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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