Backlink and Authority Gap (Light Version)

Full transcript

1,007 words · script draft, under review.

Intro

Whenever a site doesn't rank, someone says it: "We need more backlinks." Sometimes that's true. Often it's the easiest thing to blame, because it's hard to measure and it's never finished.

If you've followed the last few episodes, you already have a keyword gap, a page-type gap and a structural gap. Before you spend money on links, you need to know whether authority is what's actually blocking you.

In this episode: a light, cheap authority check. Not a full link audit. Just enough to make the right call.

Count domains, not links

First, the measurement. A backlink is a link from another site to yours. Authority, in this episode, is a loose word for how much trust and link value a site has gathered from the rest of the web.

Don't count backlinks. Count referring domains: the number of different sites that link to you. One site that puts your link in its footer can create thousands of backlinks. It's still one site, one vote.

And forget the single-number scores. Every tool has its own authority score, built from its own crawl of the web, on its own scale. They're useful inside one tool, for comparing sites. They're not something Google uses. So never compare a score from one tool with a score from another.

Cheap ways to get the numbers

For your own site, start with Search Console. The Links report shows your top linking sites and your most linked pages. It's free, it's Google's own view, and it's enough to know roughly how many sites link to you, and to which pages.

For competitors, you need an outside source. For a light check, the free tiers are enough. Free backlink checkers give you a top-line count of referring domains for any domain. Bing Webmaster Tools has a backlinks tool that also lets you look at other sites. Pick one source and use it for every site, including your own. Then the numbers are wrong in the same way for everyone, and the comparison still holds.

If you need more depth later, DataForSEO also has a Backlinks API. It's priced separately from the SERP and Labs data we've used so far. So check the terms before you sign up. For this light version, you don't need it.

Two levels: domain and page

Now compare at two levels. Made-up numbers for illustration.

Domain level first. Our demo shop has links from about forty sites. Our two core competitors have ninety and a hundred and twenty. The review site, competitor A, has three hundred. So yes, we're behind. Two to three times behind the shops.

While you're there, glance at where those links come from. Ten links from sites in your own topic say more than a hundred from directories and link lists. You don't need to grade every link. Just note whether the competitor's top linking sites are relevant, or noise.

But that's not a verdict yet. Rankings are won page by page. So now the page level. Take a keyword from the gap list. Look at the pages that rank in the top ten, and check how many referring domains each of those pages has.

In this example, seven of the ten ranking pages have between zero and three linking sites. They rank because they're relevant, well structured and well linked internally. Not because of their own links.

You don't need to do this for every keyword. Group the gap list by topic, and check one or two representative keywords per group. Five to ten groups is a morning's work with a free checker, because most of them accept a single URL as well as a whole domain.

That's the most useful finding in this whole episode. If the pages that win have almost no links of their own, links aren't what's stopping you on that keyword.

When authority really blocks you

So when is authority really the blocker? I use three rough bands. These are working rules, not laws.

Small gap. You're within two or three times of your core competitors at domain level, and the ranking pages have few links of their own. Authority is not your problem. Spend the effort on content, page types and structure, the gaps from the last three episodes.

Medium gap. You're well behind, but not hopelessly. Then pick your battles. Go after keywords where the ranking pages have few links, and leave the ones where every top result is heavily linked for later.

Large gap. You're ten times behind or more, and the results for your main keywords are full of strong, heavily linked pages. Then don't fight head-on. Use the weak-SERP hunting from episode thirty-two: forums, outdated pages, poor title matches. And accept that the head terms are a long-term project that needs real links.

Notice that this feeds straight back into the difficulty estimate from episode thirty-one. Authority is one signal in winnability. It's never the whole story.

The pitfalls

Three pitfalls.

Tools disagree, a lot. Two tools can report referring domains for the same site that are several times apart. That's why you stay inside one source.

Giants distort. If you put the marketplace or the encyclopedia in this table, you'll always look hopeless. That's why we narrowed the competitor list in episode thirty-six.

And links are rarely the cheapest fix. A missing page type or a product page five clicks deep costs less to fix, and you control it fully. Links depend on other people. So in your plan, authority work usually sits next to the other fixes, not in front of them.

The output: an authority check per keyword group

What you get is a small table. Domain-level referring domains for you and your competitors, from one source. And for each keyword group in your gap list, one column: is authority a blocker here, yes, partly, or no.

That column goes straight into the scoring in the next episode. It lowers winnability where links matter, and leaves it alone where they don't.

Wrap-up

Count domains, compare pages, and only blame links when the data says so. The authority check sheet is linked in the description. Next episode: sizing the gap, how to combine volume, winnability and value into one honest score. See you there.