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There's absolutely no way to tell from the image you're showing. There are SO many scenarios that this image along doesn't allow us to see.

If I had to guess I'd say domain #2 (#1 is obviously the winner of most metrics so there'd be no point in sharing the image if the outcome wasn't suprisng).

Two possible scenarios of the top of my head:

a.)

#1 has a lot of low quality inbound links and is therefore winning even though domain #2 supposedly has better links and #1 is winning

b.)

The inverse of "a", i.e. #1 has lots of low quality links and #2 is winning with high quality links.

c.)

#2's onsite SEO is much better, particularly internal linking, which allowed it to come out on top.

d.) infiniti (if that's the right word).

Point being...metrics don't really tell us that much unless they're Google's metrics, i.e. the search results...and even, it's easy to stump just about anybody on why X site is ranking above Y. In fact, I don't even think a Google engineer could tell you in a lot of instances after all of the recent updates other than to say, "It's an Algorithm".

Both of these seem a little counter-intuitive to me so I want to make sure I'm on the same page.

I'm wondering if I need to add "#s to my internal links when the page I'm linking to is already:

a.) in the site's navigation

b.) in the sidebar

More specifically, in your experience...do the search engines only give credit to (or mostly give credit to) the anchor text used in the navigation and ignore the anchor text used in the body of the article?

I've found (in here) a couple of folks mentioning that content after a hashtagged link isn't indexed.

Just so I understand this...

a.) if I were use a hashtag at the end of a link as the first link in the body of a page, this means that the rest of the article won't be indexed?

b.) if I use a table of contents at the top of a page and link to places within the document, then only the areas of the page up to the table of contents will be indexed/crawled?

Thanks ahead of time! I really appreciate the help.

I couldn't agree with EGOL more. The best option is to place equivalent or higher quality content, discussing the same topic as the previous article on the URL.

However, I think there are some ways to buy yourself some times if you don't have all of the content that you need. This is how I might personally approach it:

1. Create "subject buckets" and divide the content into as many buckets as possible. If it's a well structured blog, then Categories and Tags are going to be extremely helpful for this.
2. Find the most powerful URL in each bucket and create an extremely high quality (likely lengthy) article on that URL in which you cover as many topics in that bucket as possible. (Also, pay attention to links that are generating a lot...or any...traffic. The URLs that aren't generating traffic have a much lower likelihood of being changed discovered and removed by a webmaster.)
3. 301 the other URLS in that bucket to the high quality post until you can get the rest of the content written. In some cases, (and depending on how varied the topics are) this might be more of a permanent solution that will a.) consolidate your link juice and b.) reduce your total page count (good post-panda).

Also keep in mind that rewriting content is going to be much easier (or cheaper in most cases) than having completely original content written. That being said, make sure the writers know they need to make the article "your own". I'd suggest a service called Vappingo. They don't publish their "re-write" rates on the site, but if you contact them they'll definitely help you out. I had them rewrite some sub-par content I purchased and was extremely impressed by the quality...and I'm picky about content quality.)

That's wild. If it's spam, I'm not sure what's going on.

If you go the website that's being linked to, the site actually looks semi-legit.

I chased down a few of the links and the only external one I can find is to a guy who rides his bike to raise awareness of John Hopkins...and the "official" site has links from legit, personal blogs that are surely real.

And...the only outbound links appear on the ste appear to be completely legit to real places.

Maybe I'm missing something, but why would someone be spamming this site? (Assuming they weren't trying to build the authority before they built their links...which really wouldn't be smart anyways.)

Just so I know I'm not losing my mind...we're talking about: http://apps.pathology.jhu.edu/blogs/pancreas/?p=121 right?