How to Find Hidden Backlinks - SEO Tips

What you will learn in this blog is two separate things. The very first is how you can find your competition’s hidden backlinks. Secondly, what you’ll walk away learning is going to be how you can find the most authoritative backlinks, according to Google.

Find the hidden links

Before getting directly to SEO tips, but first, why would I want to know like if my competitions hiding backlinks, why do I care, why do I want to see them, because we want to know exactly what we’re dealing with. A lot of times a competitor, especially in high competition niches, they’re going to block their networks, they’re going to block from spiders, such as Ahref’s spider or SEMrush bot or MozBar. They’re going to block these backlink analysis tools. The reason is because they don’t want SEOs like yourself or myself looking at these backlink profiles to determine the actual strength that’s going to the site.

What I want to break down and what you’re going to learn is just one more way, one more time, another piece to the puzzle, to be able to say, “Hey, they’re blocking these tools. And I don’t see them. But is there anything that maybe they’re hiding?” This could be a leg up. “Hey, I could see. Hey, they built in this trust flow ad link. Where’s that coming from?” Then, you know, “Hey, they have a site wide footer, TrustTlow 70 link. We should go out and get something power, some power for ourselves.”

Along with that, I’ll teach you another little trick. It’s an SEO tip. Because what’s great about Google is there going to list the most authoritative. I’m going to share with you advanced search operators that will not only show me hidden links, they might have blocked the bots like SEMrush and MozBar, and Ahref’s, but they didn’t block Google. So I’ll share with you how we could do a search. And then right after that following up, using the same advanced search operators. I’ll also show you how you can determine the most authoritative links because Google’s going to list them. Most authoritative and relevant first, and then we’ll go right down the list. Let me share with you the search operators so you can start finding hidden links. And you can also see the most authoritative in order. Let me share this with you.

Only a browser required

The very first thing is open up your Google browser. You might want a fresh browser, so clear out your history.  What I'm going to do is search one of my websites that I control, that’s chrispalmermarketing.com. So how you will want to do this is very simple. You’re going to put a quotation marks, and then you’re going to type in "chrispalmermarketing.com" or whoever your competitor is. You’re going to put that into quotation marks ("). Next, you’re going to hit the spacebar hit the minus (-) key, and then you’re going to type site:chrispalmermarketing.com. Now, what’s going to be returned are the most authoritative backlinks. And also, it’s going to start listing the backlinks that are pointing in, that are located in the search results, ones that made it to the search results.

There might be a lot more links that are indexed. And that’s a whole another blog. But these are the ones that made it into the search results. So what we can do then is we can make our scan through here. And if you take note, they’re literally listing according to Google, not my approximation, that these are the most authoritative links and the most relevant from top to bottom.

So we have our LinkedIn or Twitter or CrunchBase, or inc.com, or site jabber. And I want you to take note of the links for your own website and your competitors websites. “Hey, is there certain social profiles or certain web tools or is there certain review sites that they have that I can go get going get them?” Google’s lists the most authoritative here. So this is one of the searches. And again, I’m not here to point out links or give recommendations. I want to show you these advanced search operators so you can go out and start finding hidden links and the most authoritative links that your competitors have.

Now again, you can switch these up, but it’s “chrispalmermarketing.com” -site:chrispalmermarketing.com. Now inside the quotation marks, there’s multiple variations. You see, when people are buying PBN links, or maybe they’re setting up their own networks, they’re trying to be relatively clever in a way. Now if they’re really clever, they’ll block all of the search bots like Ahref’s and all of this, MozBar, all the backlink analysis tools, but they won’t block Google. Now if they’re ultra clever, they will block Google. It’ll be a no index, but it’ll be a follow page. But again, this is another topic. We want to see what needed to the search results.

Search all the variations

Here’s one more search. We want to search all the variations. We want to see all the links that might be hidden pointing to the site, because we’re looking for “chrispalmermarketing.com” -site:chrispalmermarketing.com. So that means it’s backlinks coming in. That’s what we’re asking Google. So this is Google giving us this information.

Now what we’re going to do is we’re going to go to the first quotation marks. And what you want to type in is “http://chrispalmermarketing.com” -site:chrispalmermarketing.com. And now we’re going to get a separate set of results, because this is 67. Now we’re going to go to the next. Again, it’s given us very similar results, but it’s giving us more, here’s some omitted, and then you can again, we can go right through this.

Then the next one is going to be this. So we want to put this into quotation marks. But this time, we’re going to put “http://www.chrispalmermarketing.com” -site:chrispalmermarketing.com. Now again, it’s giving us 17 more links. Then, here’s another one that we can do. We can put in the “https://www.chrispalmermarketing.com” -site:chrispalmermarketing.com. And then it’s going to give us 55. It’s going to give us even more. Some of them are going to repeat, but some of them are going to be different.

Now again, I could show a lot more there’s. I’m sure, there’s a lot that are being omitted down here. But again, I just want to give you the advanced search operators. Now let’s say that we’re looking for an internal page. You could look for an internal page. And then here, we’ll take this a step further.

Add your keywords

Let me share with you another thing. Again, we’ll use myself as an example. But what we’re going to do is we’re going to put it in quotes, we’re going to put “chrispalmermarketing.com” -site:chrispalmermarketing.com “ctr” and we’re going to do the search. But now this time, what we’re going to do is we’re going to hit space and we’re going to put another quotation mark, and what we want to add is a keyword. We can add any keyword, for this example I'll use "CTR".

So now, we’re looking for that keyword, CTR, and we’ll press enter. Now we can see not only the sites that are building backlinks, but are containing a particular anchor text a lot of times, but more notably, what’s the backlink contain, what’s the title contain, what’s the anchor text contain. We’re able to really start narrowing it down.

You have https, you have http, you have www. Here’s what I’m talking about, each of the searches over here, you can put in variations of the links that are pointing in. On top of that, another one is you can go grab their IP address. Yes, you can go grab your competition’s IP address. And then you can really take a look. Also do a Screaming Frog analysis, pull in that see if they have any sub-domains attached to it. You can also pull in sub-domains by searching the IP address, just pull that in and see if there’s anything else attached to the IP. So that’s another way to find out what kind of links are being built in. Sometimes people are clever, and they want to build to particular web addresses.

Summary

I’ve given you a massive breakdown here. I’ve shared with you today, how you can find hidden search results indexed links. I’m also giving you a way to find the most authoritative links and the most relevant links, according to Google. I’ve shared with you multiple variations. I’ve shared with you the way to do these search parameters. On top of that, even break it down and start searching for keywords. I tried to give you as much as I possibly can. I hope you walk away from blog with a plethora of knowledge.

Now, you can start finding what’s most authoritative, what’s hidden. And just for a quick reminder, just to make this easy. Here’s, what you do. So again, you could put the “websiteaddress.com” -site:websiteaddress.com. And then, you’ll run that. Now, if you want to add more over here you go to the quotation marks. You do the “http://websiteaddress.com” -site:websiteaddress.com. And then if you want to get even more results, then you put “http://www.websiteaddress.com” -site:chrispalmermarketing.com. And then you can even do the “https://www.websiteaddress.com” -site:websiteaddress.com. But usually, it’s going to kick back the same results. And then if you want even more, you come over here you press spacebar and put in quotation marks a specific keyword, like “websiteaddress.com” -site:websiteaddress.com “keyword”. I hope this breaks it down for you.

This is a transcripted YouTube video, courtesy of Chris Palmer Marketing