Why Top Ranked Sites May Have Few Backlinks

There are many reasons which I shall identify.

One is that, the particular keyword may seem competitive for you, but it’s not, so few backlinks are going to make the “trick”. You just found a gem maybe.

Did you make the search with quotes? You will not see the top competitors when using quotes with your keyword. Visitors nowadays do not use quotes to search. When entering keyword in search box to see the competitors do not use quotes.

The other answer may be that you used an outdated tool to check for backlink count for your competitors. Google does not show all backlinks - so you should use Yahoo Site Explorer. Google hides most of the backlinks in the supplemental index.

I guess Google will do something specifically for Webmasters in their Google Webmaster Tools to check backlink count for any website.

Their search engine, doing a link:domain search will return backlinks for that particular website, but it’s intended for research purposes. Not for webmasters to know the actual number.

Just enter the domain name in Yahoo Site Explorer and click Search site. It will tell you how many indexed pages, plus how many and which sites are linking to it. The pages and inlinks. You can also see backlinks for a specific webpage, or just the homepage of the website.

It’s really a research tool, you can dig deeper and check out the backlink count and indexed pages for the backlinks as well. You can also see the cached copy of each website.

It will absolutely give you a great idea on how well optimized your competitors are in terms of offpage factors.

When I do keyword research I don’t look at how many backlinks the top competitors have. I check the competition number, and the sites themselves. If they are wikipedia, yahoo answers, or some big site, you instantly know it’s not the easiest keyword.

But the backlinks count, if you have good tools you can outrank any website. The giant ones are the ones with so many backlinks, especially one way links that it will not be an easy one.

But the other common ones, I never seen one with an exaggerated number of links. Giant sites get links for free, automatically everyday from people who just talk about them on their websites, forums, blogs, everywhere.

That’s why they are top ones. They get one way links without lifting a finger. Yet still, you can outrank them for certain keywords of course, since not all backlinks they get will be optimized with anchor text. They may be unbeatable for certain keyword but rank good or average for others.

Take for example lavasoft the free anti spyware software. It may be unbeatable to outrank for free spyware software, because most of the backlinks they get have those three words.

But for remove adware and spyware, remove spyware, spyware eraser, even though they may be first page, it is not difficult to outrank them as it may sound.