I am really surprised to see this page is ranking like crazy even the content is very thin

[Rajnish_HE]

https://www.hackerearth.com/blog/artificial-intelligence/artificial-intelligence-101-how-to-get-started/

We are ranking for 121KW for this page. And 22KW are ranking in the 1-3 position. I am not able to understand why will it rank like anything. Considering that it has just 4  inbound links.

Will some help me to understand this mystery. When we try to write a good in-depth content then we are not ranking but for such content, we are doing fairly good.

[Rajnish_HE]

Thanks, Buddy!

[effectdigital]

Sure, no problem I'll take a look now!

So **this is your post URL: **<a>https://www.hackerearth.com/recruit/resources/e-books/a-complete-guide-to-talent-assessment-software/</a>

This time Moz Link Explorer has only detected one backlink to the post.

The link is from: https://www.yasteq.com/US/Fremont/123161387835128/HackerEarth

The site describes itself thusly: "One of the largest resources on the Internet for finding computer & electronics services and related businesses, worldwide." - so basically it's a local-themed business directory with a tech focus and content curation elements. You can tell that more easily by looking at the homepage (https://www.yasteq.com/). It only has 18 domain authority so that's pretty weak to be honest. The listing is relevant with a reasonable write-up - but it's from a place no one really cares about.

Majestic SEO (another tool) found this link: https://www.eventshigh.com/detail/Bangalore/48e3b2743f568bd46a83bb182fe91ce8-djangothon?src=ecbox whilst **Ahrefs found a separate link from the same site here: **https://www.eventshigh.com/detail/bangalore/63c53417b3eadb328fa3d568d970624c-travel-tech-meetup-with-goibibo

At a glance these just seem to be simple events listings. In most instances, links from these listings are either image-based or have no-follow set to true. Contrary to popular opinion, 'no-following' links does not prevent or discourage users or search engines from following a link (probably one of the worst named attribute values ever). What it does is it prevents Google from transferring any link equity (or 'SEO juice') through the link. The linking page (which hosts the hyperlink) will still lose some SEO authority, but at the receiving end you won't be gaining any (it just gets vented into cyberspace).

Seeing as the page hosting a hyperlink loses SEO equity either way (a measure taken by Google to stop PageRank sculpting from actually 'being a thing') - the only reason to no-follow hyperlinks these days is to avoid outbound Penguin penalties. This is where you are selling hyperlinks but want to tell Google "this link is somehow commercial or advertorial in nature, so don't weight it into your SEO ranking algorithm(s) for Google's results". Google will take that on board and it will prevent the link-host from garnering a penalty (for selling links to others with the intention of manipulating rankings, kind of like being labelled a drug dealer)

The domain actually has very strong metrics in Ahrefs, earning an Ahrefs domain rating of 70. They are probably aware of their site's SEO-clout and either don't want to be giving you a free ride (they expect you to pay for the equity) or they're very cautious about how they link, not wanting to lose the established authority they have built up via penalty / manual action. In any case, though the site is strong and you have links from it - those links are not sending you much / any SEO equity - so there's no party here amigo. Image-based links tend to transfer less equity anyway (even forgetting about 'nofollow') and they have no (user-visible) anchor-text to explain their relevance. Search engines do use image links as signals, but they're not such strong signals (as they're more ambiguous in general)

Ahrefs also found two links from "Mail Pug":

• https://mailpug.com/?p=454
• https://mailpug.com/?paged=2&m=201808

Both have a Domain Rating and URL Rating of zero in Ahrefs. Content doesn't actually seem that bad but... it's from a site with no equity to give you.

In basic terms, your really decent contextual (content-based) links are from sites no one cares about. On the one site with high metrics, they're refusing to transfer SEO equity to you for one reason or another. As such, no rankings for this post.

The reason why it's not ranking well is that although it may be detailed and well written, unlike your other post it didn't attract links. As such it's not deemed very shareable and it has very little SEO authority. You might say it's a vehicle with no fuel.

The reasons why it attracted no 'significant' buzz or attention online could be variable. Was it promoted as well as the other post? Like you suggest - were there CRO or UX defects in the design or copy of the content? I'll leave that side to you.

[effectdigital]

Ah man I love stuff like this!

Ok so here's your post: https://www.hackerearth.com/blog/artificial-intelligence/artificial-intelligence-101-how-to-get-started/

Now I can see you think this post only has four inbound links and you have drawn that conclusion from Moz Link Explorer. By the way I think Moz's tool is great. My agency wouldn't have a subscription otherwise! BUT - MLE (Moz Link Explorer) doesn't have a complete picture of all links on the web. Even Google doesn't have this (yet - their MO is to 'index the web' though).

There are several platforms which aim to supply 'backlink' (external links) data. Moz is one platform but there are others. All of these platforms or link-explorer tools, are coded to crawl the web in different ways. They all have their own unique philosophy on how to index the the 'important' links on the web more quickly. I'm not going to get into whether certain tools are better or worse, really you need **a few of them **so that you can aggregate and de-dupe your own data!

From Moz we can see that these URLs are linking to your post:

• http://blog.crescenttechnologyconsultants.com/artificial-intelligence-101-how-to-get-started/
• https://blog.steppingblocks.com/the-tools-that-saved-me-thousands
• http://analyticstraining.com/the-best-way-to-learn-ai-and-ml/
• https://analyticstraining.com/the-best-way-to-learn-ai-and-ml/

Really that's only three pages as the last two entries there are the same page being served via different protocols (HTTP vs HTTPS).

What do other tools have to say about your post?

Well I can tell you that another tools (Ahrefs) claims to have found more live links for this particular URL. That's not to say that it always will find more links overall, but in this instance it has.

Ahrefs believes that you have 10 live links (more than 4) from 8 domains.

I'll list the domains for your reference:

• refind.com
• steppingblocks.com
• analyticstraining.com
• innovify.com
• snyxius.com
• techgenies.com
• grokbase.com
• malware.xyz

In particular "refind.com" and "grokbase.com" have pretty high SEO authority metrics! These two were not picked up by MLE but will invariably have been factored by Google.

This is the link from "refind.com": https://refind.com/TinaTran_au/collections/ai - it looks pretty weird! If you go to the base-level homepage (https://refind.com/) you can see that the site is an effective content curation network with social aspects. It's likely that when your post was added by users or editors; at some point it featured on the homepage. If so that would have driven a pretty hefty whack of SEO-juice to your post. It may be worth uncovering how this network operates and seeing if you can get in with them, leverage the platform further. Turn fluke into process...

Here's the link from GrokBase: https://grokbase.com/t/gg/django-users/13a438tgw5/inconsistency-in-model-field-with-file-storage-on-amazon-s3 - seems a bit more 'on-point'. But what the heck is GrockBase? Let's go back to the home URL (https://grokbase.com/). Here's what they have to say about themselves: "Grokbase is a growing mailing list archive that facilitates __discovery of discussions and users within and across groups." - it doesn't mean huge amounts to me, maybe it will mean more to you. What ever it is, even though it looks a bit rough and simplistic - it seems to be popular. It **looks **a bit like some kind of Reddit knock-off. Maybe I'm just being ignorant and it was well established on Web 1.0. Do some digging, see what you can find. I wanted to take this further for you by looking in SEMRush (another tool) to get an estimate of the domain's traffic. Sadly it seems to be down or having problems right now.

Another popular link-indexing tool (Majestic) has **no information **on your post, so clearly both Moz and Ahrefs index your site more efficiently in terms of backlinks and the particular sites which you network with.

This was another interesting link found by Ahrefs: https://www.snyxius.com/where-to-begin-with-ai-development/ - Ctrl + F for the anchor text of "different industries and processes" and you'll find the link to your own article. It seems like a contextual link from a well established app / software development company in Austin, Tx. Guess what you wrote resonated.

It's not about volume of links, it's about the **quality **of backlinks. Either your links are high in quality for this post, or you have beaten the system somehow. Either way - congratulations

[Roman-Delcarmen]

As I see you have some really good links but most important you have really good anchor text

• artificial intelligence
• artificial intelligence 101: how to get started

One of those anchor text is your Headline / Title which according to Adam White is the most valuable backlink type

If you want to understand how important are the anchor texts on your backlinks please read this articles The Single Best Anchor Text for SEO That No One Is Talking About