Should we consider only referring DOMAINS number instead of referring PAGES. In other words, to overcome the competitor with 18 backlinks from 10 domains we have to build 11 backlinks from 11 more authority domains? Or should we build 19 backlinks from 11 domains, overlapping both the number of his backlinks and referring domains?
that's how math works, but that's not how SEO math works. Theoretically, you have to build more backlinks from more unique domains, yes, but google will consider a lot more things when deciding where to rank you than RDs (although, RDs is a pretty big deal in SEO), with some of the most important ones being...
- niche (some niches are very hard to get into without a strong brand and / or deep pockets, no mater what kind of stellar content you have)
- your domain's age and trust by google vs. the domain's age and trust by google of your competitors
- the quality and optimization of the content of your competitors vs your own
- the SEO metrics (bounce rate, session duration, etc.) and user engagement with the content of the page you're trying to rank
- the speed and structure of your site (sometimes, fast, easy to navigate and clean sites do outrank more established and / or bloated sites)
- luck (sometimes google inserts randomness into their algorithms to force people to buy google ads and if you're the unlucky target of that randomness you're not gonna rank no matter what you do, I've seen an example like this few weeks ago on the forum)
and many other factors possibly, some of which only google knows. Your best option to outrank your competition comes down to 4 things IMO:
- your site is decently good (decent speed, no 404 / broken links, clean and intuitive navigation, etc)
- your content is better optimized than your competitors' content
- your site has higher authority (the DR / UR metrics invented by Ahrefs is as close to assessing a domain's authority as we can get) than your competitors (this can be achieved by building more, and better links)
- you're not hit by randomness
What about page authority score (Page AS in Semrush)? Is it important or do we have to look to DR only?
no idea what that score is since I don't use SEMrush, but... SEMrush is an important SEO tool, so I assume they're not off by much when assigning AS scores to pages. So, yeah, you should be mindful of that score, just for your own curiosity and testing purposes if for nothing else.
Strong, authoritative sites do have similar scores (AS, DR, DA, whatever you want to call those scores, although DA is pretty unreliable nowadays), so if you see the scores of several important SEO tools being similar to one another then that's usually a good indication that THAT particular site / page is pretty authoritative and hard to outrank by mere mortals and folks without big SEO budgets. Of course, I'm referring here to sites / pages with high DR / AS scores as they reflect reality better than sites / pages with low DR / AS scores. If you're seeing sites / pages with very low DR / AS scores (say, under 20 DR for example) then go for it! That's usually a sign that you can outrank that site / page with a few good links and good content optimization....
