You can check a website's backlinks to learn which websites could potentially link to your site too. SpyFu lets you see which specific pages are pointing to your competitors to help them rank higher in search results.

Search the website's name into the SpyFu search bar.

Click to enter a website so you can find its backlinks

What to Look For

The first results show you a list of pages that link to the domain you entered in the search bar.

If you just want to download your competitor's backlinks, you can use the Export All button in the upper right.

A backlink is a link to a website from a separate website. Duolingo is a popular app/website for learning a language. Several pages and lifestyle guides link to the website duolingo.com--to suggest it or show an example of one way to learn Italian. Those pages are Duolingo's backlinks.

Once you've pulled a competitor's backlink profile, you're sitting on a ready-made link-building roadmap. Every site that links to them is a site that has already shown a willingness to link to content in your niche — which means they're likely to link to you too.

Here's how to put that data to work:

Look at where their links are coming from. Are they getting featured in industry roundups? Guest posting on niche blogs? Listed in directories? This tells you exactly which link-building tactics are working in your space — so you can replicate them instead of guessing.

You can see a breakdown of where their links are coming from. Want to put it into action? Click the box next to a type like "forums" to single out those pages in your list.

The backlinks list has a built-in filter for different types of banklinks

Find the high-authority sites linking to them and pitch those same sites with your own content or perspective. If a DR 80 blog linked to your competitor's article, there's no reason they wouldn't link to a better one from you.

The backlinks checker includes a Domain Strength column that you can click to sort by highest or lowest

Corner a topic that they've missed.

If a competitor has a weak backlink profile in certain areas, that's your opening to build authority they don't have — and outrank them for it.

The only backlinks that SpyFu shows for a site are the ones that are also indexed by Google. It won't include spammy links from sites that Google has punished. That way you can go after those same links by approaching the people who manage those pages, and you can do it without worry that you're chasing a page that has been penalized.

Yes, SpyFu has a free version that gives you a hands-on preview of its tools like the backlink builder.

Click to enter a domain into this search bar. It will open a new page for the backlink builder tool. Type the domain at the top, and get the first 5 results for free.

Click to get a website's backlinks for free