How to find affiliate sites linking to a competitor website?

[fablau]

Hello here,

I am trying to understand the best way to find sites that are affiliate of a competitor, through link research.

Typically our competitor's affiliates link to our competitor website via any of the following links:

http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp?SID=[aff_id]&LID=[link_id]

http://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=[aff+id]&offerid=[off_id]&type=2&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.musicnotes.com%2Fsheetmusic%2Fmtd.asp%3Fppn%3D[item_id]

The first link looks much easier to find, so I have tried to find the first kind of links with Google by using the "link:" clause as follows:

link:http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp

Or, similarly, by using Open Site Explorer. But I always get 0 results! It is weird because I know there are thousands of affiliates out there with the same tracking code.

How's that possible? Why does it look impossible to find the sites I am looking for? Would you suggest any different approach?

Any ideas, suggestions and thoughts are very welcome!

Thank you in advance.

Fab.

[fablau]

Thank you for your reply and suggestions, actually ahrefs returned quite a number of links... what I don't understand is how you can see 350 links inside the "Just-Discovered beta" of OSE... I see just 23 links for the following URL:

www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp

Ideas?

[grasshopper]

Hi Fabrizio,

Since you already have an OSE account, just enter that URL, and then click on the "Just-Discovered beta" tab on the far-right.  You'll see 350 links to that URL.

Alternately, ahrefs has 195 domains that link to the URL you provided, but of course you'll need an account to see all the data.

Hope that helps!

[IrvCo_Interactive]

Have you tried looking in any of the other link graph tools like ahrefs.com or majestic SEO?