How do sites have so many 'total links'?

[TBiz]

I've been analyzing some of our competitors: essayedge.com and papercheck.com

Both sites have a large number of 'total links'... about 93,000 each.  The former has about 1,200 linking root domains while the latter only has 195.  Even for 1,200 linking root domains, 93k total links seems like a ton to me.

Our site has 101 linking root domains and only 299 'total links'.

I'm quite new to this whole SEO game and admittedly still learning a TON.  Am I missing something here?  How do sites generate so many links?  This seems nuts to me.

Thanks for any help!

[TBiz]

Thanks Marcin, that makes more sense.

For example, I noticed papercheck had a ton of links from verisign.  It appears they did some case-study for the company and the links were all over their other country specific domains, etc.

It makes sense that it would be more about increasing the number of linking root domains than the total number of links and I now understand how one link on a very large site can result in hundreds, if not thousands, of links.

I didn't really understand this and in the back of my mind I keep hearing Rand telling me that link building is valuable but hard work and time consuming.  I'm thinking... s*$t, it really is going to be a lot of work to get 100,000 links  

But it's nice to know I need to simply focus on high quality linking domains... easy enough

[TBiz]

Thanks for the reply, that helps and makes sense!

[marcinlejman]

Hi,

it's very simple to achieve with site-wide links, for example in a sidebar or in a footer. It's quite possible that a single domain. This is exactly the case with at least one of the domains you provided, as far as I can tell after a quick look-up.

Generally, if a large site links to you with a link which is present on each page of that site (think blogroll), you can easily get thousands of links. However, their value will not be significantly stronger than a single link from the same site would hold.

Hope it helps.

[Keszi]

Hi TBiz,

The fact with these website is the following: they have a lot of sitewide links (link that appear on more then one page of the linking website). For ex, footer links (such as "created by" or "designed by", etc.), advertising which appears on each page, etc.

Although it can drive a big number of inbound links, I would still go and ask the question of quantity vs. quality? Which one is better for a website? (If it would be me, I would choose quality).

I hope that helped,

Istvan