# of links and how it impacts ranking
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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.
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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.
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