Link gap analysis: it's not the gap, it's the shared donor

Link gap analysis: it's not the gap, it's the shared donor

Everyone runs the intersect report — domains linking to three competitors but not you. Here's the deeper read most miss.

The valuable signal isn't 'go get these links.' It's which single donor sites link to your entire competitive set. When one blog links to all four players in a niche, that site isn't editorial — it's a paid placement hub that monetizes the whole vertical.

— Those hubs sell to anyone, so the 'gap' is just an open price list.
— The real gap is the donor that links to exactly one rival and nobody else — that's an earned relationship, and that's the hard one to replicate.

Multiple profiles confirm the pattern: the more competitors share a referring domain, the cheaper and weaker it is.

Watch this space.