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
-
Should I get a link from a low quality directory?
While doing some backlink research of similar ranking sites I noticed that a few of them had links from a directory called Infignos, it has a moz DA of 37 and a low spam score of 3, so it doesn't look like complete junk. But the posts on it look terrible, like people are just putting keywords with a small description to get rankings. Should I bother posting something similar to be competitive or just move on? Any advice or feedback on this is much appreciated, I know some of these things are not quality sites but I was wondering the best way to filter that out. Thanks in advance.
Competitive Research | | iwantclarity0 -
Is my client's site penalized and if not, why are other lesser quality sites ranking with lower metrics than my client's?
Hello, I'm trying to explain to a client, as to why certain websites that appear in the top 50 listings for a keyword are there when they don't have very good backlink profiles, and for this keyword, seems you need a high PA above 20 or DA above 25, just to page for page 2 - 3. Running a full SERPs report, I have seen that backlinks to the page that's ranking seems to be as high of a factor as PA, followed by DA and overall backlink profile. Having a high score in one of these 4 areas seems to increase your ranking. However, going into page 3 and beyond, seems that things kinda take a weird turn. After comparing the client's site to those ranking on page 2 I could see that all of them had better PA and more links to the page ranking for that keyword, so page 2 I understand why we don't rank on yet. However, looking at page 3, I see that the client's site in question has better PA, DA, links to page and overall links to domain. Which leaves me to think we have a penalty that's keeping us ranking 50 or beyond. Since our metrics across the boards for what MOZ is showing as ranking factors. The more odd issue is that looking at the line graph, shows right at the time we implemented sitewide https our ranking for this one keyword dropped, while rankings for our other keywords increased. Am I to assume it's a keyword density penalty? What penalties are there with a outcome of ranking limits?
Competitive Research | | Deacyde0 -
How Do You Currently Analyze Outbound Link Profiles?
So I'm looking at some potential guest blogging &/or article writing opportunities and I'm looking for a tool which will analyze the OUTBOUND links from the site....it would be handy if inbound were displayed too but not essential as there are many tools available for this. When I ask for sample sites it is clear that a number of them (all?!) have been created purely for us content purposes, however it would be good to analyze the site further. A tool that could analyze its outbound links would give me a rough idea if the site is suitable or simply a glorified link-farm. Also, if you have any useful links regarding industry averages on outbound links for blogs & article sites (eg Ezine) for benchmarking it would be good! Thanks
Competitive Research | | cmooki
C:)0 -
Why does the link analysis of my website say I have no links?
When I click on the "Link Analysis" tab it says my website has a domain authority of 1 and has 0's for every other category. When I run it in Open Site Explorer - it says I have a page authority of 51 with over 4600 links. My website also seems to be at a stand still over the past several weeks. Anyone know why the two Link Analysis is not showing anything? Thank you
Competitive Research | | tyler7560 -
Page Linking Root Domains and Root Domain Linking Root Domains?
hi, i want to know if Page Linking Root Domains is less and Root Domain Linking Root Domains is higher in number, at that time your keyword is highly competitive or less competitive? for example if a keyword having this information:- Page Authority is:-83 Page Linking Root Domains:- 295 Domain Authority is :- 94 Root Domain Linking Root Domains:- 42,399 which point is more important to consider? if you want to bring your keyword on the first page of the Google ?
Competitive Research | | parallelseo0 -
Important link building question for me!
Hi, When building backlinks how important is the location of where the website resides? For example, if I was targeting a search term in Google UK, will link building from websites hosted on UK servers have a higher positive impact on rankings then building links from websites hosted on US servers? Lets say in the above UK hosted is better, what if you have 2 websites hosted in the UK but one with .com and one with .co.uk, I take it from a domain point of view the .co.uk will have a better impact on SERP's then the .com. Now looking at the above from a more wider scale lets say I have the following: A .co.uk website aimed at a search term in Google UK. Example: 1. 100 backlinks from websites hosted in the US with .com extension. 2. 100 backlinks from websites hosted in the UK with .co.uk extension. Is it a FACT that number 2 will 100% be more beneficial in UK rankings? Cheers
Competitive Research | | activitysuper1 -
Good tools to compare site speed on different sites?
Google tells me that my site is slower than 81% of the internet.Now this is a very large news website, so I would like to compare this against other very large news websites. Are there any tools that will be able to tell me the speed of a list of websites? I am looking for something a little more detailed than 'this site loaded in 1 second'. Also, do any of you fellow SEOs know of any good tools to analyse what is causing your site to slow down? Kind regards
Competitive Research | | MirandaP0 -
Online checkers for Anchor Links ?
Okay, we are looking for online tools to check our backlinks, and anchor links top domains, etc. OSE is not working for us, because looks like , it gets updated in some months. We are looking for something, which can drag the statistics in fw hours and show up. Let me know.
Competitive Research | | qubesys0