Links from Blogs and Forums

[StillLearning]

Hello Everyone,

We are a small, local business in a city in Canada.  We just got a new website and I am responsible for basically all of it, including the SEO.

I was researching the back-links from our top-ranking competitor (another small, local business in our city).  Here is their ranking:

• PA  40, with 441 Links from 111 RDs
• DA  30, with 6,864 Links from 116 RDs

Here is the second-highest guy:

• PA  29, with 101 Links from 10 RDs
• DA 15, with 1,682 Links from 11 RDs

As you can see, the top-ranking competitor's PA & DA are just about double his closest competitor.  (Don't ask where we currently stand!)

But, on closer examination, most of the links from our top-ranking competitor come from a local blog, where our competitor's ad appears in an advertisement on the sidebar.  Each time they make a post, which is just about every day, our competitor gets a link.

They also have a lot of  links from a forum on a rock band's website.  The original post was something about finding music, but the responses all have links to unrelated websites.

This seems really, really slimy to me.

What's going on?

[Harbor_Compliance]

The total number of links is almost always going to be higher than the RDs.  This is because the domain is counted once (hence "unique") whereas there are often many links coming from that domain.  Consider your own site - your own site will provide links (these are called internal links) and you will have hundreds or thousands of links from your own site.  If you have a homepage link on the menu bar, that is creating one link on each page of your site.

So the number of links is not very helpful to look at alone.  It may be useful to look at the ratio of total links to RDs, but that's a separate issue.  The more useful metric is RDs.  If I were you, I would pursue links from different sites so that you can build a portfolio of more RDs.

It's not unusual to have 10-15 RDs for a new domain.  After 1 month I would be surprised, but seeing that after a few months would be normal.

[StillLearning]

Thanks for your reply.  And thanks for the encouragement - I need it!

May I ask another question?

Both #1 and #2 have a HUGE number of links.

I find this odd, especially since #2 has only had their new (and presumably "optimized") website for about 1 month.

How did he get so many links in such a short time? (And why would he want so many from so few RDs?)

[Harbor_Compliance]

The blog link you mentioned will provide diminishing returns as the initial link you get from a domain is the most helpful and each subsequent link from the same domain is worth less and less.

The forum does indeed sound sketchy if there are links to unrelated sites.  You are in a good position because your competitors link profile doesn't look great.

I also look at the proportion of DA and PA to number of RDs.  The lower the ratio (more RDs) the worse the link profile is.  For instance a site that has a DA of 30 with 15 unique domains has a great ratio.  A site with DA 30 and 500 RDs has a much worse link profile.

This particular site is not impressive.