KnowledgeHut and Simplilearn are two big players in the education domain and are been into the professional training and certification for a while. Simplilearn was founded at least 3 years earlier than KnowledgeHut and it is also being funded since 2012, whereas KnowledgeHut started operating since mid of 2012 and it’s a self-sustained one.

Background of these Professional training and certification providers

Let’s get back to the backlink profile of KnowledgeHut and Simplilearn, the backlink activity is an effort of digital marketing teams in order to improve the crawl stats of the websites and their visibility or reputation on the internet.

I did a small study in understanding how these players have built their backlink profiles.

• Interestingly I found that KnowledgeHut is dominant in several aspects over Simplilearn, whereas Simplilearn is dominant over KnowledgeHut in very few aspects.

• Also, KnowledgeHut can be seen low on few aspects but then the severity level of it is very minimal and which also would get better eventually, eg: Backlinks from HTTP referring domains, this would no more be a concern after all the websites moving to HTTPs

Note: The study is done using a tool Majesticseo.com. Majesticseo is one of the biggest web crawlers after Google search engines and many digital marketers use this tool, trust and rely on for the data or for the competition analysis.

Also, the study was done just to understand the activities between two similar players, it doesn’t intend degrading or uplifting any of the players in terms of their backlink profile

Here starts the Backlink profile study

The brief of the Backlink profile,

Before we get into the details, let’s take a quick glance at the key metrics which are used to measure backlink profiles,

The website can have several numbers of backlinks and each of these backlinks contribute at a different level, better the quality of the referring domains or external website higher is the advantage from the backlinks, the backlink quality is measured in terms of Trust flow and citation flow and the details of these two players in comparison are as follows,

KnowledgeHut Vs. Simplilearn- Trust Flow and Citation Flow

External Backlinks and Referring Domains,

External backlinks are the count of links from the referring website/domain pointing to your website, for e.g: A single website can provide any number of backlinks from its web pages to your website/web pages

Referring domains are the actual count of domains pointing to your website,

Take away: It’s good to have as many links possible from a single domain if the domain is of very high quality or trusted one, meanwhile its bad to have too many links from a single domain if the domain is not that trustworthy. Before coming to conclusions lets wait for the next set of data to understand the practices followed by these players.

KnowledgeHut Vs. Simplilearn- External Backlinks and Referring Domains

Topical Trust Flow:

A measure of how close you are to the most trusted websites in almost one thousand categories.

Reference: Majestic SEO

The trust factor or the importance of considering the quality backlinks by search engines or majestic SEO tools varies from category to category, but then the news category is considered to be as the most trusted category and has great weight for the backlinks built from it and hence with more news category backlinks the topical relevance will be highest and that’s what can be seen for the KnowledgeHut website, which has 70% of its backlinks coming from the most trusted category and that’s the reason for KnowledgeHut having the highest trust backlink profile.

Meanwhile, Simplilearn has got 88% of its links from the education category domain, but then still it’s not considered to be as the most trusted link profile since the domains are not so trusted worthy even though they belong to the same category.

KnowledgeHut Vs. Simplilearn- Trust Flow

URL Backlink History:

There are a good number of backlinks to KnowledgeHut website on a daily basis and which is very good, higher the number of backlinks on a daily basis better it is.

Meanwhile, Simplilearn has fewer links on a daily basis comparatively.

KnowledgeHut Vs. Simplilearn- Links Crawl On a Daily Basis

Backlink Breakdown:

Supplement links are the links from the same webpage. In simple the instances in which the same webpage would have provided more number of backlinks to many other web pages of your domain.

Simplilearn has more supplement links compared to KnowledgeHut, and this is something good of Simplilearn backlink profile.

KnowledgeHut Vs. Simplilearn- Backlink Breakdown

The external links can be further segregated and understood by the following factors,

KnowledgeHut wins over several aspects and loses to Simplilearn over building links from HTTPS referring domains,

Knowledgehut has many backlinks from HTTP domains, which also mean several things, such as:

• The referring domains may be old
• Maybe non-transactional and mostly content portals

Links from non HTTPS sites don’t have any harm until bots continue to crawl those referring domains. These referring domains might have hit on their user engagement/metrics if their traffic is from organic sources.

Meanwhile, Simplilearn lags over several aspects,

Live & Deleted Links:

At least 20% of the links are getting removed regularly, which means,

They don’t have static links or the activities are of the very short term and which would lead to lots of fluctuations in their keyword rankings or it can be called as very unstabilized rankings

Deep Links:

Has a good number of deep links by a percentage of 99%, but when compared to Knowledge loses by 1%

Follow and No-follow Links:

Knowledgehuts 99.9% of the links are do-follow, whereas Simplilearn has only 61.8% of do-follow links,

Do-follow links are more useful from SEO perspective and you would need to have more do-follow links for better performance on SEO front.

Links from the Home page of referring domains:

Both the players have got an equal number of backlinks from home pages of referring domains

Anchor text

It’s good to have a distributed anchor text to reap the complete benefits of backlinks

KnowledgeHut has got well-distributed anchor text compared to Simplilearn, Simplilearn need more focus on distributing the anchor text if they believe in this concept of distribution of Anchor text,

KnowledgeHut Vs. Simplilearn- Anchor Text Distribution

Links type Distribution/Status:

KnowledgeHut Vs. Simplilearn- Links Type

Conclusion

Simplilearn has got more prominent issues with regard to backlink profiling and which needs an immediate fix over it, Such as,

• Building links from the trusted website
• The citation number also have to be improved, this gets better by building links from the quality websites
• The outbound links have to be limited
• More attention has to be paid in retaining the links or links have to be built for a long-term
• The anchor text has to be well distributed among referring domains
• Need explicit focus towards Do-follow links if the activity is intending the SEO progress
• Knowledgehut comparatively has very few domains but the numbers of links coming from these domains are very high
• The referring domains scale is big for simplilearn but then the quality is poor

Manjunath Chowdary

Digital Marketing Consultant