Experts please take a look.
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Below is a screenshot from the website ahrefs.com (They identify the backlinks to your website), containing 3 results. My website, competitor 1 and competitor 2.
My website - I spend a year optimizing my site and doing back links as natural as possible. - Currently #10 in google.
Competitor 1 - Low URL rank and Super unnatural back links. - Currently #1 in google. This competitor has 195K backlinks by having 3 seperate websites linking each in their the main header.
Competitor 2 - Low URL rank and only 58 back links. - Currently #2 in google.
They have been on the top of google for a few keywords for months. And I do not understand why they are #1 constantly.
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I don't like trying to solve problems without specific domains and example KWs so I can do a real diagnosis but let me suggest a few hypotheses (I would not suggest all of these if I could see the URLs.)
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You don't know what they've disavowed - they could have, for whatever reason, disavowed their own cross-domain links. Disavow says "ignore these links" which is (if you're not an SEO) basically the same as nofollow "don't pass juice to these links." So they may have made a (poor) choice to disavow their own links but it may be working for them.
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Competitor 2 has at least 1 redirect. Could be a site with 20 million links for all we know. Could be nothing.
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Can't tell the site speed, titles, content or any other on-page issues with any of the sites. You could be over-branding (Panda issues) or smashing the site with keywords.
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Sometimes Google doesn't make sense.
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Ahrefs only picks up around 10-20% of all links from what we've seen. Hard to make estimates on what Majestic, OSE, & Google see without the domain info.
You're assuming this is a link issue - but honestly we just can't tell yet. Not enough info to fully diagnose.
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Most likely they are if the situation you described is how they have gained their links.
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From the result shown above, competition 1 is using bad tactics correct?
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SEO is not all back links, content is king, traffic is important and on-page problems can drag you down. Instead of worrying about rank and back links you should work on a content strategy, make sure what you control is optimized (fast page load, no huge errors, proper meta etc.) and work toward small, sustainable incremental gains. If your competition is using bad tactics it will catch up with them, you can grow your position now and be primed to take over when Google catches them.
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