Are bad links the reason for not ranking?

[EduardoRuiz]

Hello Moz community. I'm looking here for some input from the experts on what could be wrong with a site I'm working on. The site is in Spanish, but I'm sure you'll get the idea.

We want to rank the site first page on Google Mexico (www.google.com.mx) for the keyword "refacciones Audi" and some other brands (refacciones = replacement parts would probably be a good translation, just FYI). Now, our page hasn't been completely optimized, so in my mind it's OK not to be on first page yet.

However, our main competitor is ranking first page for all the keywords we want to rank for, but when you check their site, you'll find there is hardly any content, no keywords are being used in their content, all pages have the exact same title and meta description, their catalog is in a completely different domain. In short, no SEO whatsoever. Looking at Moz data, our site has a DA of 26, while our competitor's has a 10. They have no external backlinks at all, while we have a few hundred.

This leaves me scratching my head: how can a completely non-optimized site outrank us?

I decided to check our backlink profile, and a previous SEO agency seems to have built MANY fake blogs with lots of backlinks with rich anchor text. Quite a big percentage of our backlinks are of this kind, so this is the only thing I can think can be affecting our ranking. Will disavowing be our solution?

If you'd like to check, our site is: www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx

Our competitors' is: www.saferefacciones.com

ANY help will be extremely appreciated as I feel a bit lost.

Thanks!

[MichaelC-15022]

I agree with Keri...there are a ton of factors that all contribute to ranking for any given term.  It's possible to rank well based simply on a few of them, if it's not super-competitive space.

[KeriMorgret]

They are extreme examples, but Adobe Reader ranks for "click here" because of all of the links pointing to it with "click here" to download adobe acrobat since the beginning of (web) time. Same with Disney and Yahoo ranking for "click here to exit", as adult/liquor sites often have a click to enter if you're over 18, and click to exit if you don't want to visit that site, and they'll link to Disney or Yahoo.

[EduardoRuiz]

Thank you everyone for your input on my question. It seems this could be an interesting problem to tackle.

So, if I may pose this extra question: how can a site that has absolutely no SEO (I mean, if you went through an SEO checklist this site would surely fail) rank first page? Does this make sense from an SEO perspective? I know there are many factors considered by Google to determine rankings, but what about pages that don't seem to match any of these "requirements" and rank highly? It's weird... Sorry, I probably must post this as a separate question.

[MichaelC-15022]

I'd agree with Keri on this one.  If you want to start with a fairly inexpensive investment to see how bad the problem is, buy a subscription to Link Research Tools and run a Link Detox report on your site.  If you get a pretty bad result, then go to the Moz recommended list to find someone with experience identifying and getting you out of penalties.

[KeriMorgret]

In cases like this, it may be advisable to go ahead and pay a professional for an audit/evaluation of the site. This is the type of thing that takes some time to examine, especially with so many moving parts. Q&A is great for some questions, but some of the larger ones like this (especially with a foreign language and different version of Google) are better suited to someone who can spend a few hours devoted to your site and your competitors and figure out what is happening and give you some advice as to the next steps.

[EGOL]

I don't think that you are going to get good actionable advice on this site in a forum.  There are too many factors to consider, too much time and expertise required to do an assessment.

Just saying that you should not take action based upon kibitzin'.

[billhartzer]

Eduardo,

I haven't looked into the specific backlinks, but there are a few factors involved. First, most likely you are not seeing all of the links to the site and to your competitor's site. I would check Webmaster Tools as well as a few other sources of links (ahrefs, majestic, open site explorer, etc.) and combine those links to get a better picture of the links to your site. Different tools have different crawlers and they all don't get all the links all of the time.

It sounds as if you may have an issue with bad and toxic links pointing to the site, I would review all your links and get the toxic and bad links removed (focus on the low quality links with exact match anchor text). There is a very good chance that you are suffering from these bad links.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Eduardo,

I have just answered another question very similar to this one and poor links are very problematic. I deal with a lot of companies who have this exact same problem, so go through the process of cleaning the backlink profile up for them.

Google Panda has a habit of penalising for these backlinks and it certainly would be a starting point by the sounds of things.

You have to be a little careful when disavowing though as you don't want to remove good links, just those that will be contributing to this problem. There many be other reasons for it, but if you have a poor link profile, it is a little bit of a waste trying other SEO techniques that could do absolutely nothing for you.

-Andy