Should I be worried?

[chromate]

Just had a look at the link popularity stats of one of my potential competitors using marketleap.com. Up until now I've only really been looking at my competitors link popularity with respect to google.

As far as google is concerned my competitor has 270 backward links. I believe this is most feasible to beat and in addition to this, the SEO for their site isn't all that great at all for the keywords I'll be targeting.

However, marketleap reports that alltheweb.com has registered 8,500 links to my competitor's site.

This isn't really a problem on the face of it considering I'll be looking to google for most of my traffic. However, If I beat my competitor to the #1 position in google, wont they have an easy time fighting back? I would think they could do this easily by increasing their link popularity simply by submiting all the pages from other sites that have links to them, that don't yet seem to have been submitted to google (because google isn't listing them?)

Or have I got things totally wrong? :) Is it just that google isn't listing the other few thousand backward links because their PageRank isn't above 4 or something?

Should I be worried? :)

[Chris]

Google knows about all those links -- they're just from pages that have a PR lower than 4 so Google doesn't list them.

Also a link search on AllTheWeb returns backwards links for the entire site, Google is just for the domain.

Do a comparison for AllTheWeb and Google backlinks on http://www.online-literature.com.

[chromate]

I already have. I was quite amazed. The whole thing's suddenly looking a lot harder than I originally thought.

... Maybe I should be worried after all :confused: heh

[Chris]

Don't be worried. Google and AllTheWeb know about the same links they just list them differently.

[chromate]

Yeah, but what I mean is, the number of links my competitor has actually far exceeds that which I originally thought to be the case. But I guess the point is that the ones google doesn't show aren't *too* important anyway. With that in mind and the poor level of SEO the top ranking site has at the moment for my keywords, hopefully things will turn out ok after a bit of work. Though unfortunately, it is a competative field. Oh well, I'll soldier on :)

[Chris]

Sheer number of links don't matter though.

If you're close in Google you're close, regardless of the actual number of incoming links.