Two links with the same quality but different effect

[RomiSverige]

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!

[TheSEODR]

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.