Many people like to look at the backlinks that their competitors have, and try to get some of them for themselves. But the tools available for showing links to other sites do not reflect the importance that Google gives to them, so we could be chasing links that actually do not have much value. Just as one example, let's say you find that a competitor (who is ranking higher than you) has a link to a .edu site that is a spam comment on a blog; are you going to add your own as well? Or they have one in a PR0 directory buried on a deep page, will you submit to that directory?
Or maybe it could be the other way round - a human thinks it is valuable but Google's machines do not?
Human if value links based on PR or other things then it is of no use but if value based on traffic it can drive, it can be of immense help. Let me try to explain this with an example for one of my article. I have a post about Wordpress SEO - http://imtips.co/wordpress-seo.html And so Definitely I would always want to rank well in Google for my main term Wordpress SEO. When Analyzing the competition I found that first 2 spots are by Wordpress plugins and then 2 spots are by Yoast.com which is yet again very popular Wordpress plugin and so it would be really foolish from me to even thinking about outranking them but then 5th result was a site viperchill.com and this is when I came to know about Glen (The owner of viperchill) So I wanted to know how he is ranking so well and doing my analysis with Market Samurai (you can read about it here if you want) I found some of his backlinks and though some links were from blogroll sitewide links, the impactful links would be definitely the ones from guest post on Problogger and other natural links from smartpassiveincome / thinktraffic blogs. So to outrank that result would take some doing and so it is better to not trying that for my blog as of now but instead of focus on long tail keywords. So if human analyzes links, it would be much better than bots. The story is I could manage to rank in second page for that term but then impact of penguin let off for that term
Ok I understand what you are saying, i.e. that there is far more to analyzing your competitor's backlinks than e.g. just looking at PR, and also that in some cases we are just not going to overtake the competition for some keywords.
Nice debate, In regards to choosing what links to go after for yourself. I would take note of any high authority links that may be hard to obtain first. Then look for any relevant niche specific places where you can easily obtain some links from. A good bit of snooping around you should pick up some easy links and have noted down a number of high authority places where you can guest post or attempt to achieve a link from later down the line.
It was not about Authority when I started to gain ranking but now it is more about authority links and so now I am not anywhere and I am fine with that because that is how Google behaves. Some webmaster would argue that they are more deserving than some of the result and I don't deny that fact but if you know how ranking is based on... you would say that some of those results deserves more than my link. Again that holds true for many other terms as well where my content is not as good as others but that content has managed to gain better natural links over time SEO is a zero sum game.
as per my experience i would like to say that... competitior's backlink analysis are required but we don't need to follow them blindly ... i would like to say that GET OUT BOX & create links but make sure, Should obay the rules. some exceptionals are there.. like 95 to 5% ratio. Thanks,