My Spyglass has been coming up with a lot of back links for my competitors that are nowhere to be found when I visit the site (and yes, I'm searching the page source). I realize things could have changed since the information was found, but I'm also finding it extremely unlikely that my competitors were able to get back links on some of these particular pages. Anyone else experiencing the same thing?

Also, completely unrelated, I was wondering if there was a way to have SEO spyglass show just the domains of all the back links and not all the URLs?

Thanks in advance!

Maybe the link was there to a domain that your competitors' pages are on? Also, when you update the page info factor, what does the "links back" column say? If you could give us an example we would be really grateful, as you are saying "extremely unlikely that my competitors were able to get back links on some of these particular pages"

For example, my Spyglass is saying the my competitor has a backlink on mattcutts.com, the homepage. HIGHLY doubt they EVER had a backlink there... The "links back" column says "No (link missing)"

Thanks for your help!

Please check where the link has been found. If it comes from Alexa - please keep in mind that Alexa seems to return only the backlink domains. So it could have been a comment in one of the blog posts, and Alexa reported only the backlink domain for you.

I've noticed the same thing and looking at the data now, Alexa is the culprit and it's listed as Link Missing. I was wondering why Matt Cutts was linking to a competitor of mine as well!

Regards,
Numb
http://www.siteone.co.uk

Yes, it did come from Alexa... Is this taken into consideration when calculating the link value?

Nope. Link value depends on the PR of a page and the number of links on it. Basically, it reflects how much link juice a link gets.

Right, so if a link is on a page other than what spyglass thinks it is, the PR and or number of links is probably different as well. Which means the link value of any given link found with the Alexa search engine is probably completely off??

Yes - but only in case with backlinks found using Alexa. If you want to, you can remove it from your preferred search engines list (there are more that 600 other SEs to use for backlink retrieval). Alternatively, you can create a LinkAssistant project for your competitor's website and copy backlink domains there (File -> Import -> Plain Text). Using the 'Verify' command, you'll be able to find exact backlink pages and to recalculate the value of these backlinks.