What is the importance of root domains linking to your website in Google's rankings? I notice our competition has a much higher number on keywords I'm analyzing. Thank you!

[mjfinet]

I've noticed our competition has a much higher number of "root domains" linking to their page than we do. Is this simply a result of more websites linking to them? How long does it normally take to build up these numbers/rankings? (I'm assuming it's a concerted effort, which I'll be researching.) Thank you!

[mjfinet]

Wonderful, thanks Ryan!

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Miriam. Root domains are the first two extensions of a domain name, working right from left, so in the example www.google.com, the root domain is google.com. It's a handy metric because sometimes you get links from mobile versions of sites that are like m.google.com so by removing the third level (m, www, etc) you get a better idea of how many individual websites are linking to you or your competition. Like you've said, it's basically more websites linking to your competition.

Time to build varies! Some sites explode onto the web via viral content, product releases, huge funding, etc, but in your research you can likely get a decent idea of timeline by looking at dates on when various articles were written, how long a site's domain name has been registered, and their presence in archive.org's way back machine.

The Moz Learn center (http://moz.com/learn/seo) will definitely help you on your way.  Cheers!