Your Competitor Has 800 Backlinks and You Have Three. Now What?
Start by checking what the 800 actually is. In most tools, the big headline number is total backlinks — every individual link, including thousands from the same site. The number that matters is referring domains: how many separate sites link to them. A profile of 800 backlinks from 12 sources is a different thing from 800 backlinks from 400 sources, and only the second one is a gap worth taking seriously.
That check takes a minute and it changes the plan. So do it before you do anything else.
Reading the gap properly
Three things to establish, in order.
1. Referring domains, not backlinks. Switch the report to count sources. Site-wide links — a footer, a sidebar, a blogroll — produce one link per page on the linking site, so a single placement on a large site can generate thousands of “backlinks” from one source.
2. How many of those sources are ordinary web furniture. Scroll the list. A large share of most profiles is stuff nobody built and nobody would want to: scraper sites that mirror content, domain-statistics pages, feed aggregators, directories that list everything. These accumulate automatically as a site ages. They aren’t a competitive advantage and they aren’t reproducible work.
3. How many are links you could plausibly get. This is the only number that matters. Real publications, industry blogs, resource pages, course reading lists, forum answers, documentation. Usually it’s a small fraction of the total — and that fraction is your actual work list.
By the time you’ve done those three passes, “800 links” has often become something like “35 sources a person deliberately created.” That’s a project. The 800 was never a project.
Also worth knowing: the counts themselves are estimates, and they disagree between tools and drift over time as indexes recrawl. Why Do Competitor Backlink Reports Go Stale So Fast? covers why the number you screenshot today is different next month, without anyone doing anything.
Age is doing a lot of the work
A site that has been publishing for ten years has ten years of accumulation: every conference it spoke at, every partner page, every journalist who needed a source in that decade, every forum thread that referenced it. You cannot compress that into a quarter, and trying to is how people end up buying links.
This is the honest and slightly unwelcome part of the answer. If the gap is mostly age, the gap closes slowly by design. What you can do is stop the next ten years from looking like the last three, which is a matter of publishing things that get cited rather than chasing a total.
Don’t chase the total
Two reasons the “match their number” instinct backfires.
Links aren’t the only input, and volume isn’t the metric. Nobody outside a search engine knows the weights, and claiming otherwise is guessing. But it’s clear enough from published guidance that a small number of relevant, editorially-given links from real sites is worth more than a large number of low-quality ones. What Is Link Equity? covers what a link is thought to carry and why the source matters.
Fast volume comes from one place. There is no supplier of 500 good links. There are suppliers of 500 links, and what they sell is placements on sites built for selling placements — which is a guidelines violation and a spent budget. Do Automatic Backlink Generators Work? and Editorial Links Versus Placed Links both cover why the shortcut doesn’t produce the thing you wanted.
What to actually do with the list
The competitor’s profile is genuinely useful — as a prospect list, not a scoreboard.
Find the pages, not the domains. Sort their site’s pages by referring domains and look at the top handful. Whatever those pages are — a dataset, a calculator, a definitive explainer, an annual report — is proof of what publishers in your field are willing to cite. That’s a much better brief than any keyword list. Why One Page Earns Links and Another Doesn’t covers how to read it.
Find the sources you can plausibly reach. From the “could get” pile, the reachable subset is usually: resource and reading lists (Landing on Resource Lists), publications that cover your category and need sources, and communities where your answer would be genuinely useful. How to Find Backlink Opportunities is the systematic version.
Check what you’d be sending them to. Most link gaps are downstream of an asset gap. If your best page is a service page and theirs is an original dataset, the difference in links is a consequence, not a cause. Build the citable thing: Original Data You Already Have, Small Tools Earn Links, Worked Examples Earn Citations, Diagrams Nobody Else Drew. Then make it easy to cite: Make Pages Easy to Cite.
Take the free ones first. Places you’re already mentioned without a link, partners and suppliers with customer pages, memberships and directories you legitimately belong to, anywhere your own team has published. These aren’t glamorous and they’re real. How to Find Unlinked Brand Mentions is the starting point.
A sane way to measure progress
Three links is a small enough base that any single addition is a large percentage change, which makes percentage reporting useless. Count sources instead, and count the ones you’d have been happy to get:
- Referring domains from sites with a real audience, this quarter.
- Which asset earned each one.
- Which outreach reasons got replies and which didn’t.
Then stop looking at their total. It includes a decade of scrapers and a footer link on a 4,000-page site, and matching it is not a goal any part of your business benefits from. Closing the gap on pages worth citing is the version of the goal that pays.
And when you do earn them, keep an eye on whether they survive — links disappear when pages get redesigned or deleted. How Do You Know if a Backlink You Earned Is Still Live? covers checking.