# 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.
-
Howdy.
So, there are more things going on than just amount of the links. The link diversity (number of link per domain), link quality, number of domains linking, spam scores, anchor text cloud etc etc (even position of link on a page). Good metric number to look at is the MOZRank and MOZTrust, since they kinda combined all other metrics.
In terms of disavowing - if links are natural, then i wouldn't worry. If it has spammy nature - get rid of them.
Another point - footer links. You said you have quite a bit. It's quite known footer links are not valuable anymore. So, you can have way more of the than your competitors, but if they are all from footer, you won't rank as high.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Competitor ranks high, but how?
On our campaign, I have three local competitors which I like to keep an eye on. Two have been around for years but the other is pretty new. According to Moz, he has a Domain Authority of 1, has no backlinks and ranks lower on every keyword I keep track of. How then is he getting ahead of us for certain search terms? Can Moz not give any more information?
Competitive Research | | robandsarahgillespie0 -
Competitor Ranks Top Keywords Without Backlinks
One of my competitors is ranking very well for many different competitive keywords (1k+ searches per month). I'm trying to figure out how in the world he is ranking so well. I've signed up for MozPro and looked at his back-links. He has 1 branded site-wide back-link from a decent blog. He also has 1 contextual back-link from a decent blog. Other than these 2 back-links, the rest are garbage links unlikely to even count for anything (he has maybe 12 of these low quality back-links). My website on the other hand has more than 15 back-links from different (high quality) websites and does not rank anywhere near this competitor. This leads me to believe that either MozPro back-link reporting is inadequate or there is foul-play on the part of my competitor. As far as on-page SEO is considered, his website is far inferior. Therefore, I highly doubt this would play a role. What are some reasonable approaches I can take to better understand the cause of this discrepancy. Clearly the back-link reporting has not revealed any answers.
Competitive Research | | poke10 -
Possible google sandbox issue? Organically ranking page 1 for our number 1 keyword, but page 5 sometimes 6 on google?
What are some things I can look into to figure out why google is ranking us on page 5 sometimes page 6, with some slight rank boosts to rank 36 from 48 but then falls right back. While Yahoo and Bing rank us page 1 consistently, without these big drops back. I use google search ( webmaster tools ) daily, fix 404s and make sure to fetch new content I create. Our site is within the Sandbox issue time frame, google 1st indexed the site about a year and a half ago, the site has been through various SEO service checks, and has had those issues fixed ( some bigcommerce won't allow, such as full sitewide ssl and a few other small factors ) but all the big stuff was handled or will be 100% handled after this redesign is complete. But just still seems we're stuck in the google hole again. We do use adwords, but no clear signs as to why we'd suffer such hardships with google ranking, only thing we don't have optimized in terms of on page optimization from moz is keyword in url, of which will be changing within the next month or two, as we're rolling our a new redesign with SEO 100% at the forefront, nice url paths, with keywords in their url, much more responsive site that uses less resources. But before we release this redesign, I'd like to find out what toe we stubbed of google's to give us such a ranking blackeye... We don't have that many backlinks, and I know these are a huge factor, however, building quality backlinks it's harder than walking on water at time and on the same level as spinning hay into gold. Any ideas community...
Competitive Research | | Deacyde0 -
Can an https: impact (not provided) keywords in Google Analytics? Meaning if I make my site https: will it provide any more keywords. If not how can I get this data?
I have a site that I'd love to have more keyword data on. Can making my site an https: site give me more keyword data than leaving my site an http: site? Thanks!
Competitive Research | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Blogging just to manipulate rankings?
Hi, I have been playing with Open Site Explorer for a while and have been trying to figure out how some of our competitors could rank with "not so great" articles. I don't want to sound harsh here but some of the articles outranking us are nothing but 6 images + 200-225 words from a press release and a Video. How exactly does Google justify this by ranking them higher than a 1500 word unique article that has been written in no less than 7 days? According to OpenSite Explorer, about the two pages compared, the difference is the number of LINKS. The sad part is, without 1 exception, all their links are coming from blog pages like *.wordpress.com *.typepad.com etc. I would have been just FINE if their links were NATURAL. You may ask me why I assume those blogs are created by them. Because every single post on those blogs are pointing to their domain... I don't think a normal blogger would keep pointing to the same domain. So what are we supposed to do here? Wait 3 months so people discover our articles and natural links will come? (It happens sometimes but then it may not...) Do what they do? Sorry about the ranting but I have one question if you don't want to read the rant. Is blogging to build links, considered black hat or not?
Competitive Research | | Gamer070 -
Site Ranks Better than Comp...but why?
My site is ranking better than some of the competition sites even though the Moz Rank and Moz Trust are lower, anyone know why?
Competitive Research | | CalgaryRealtor390 -
Sites With Duplicate Content Ranking Way Higher
The site I am writing about is easendtorontohomes.com I don't get it. I see that some of my competitors have more inbound links and have been around longer. Their SEOmoz trust etc is also higher. But I don't get how many could possibly be ranking higher since they're sites are all template based site via Web Tech Design and the content is duplicated from one to the other. The other weird thing is that they do everything wrong - they stuff their keywords tag, some of them use the same keywords/meta data on every single page, some of them don't even have meta tags, some of them don't even have a blog with ANY original content. Apart from listings EastEndTorontoHomes.com has TONS of original, well-researched, and keyword rich content. I just don't get it. Is it possible that google has some sort of relationship with that company? Or am I totally missing something? Some of these sites include: tinasmith.ca, mikeclarke.com, teamkassen.com
Competitive Research | | annasus0 -
Do links from a linkdirectory still matter
Hi everyone, I'm checking out some competition for a webshop and i found a website which was quite high in Google for a searchterm, when checking it's backlinks why it was that high in google (His Content was rubbish, so it wasn't that). I only found out that it has loads of linkdirectory links, does this mean it still matters these kind of links, or does it mean the competition is just rubbish? Regards, yannick
Competitive Research | | iwebdevnl0