This week’s Ask An SEO question was by Arvin from Vancouver, Canada, who wrote:“One of our competitors got tons of backlinks from unrelated posts including forums like apache.org (and many other .edu sites as well). Although even after updates like Penguin, why are they considered an important backlink to Google? Let me start by saying, Arvin, that we are a sports-loving family. I currently have four children on seven teams. I love the lessons sports teach my kids. And one of the biggest lessons I take to pass on to my kids is not to blame the judges for losing.
I have never seen a sporting event where, if one of the teams had done something better, the referee’s call would never have affected the outcome. This lesson translates SEO well. If you know how to play the SEO game, what your competitors are whatsapp phone number list doing - even Google and Bing - shouldn’t matter to you. Focusing on your competitor’s SEO rather than improving your own is a frustrating waste of time. But, as an SEO, it is important to understand the factors that affect the ranking of each keyword. As everyone might know If you don’t work at Google, you’re never sure why one site ranks above another. We can guess. We can make complex mathematical models to try to understand the algorithm.
But the conclusion we can never be sure of. In fact, I’m not even sure that people working at Google can tell you exactly why one site ranks above another. The algorithm is so complex that no one can completely turn it around. How do you know if the links are relevant? There is no way to know if Google has counted the links built by your competitors. Google knows a lot more than our tools tell us. None of the many backlink analysis tools on the market today can tell you whether Google counts links or not. These tools use data collected from their own analysis to determine if a link is relevant or toxic. Your competitors may turn their wheels and spend money on buying links that do nothing for their SEO.