This “Glitch” in Measuring
Link Building Competition
With Google’s Allinanchor Command
Can Push You to WASTE
Tons of Truly Lucrative Keywords

If you are serious about pushing sites to the top in search engines, then you should know that a big part of your success depends upon the link building competition for a specific keyword. It is logical that if lots of sites are building backlinks for the same keyword – then getting page 1 for this keyword is tough. And, on the contrary, if the link building competition is not big – then your chances to get page 1 seriously increase.

For those of you who are making the first steps in SEO – I will quickly explain how people are checking the link building competition, and then will explain what “glitch” it has. So, if you want to check how many sites are building backlinks for a specific keyword, then type into Google the following phrase allinanchor:”your keyword here”, for example like it is show on the screenshot below…

In our example I was kind of asking Google, “Please show me the ONLY the sites that are building backlinks for ‘learn to make money online’ and that are my direct link building competitors.” So, if you see lots of sites when you do the allinanchor search – this means you have lots of competitors. If you see a small number of sites – cool, this is a low competition keyword.

Ok, Now Comes the “Glitch”…

I am always putting the word glitch into the quotation mark, because actually it is not a glitch and Google has explanation for it. But as lots of people are calling it a glitch – I will call it the same way. So, let’s take the same keyword ‘learn to make money online’ as an example and check how many sites are building backlinks for the same keywords. Please check the screenshot below…

You see, well over 900,000 link building competitors – this is a really big number. Seems like mission impossible. Seems that the competition is absolutely unreachable.

But, if you scroll the Google search page and click to see the results on page 10, page 20 (in other words – if you go deeper in the results that Google gave you on the allinanchor search), then soon you will see the following…

Not 992,000 – ONLY 226!!

Now I don’t want so say that 226 link building competitors is easy, because sometimes even with 50 link building competitors you have to fight like crazy.

But, still we are talking about HUGE difference – and the keyword from “mission impossible” becomes something you can fight for.

This is how you can pass by the truly great keywords (in terms of link building competition), being scared away by the big numbers. Big numbers that can actually be hundreds and thousands of time less than Google shows.

Why the Heck is Google Doing That?!!

There are 2 points of view on this issue:

- Google ditches automatic tools for checking competition

Some people say that with the help of showing “fake” results on the first page of allinanchor check Google is killing lots of automatic tools that promise people to help with measuring link building competition. Indeed, there are plenty of tools that are checking allinanchor search for you – automatically. Still, I know that the owners of reputable tools explain their clients that this automatic search has its drawbacks and can show fake numbers.

Some of the tools tried to bypass this “glitch” and automatically clicked deeper into the results. But responsible owners of the tools should tell you that actually when you do an extensive allinanchor search, Google bans you for a while. For example, when I do keyword research within the framework of the service here or here, and when I have to pass through several dozens of keywords – I get banned. Nothing dramatic, I can still use Google, but not allinanchor command. And usually I get unbanned in about an hour, sometimes even faster. So, this is not a problem at all. But this Google “behavior” kills the very idea of using any automatic solutions for allinanchor checking in bulk.

And this is sad, because for our clients I have to do a lot of allinanchor checking :)

- Google saves efforts on processing jobs for their servers

And this is something that I personally prefer to choose as the reason for such behavior. It’s not a secret that Google has colossal amounts of processing jobs on their servers. And they officially acknowledged that to be able to show you search results FASTER they process just a tiny bit of their info. And only then, when you get to page 2, 3, 5, 10 and deeper into their search results – they will show you numbers that are a lot more realistic.

No conspiracy. Everything is simple and transparent. And, once again, for me personally this explanation is appealing a lot more than the one saying “Google fights with the automatic tools like this”.

Though, it can be both :)

But in any case, pay attention to this “glitch” – go deeper in the results of the allinanchor search. This will make sure that you don’t pass by the truly golden keywords with reasonable link building competition and decent traffic.