Backlinks 101, one or multiple?

[max.favilli]

Analyzing a competitor backlink profile I noticed they have the habit of adding multiple links to the guest post/advertorial they get, one link to their site, plus some links to authority site like wikipedia and institutional websites.

Is there anyone with some data, testing, and so on, supporting this?

I can see their SERP positioning is very good, but they spent a lot of money on quite expensive links, so I don't know if it's the DA of the linking domains or the multiple links making the difference.

Anyone has an idea?

[gazzerman1]

This has been a very common practice for years, link out to authority websites in the same post to give the page more credibility. If their websites is mentioned in the same breath then it may encourage higher click through.

Will it increase the power of that link specifically, No, but if click through rates are higher then that is a signal.

Content marketers got caught out a long time back only linking to one website in an article (THEIRS), in order to make it look more natural they decided to add sites like wikipedia and other news sources etc... To make it look like a well researched article. However the flaw is that in many cases its still a biased article. A better signal of quality is content that links out to yourself AND your competitors. That is something that would be considered to be less spammy, but people never do it because they obviously don't want to help their competitors.

There are a lot of factors that could be contributing to their rankings, not just the links they have. Links are becoming less and less of a factor in the last year.

200+ factors
http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors

[max.favilli]

Thank you for your answer Gary.