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Backlinks vs. Referring Domains

by tomewer
1 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hello all,

I have been developing a niche site for around 2 1/2 months now. It currently ranks #9 in Google for its primary keyword.

I have tried all sorts of backlinking strategies. I have done link wheels, article directory submissions, and blog and forum commenting. It has been a hard slog but I hope I am getting there!

I appreciate that you can't rely on the numbers purely for guaranteeing your ranking, but I understand that there are various factors that will influence where your site is placed by Google.

Putting aside on-site optimization and other miscellaneous factors (such as DMOZ / Yahoo ranking and domain age), they are:

- Page Rank
- Index Count (not sure this is that influential)
- Referring domains
- Back links

Now if I compare my site against the #1 placed competitor, I beat them on all counts, with exception to referring domains.

The site currently has 1,140 backlinks, but only 38 referring domains. I don't understand how this can be the case - I have manually created backlinks on more domains than that. How can I have so many backlinks, but so few referring domains, and how do I build up my amount of referring domains? This seems to be my only real weakness compared to the competition.

I would appreciate your help!

n.b. I used Market Samurai to get the information in this post.
#backlinks #domains #referring
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    No search engine is going to show you all the backlinks they have indexed for a website. So you very well may have far more referring domains, the search engines just don't want to have all their cards on the table.

    Also, you might want to check out SEO SpyGlass instead of Market Samurai for analyzing backlinks. SpyGlass gives you the ability to integrate with a whole bunch of search engines and pull backlinks from each. MS, I believe is only integrated with Yahoo Site Explorer and Majestic SEO (unless that has changed since the last time I used it).

    One other factor... you mentioned pagerank. The pagerank of your site is really not overly important for ranking. You can find plenty of example of PR 0 sites outranking PR 3 and 4 sites. What is important though is the PR of your backlinks. Your competitors may have more high PR backlinks than you. A few high PR backlinks will out perform 1000's of PR 0 and PR n/a backlinks.
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