Two links with the same quality but different effect
-
Hi,
the website I'm working for is loosing rankings for one specific keyword and since there haven't been any bigger onsite changes I assume it's the back links.
The company bought some exact anchor text links in the past, so I went through those. One specific one attracted my attention: It's a site wide link which creates over 80% of the back link profile to the specific website.
There was only one catch: part of this bought anchor text campaign is another highly targeted anchor text which is not negatively affected by the rankings.
Still I didn't like the feel of this so I ran the seomoz keyword difficulty report. And there I discovered an interesting pattern:
For keyword A we are the only ones in the top10 with such a high percentage of exact keyword usage. But for keyword B, which didn't loose rankings our top10 competitor have an even more over-optimized keyword usage or much weaker back link profile.
So now I wonder if it could actually be the case, that we loose rankings for keyword A since our competitors have a more natural profile, but for Keyword B it has no negative effect due to the worse competition.
Thanks in advance for your help!
-
Your conclusion sounds correct. Keyword A is much more competitive and you have 80% of your backlinks coming from one domain. Your competitors may have a stronger link profile with links from multiple domains and diverse anchor text.
You are able to rank for Keyword B since it is less competitive and you have a link with exact anchor text matching that term.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
# of links and how it impacts ranking
Hi everyone I was running a competitor analysis in Moz Pro of my site and 3 competitors that are ranked above me. One of the things I noticed is that my # of total links is very high compared to 2 of my competitors(please see attachment). Other seo tools are telling me the same. This is mainly due to a few affiliate sites that have us in their footer. I was wondering if this could impact our ranking if some of these sites have very low domain authority and have thousands of backlinks to our site? I am looking into starting the disavowing process. Walau
Competitive Research | | wdsguy0 -
How can I estimate annual traffic for this deep link?
I need to estimate the traffic patterns for the last year at a minimum...preferably 2 or 3 years for this deep link: http://www.amazon.com/Boating-Water-Sports-Outdoors/b/ref=sa_menu_btwt?ie=UTF8&node=3421331 I have ran a url comparison in open site explorer against amazon.com but want to put some traffic estimates around this. Is there a tool in moz to do this?
Competitive Research | | mm9161570 -
Abnormally high number of root domains linking to root domains
My client runs a very small business hiring out space in a single warehouse and rarely adds content to his incredibly badly optimised wordpress site. Can anyone make any wild guesses as to why my client has 2.9 million root domains linking to root domains? He also has a domain authority of 100. Strange when the number one competitor in warehouse space in this part of the world is Gumtree (equivalent of Craig's List) and that only has 9.25k root domains linking to root domains and site authority of 80. Is there any way of finding out where these links are coming from via Moz? Thanks
Competitive Research | | SocialStreets.Co0 -
Spam affiliate outranking quality site?
I purchased a site hotkeyit.com which was making decent revenue without much work (all via PPC or CPM) but then afterwards started looking at the SERPs and realized I was being outranked for the main term, 'starcraft 2 guide/s' by crappy ClickBank sites like starcraft2guide.com and many others. Researching starcraft2guide.com specifically in SEOMoz/Rush/Majestic shows hotkeyit.com as being quite superior in everyway, not to mention it has quite a social following for a small gaming site, yet Google seems to care not. Can someone please explain what's going on here? It seems like the site was penalized, but there was never any link building done for it aside from word of mouth on forums (this was mentioned beforehand). Thank you everyone.
Competitive Research | | Neyzio0 -
Ive been busy link building for about 3 months and my seomoz account says i have no links?
Wondering why none of my links are showing in my dashboard altho many were accepted 3 months ago? many Thanks, Zoe.
Competitive Research | | zozzer0 -
50,000 Links From The Same Website
Hey Mozers, I was conducting competitive research for a client of mine and I discovered one of their competitors has over 50,000 backlinks! After removing my heart from my stomach I realized that 99.9% of the links came from a single website that doesn't have nearly that many pages. Has anyone experienced this in the past? And if so what exactly is going on? C
Competitive Research | | calindaniel0 -
Multiple links from Dmoz/Google directories worldwide
I came across www.soundandvision.com and did a Link Analysis on them.... http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.soundandvision.com/a!links I noticed that the top links they have are from Google directories or Google IP's. How has this happened? I am listed in Dmoz in the UK does this mean I have automatically appeared around the world. Dmoz is pretty strict about rejecting links how can a company be listed so much? Is this a good practise? Cheers
Competitive Research | | JohnW-UK1 -
Inbound links
Is the any report that will show the reciprocal vs one-way inbound links?
Competitive Research | | FastCashOnlineInc0