Boosting Equity-Passing Links?

[EricFish]

Hello Moz folks,

We have a SEO client who has exponentially fewer equity-passing links(inbound and internal) than their two major competitors, which I'm sure is a MAJOR factor in their rankings. In fact, the numbers are so drastically different seems to indicate that these competitors are participating in some sort of black hat link farm. For example:

Internal and Inbound Equity-Passing Links

• Our client - 2274
• Competitor 1 - 496k
• Competitor 2 - 143k

How is this possible or legit? I don't understand.

Our well-known client has been in business for 10+ years and they have a content-rich, WordPress website consisting of thousands of pages that have been optimized for search, including keyword-rich URLs, page titles, metas, H1 tags, etc. The things that keep coming to mind are the need for more links and more content.

One thing that comes to mind is that the client launched a new site about 1.5 years ago and changed their domain prefix from http to https. I'm not sure if this would have an impact on inbound link equity or not. 301 redirects are in place so from what I understand, all of the old http pages should have passed at least partial domain equity to the new https site.

I'm also wondering if changing the structure of WordPress categories, tags and author pages could somehow dynamically increase the page count and amount of perceived content. We may be overly restrictive with Google Search Console.

Anyway, I'm at a loss and don't understand how our competitors, with seemingly similar content, could have exponentially more links and are dominating the search results.

Thanks for your help and sage advice. Your input is very much appreciated.

Eric

pSzXl

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Eric,

It sounds like there are many things going on here. From what you say, it does sound like the competitor might be doing something dodgy, but it also depends if the links are linking domains, or just a handful of domains with site-wide links that are producing that number. Either way, it doesn't sound natural, but Google clearly isn't objecting at the moment.

It is highly unlikely that the structure of the site is what is causing the problem here, unless you have a real problem buried away somewhere - maybe a penalty? It could possibly be the http-https transition, but you can check this by looking in analytics at the dates this happened for clues. I certainly wouldn't be trying to artificially increase the page count without any real benefit for the pages being there though - this will cause you problems.

Try and focus heavily on amazing content, a natural-looking link profile and I would be looking at setting up a strong internal-link structure to your key hub pages.

Google ultimately will deliver results that they feel meet their E.A.T (Expertise, Trust, Authority) requirements. This can be down to so many factors that it would be impossible to know where to begin just from a discussion here though I'm afraid.

-Andy

[BlueCorona]

It sounds like your competitors may be taking advantage of spammy link-building practices! You can use the Moz Open Site Explorer (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/)  to compare your SEO client's off-site authority to their competitors' off-site authority. This tool will give you insights into the domain authority, page authority, how many total inbound links the site has from how many domains, as well as page social metrics.

This tool is extremely helpful when you're concerned about boosting equity-passing links, as it gives you an insider look at where your competitors are being linked from, so you can learn whether they're being linked from valid sources or spammy ones (Open Site Explorer shows you the spam score of each site that links to you).

Hope this helps!

[EricFish]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for your input. Much appreciated. I apologize for the delay in responding. I was on vacation with my family and just returned.

Thanks again.

Eric

[EricFish]

Hello Blue,

Thanks for your input several days ago. I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. I was on vacation.

Anyway, I appreciate your words of wisdom. I have been digging into the Open Site Explorer but I am far from an expert at this point. That said, I shall continue to persevere.

Thanks again.

Eric