Total Links and site's ranking

[hanazair]

This post is deleted!

[DennisSeymour]

Basically, optimise the site better than them. That's the first thing you have to do (after your research is done)

Then start with the links, or some way to integrate it with the business to get customers to link to them. Read about the other link building strategies featured here on moz as well. You won't jump, but you will steadily climb up. If the competitors aren't really that active, you can make page 1 in a couple months or less.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Maria,

Try not to focus too much on links as the major factor here, as there is a lot at work when looking at why one site is ranking better than another.

For example, although links pay an important role, you can actually rank a site 1st page for highly competitive terms without the need for link building (I have done this myself), focussing on the content and then looking at cocitations and mentions. This is where the site / company is credited on a page without there actually being a direct link back. This is something Google is pretty hot on right now.

Be careful not to get too drawn into this and focus on quality rather than quantity. A link from a highly respected site will be infinitely more beneficial than hundreds from directories, but people choose this route because it is easier to obtain.

Google is also ranking brands more highly now as they aim to ensure they give the best results for search queries.

Strive to ensure you have better content than your competitors and share this. You will find links do appear naturally, but sometimes they need a bit of a shove

-Andy

[johnny122]

Hi,

I agree with Dennis, try to optimize your website first.

Links = 40% of rankings.

I have a client ranking 3rd page with same page/domain authority than his 1st page competitors.

I started to optimize homepage (title, headings, ALT attribute...) ; then found a freelancer to follow Google PageSpeed advices. I also asked for a W3C/HTML5 validation.

For internal pages, you can also optimize URL.

Most important : I took time to study the first page texts.

My client = 400 words on homepage.

1st page results: from 600 to 2000+ words.

Of course, it is always better to write for users and not for search engines. But a longer text is most of time a better answer to user query...

The website went from 30 > 22 > 11 in one month.

Now, I will probably try to get some relevant links; but it was not my first step :).

Erwan.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Maria,

With such low external linking root domain numbers (8 and 5), it is likely that links are not the primary ranking factor here. Their 1,388 links are most likely not an attempt to trick Google: they are likely to be from site-wide links where the site has been naturally linked to from a side-bar or blogroll, etc. It's quite common to see this (although if you dig around, you might find that they have done something dodgy - you'd need to look at the specific examples). The same goes for the 773 links from 14 domains.

To the best of our knowledge, Google generally takes the total linking root domains or total linking c-classes number most seriously. By c-classes, I mean that Google may discount links if they all come from separate sites hosted on the same server or set of servers. This is to stop someone renting space on three servers, building 800 little websites and linking back to their hub site. This used to work well many years ago! Moz reports on the number of root domains here, which is most likely totally fine for these types of analyses however.

If you are ever suspicious as to whether someone is using a "link network" (renting a lot of server space on the same servers to build lots of linking websites), check out the IP addresses of the sites they have links from. You can use a range of free tools for this, like https://www.site24x7.com/find-ip-address-of-web-site.html. Do all the sites have a similar or the same IP? Definitely operated by the same person.

Use Bing to search for that IP address and you can see all the other sites hosted on that IP, e.g. http://www.bing.com/search?q=ip%3A69.163.214.222&go=&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=ip%3A69.163.214.222&sc=1-17&sp=-1&sk= In this example, this IP is just shared by a lot of sites hosted with Dreamhost, but that kind of snooping can be interesting for backlink competitive analysis as well

As far as why you are not ranking as well goes, it's likely that a lot of other factors are in play with low link numbers. How active are you all on social media? How old are the websites / domains? How long have the domains been registered to their current owners? Have the sites ever been severely penalised in the past? How good is the internal optimisation of the sites?

Definitely keep up the link building work because it's a very important ranking factor once you build a higher number of high-quality links and differentiate yourself from the low numbers of your competitors. Also take the advice in this thread about engaging in other audience / content driving activities.

Cheers,

Jane