least a few links.

So try it, and see if it works!

Steal Guest Posts

A great way to steal competitor backlinks is to steal their guest posts.

There are a few ways to do that, but I’m not talking about copying their blog post – that would be duplicate content – or spinning it.

Instead, you’ll simply want to find which websites they submitted guest posts to and then reach out and submit an even better guest post with better content, better links, and better writing.

When other bloggers see your guest post, they will be more likely to collaborate with you in the future rather than with your competitor, even reaching out to you proactively.

Track Competitors’ Links

Finally, make sure that you track your competitors’ backlinks so you are updated on new backlink opportunities to steal.

Some site crawler and backlink audit tools allow you to set up automated site crawls and backlink audits, and you will get automated email notifications for every new crawl.

Final Thoughts

Stealing competitors’ backlinks is not as nefarious as it sounds.

Instead, it is a solid and highly efficient SEO strategy that helps you get one up on your competitors.

It is simply smart SEO to find out where they are getting their links and target those same backlink providers.

At the same time, though, you should be focusing on creating awesome content, including infographics, blog posts, videos, and more.

That way, you will also get organic backlinks, critical for your backlink profile.