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I've read in many articles that pages can "pass" rank to other pages internally. Is anyone aware of any well done internal linking case studies which confirm this?

If my homepage has the strongest Page Authority, would linking to another page deeper into my website from my homepage boost my rank for the deeper page in Google (more so than linking to the deep page from a page with lower page authority)?

Let's say you have a page on your website which displays the current discounts available for iPhones. The page is a list of deals with buttons to reveal a promo code.

Would adding contextual content to these pages improve rankings?

If the main keywords are already on the page, such as "Save 20% on iPhone 5 with this great iPhone coupon code" where iPhone coupon code is the target keyword. Does it still make sense to put 500+ words of contextual content on that page, even when the content isn't really something the viewer cares about?

I've noticed websites doing this, and ranking well. I wanted to know if this is a significant ranking factor or just a coincidence.

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.

Got it, thank you!

The links are new (only 2 or 3 days old) and all of them are DoFollow and all links are from relevant blogs.

The site-wide links are branded links (not rich anchor text links), I don't see how branded site-wide links could warrant a penalty.

There are many blogs which list their favorite websites on their sidebar, it looks to be common among average bloggers. Should I ask these bloggers to remove the links or should I wait for 2/3 weeks and basically see what happens.

Could it be that Google is just "shuffling" my website around after they noticed new back-links and I am on the downside right now and may rebound? Is this something that happens?

Thank you for your response.

I have a low-traffic website (under 100 unique visitors per day) and I've encountered a strange issue started yesterday morning. I acquired three back-links, one of these back-links is contextual and the other two are site-wide. The site-wide back-links are from PA 40+ blogs. It looks like the back-links are already indexed by Google.

Despite these new back-links, my rankings across multiple keywords have dropped several positions. I'm new to SEO, but I would assume new back-links would improve my rankings. None of these back-links are low quality links, they are from real established blogs with high domain and page authority values.

Could anyone give me insights into why my rankings may have dropped with new back-links?