Thread: Competition Analysis. External Backlinks vs Internal Backlinks.

Ok guys I need your help here. The competition analysis I did for a kw-phrase has thrown up some nice results which I previosuly ignored.

I am seeing that the pages in top 5 have 30-40 external backlinks, now these sites are old sites and u may consider them authority in the niche. But I decided to target this phrase since I thought I can easily out-do them.

Now the problem is my page is stuck at page 2 and not rising(gotta work hard on linkbuilding). So this time I rechked the BLs to my competition and it was same, no change. Something struck me and I decided to see how much internal links they get from within their sites.

Was suprised to see that the topmost page has 300 internal links while the rest 4 have 100, 50, 30, 25 respectively.

You think its still beatable?? How much is the value of internal links compared to external links?

Thanks.

The internal links have nothing much to do with ranking. They help in the pagerank/linkjuice flow from within the site.
300 is way too high as it creates issues for the crawler. A figure less than 100 for this is good and acceptable enough.

Apart from manual competition you could also try some free tools like Traffic Travis & Web Ceo for your research. Or you could also use IBP's free version to create individual reports and compare them.

P.S. : By internal links I assume you're referring to the pages within the same domain linked by the page you're competing against.

yeah..i mean exactly that..around 300 pages inside the site had links to that one page... I use Traffic Travis and it shows this KW is good to go..

Well, a few q's for your consideration...
what is the authority of their 30-40 external links?
of the main page or other internal pages possibly passing link juice?

What quality of links are you passing to your pages? etc...

What link juice are you letting escape from your internal links through ads with no no follow tags, other links, etc?

What level of effort have you really put into your links? One article marketing effort, social bookmarking, forum, other sites, directories, comments, web 2.0? If not all for all your kws, then not enough, if yes, then either not enough time to "salt" or the competition strength is greater than you think and you need to repeat.

Good Luck!

You should focus on external links instead by internal links. Google gives the first privacy to external links.

I think google still gives weight to internal links. As you build your external links, do not forget to build also internal links to your website. Try to see Wikipedia, a lot of internal links are existing and this can also help.