Internal/External link ratio

[Vizergy]

I have a client who ranked #3 for a very important and highly competitive keyword phrase.  Using the 'Compare Pages' tool in open site explorer I could see that we were far better optimized than the two websites that were out ranking my client.  Our PA was higher, the MozRank was higher, more internal and external links (and the external are all high quality) more linking C blocks etc.. etc... not just the page but the website, in general, was better optimized.

The one thing I did notice was that although we had more internal and external links, our ratio was far heavier to the external side than the ratio of either competitor.

So, at a loss of what else to do, I went through the website and beefed up the internal links to the specific page in question.  I didn't over do it, just moved up from about 6% to about 12% (one competitor was at about 20% while the other was about 65%).  Six days later we are number two rather than number three.

Coincidence?  Should I beef it up even more?  Has anyone ever come across anything like this?

Thank you for your comments in advance.

[Dr-Pete]

It's always tough to speak in generalities, but unfortunately I've seen many examples in the past 2-3 years where footer links from clients got devalued. It's not necessarily a penalty situation, but sometimes it just means waking up and finding that those links that helped you rank for years just aren't helping you anymore. This can result in a situation where your actual ranking is much less than what your link metrics would suggest.

Obviously, as we go forward, we're trying to build better models to account for this, but it's an incredibly complicated problem. What's a "good" link changes weekly.

[Vizergy]

Thanks, Dr. Pete.  They actually do have a lot of footer links from clients that I have advised against but.... you know how clients are.  Perhaps that is/was holding them back and the addition of more internal links coinciding with their small jump in ranking was a simple coincidence

[Dr-Pete]

If you had a very large number of internal links, that could dilute your authority in some cases, but some of that should be factored into MozRank. Having too few internal links shouldn't be an issue, unless you were artificially restricting your internal PageRank flow somehow.

This is almost impossible to diagnose without seeing the specific case, but keep in mind that none of our metrics really account for any filtering or devaluation Google might do. So, if they felt some of your links were low quality, or there was a bad pattern to them (too much reliance on one type of link, such as footer links from clients), or you were hit for excessive exact-match anchor text, etc., that wouldn't necessarily show up in our metrics.

The other issue would be any sort of technical issue with the page or even an on-page problem (a low ratio of crawlable text, too many ads, bad targeting, etc.).

[Travis-W]

Interesting question, I'm interested to see what other people have to say.

Our site has a TON of internal links, a much higher ratio than our competitors.  I'm wondering if adjusting this will help us rank better.