Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: Link Building

Chat through link building best practices and outreach techniques.


  • Happy Sundays beautiful Moz people! So I am giving a back link to a friend of mine who has done wonderful work for my company. (he's a painter general contractor and framer who has redone some stuff on my building). I want to give him a shoutout on my blog and highlight the amazing work he's done and I want his website to get a nice boost. My Domain authority is 27 and so I wrote a blog which I never do about him and linked him in the blog. Now obviously the page authority is a 1 on my blogs. So should I be interlinking my blog page to my home page in the post? And just out of curiosity how much to your page authority matter in the back linking process? I searched on google but people only talk about how to get backlinks, and not the proper way to give them. Thanks crew. I love ya!

    | Meier
    0

  • Hi I've recently discovered Bing's linkfromdomain: operator and have been testing it on a few of my wordpress sites which are running the DIVI theme from elegant themes These are new sites with little or no content yet I was a bit alarmed when the results showed site I definitely had not linked to eg slickdeals dot net
    2521.gen778 dot com
    9gag dot com
    flowers.ftd dot com
    www.jmldirect dot com
    pubs.rsna dot org is this an error from the Bing linkfromdomain: operaror because when I run the domains through xenu these sites do not show Hope someone can help

    | briandee
    0

  • Here There We have been contacting, a view online travel blogs lately if they are happy todo a sponsored blog post for us. Including a least one "dofollow" link within the post to our website. Our website: www.rapturecamps.com Blogs which have done a post about us: http://www.adventureinyou.com/10-best-surf-spots-in-bali/ http://thetravelhack.com/portugal/surfing-in-ericeira-portugal-with-rapturecamps/ Just wanted to double check with the Pro's here if that could harm our ranking? As i have a slight feeling it did actually, i cant proof it fully do. I hope i can get some answer here, these blogs are with good quality content, have a good PR and do allot of good blog posts. So i thought this should be only good for us.

    | 5Gates
    0

  • I have a link to my site from a post on an online forum. I now want to include the forum in a blog post about good industry-related e-forums. If I link to them in this article, will I lose the value from the link on the post in their forum, and could it be seen as spammy?

    | AHC_SEO
    0

  • We currently have a political issue with one microsite we're trying to promote. The group that created the website, created it without the consent of the rest of the company and now, although it's allowed to live, we've been given a few restrictions. They main restriction is that when the microsite is linked from the main corporate website it needs to be referenced as a subdomain so http://microsite.company.com. We've been promoting the site as http://www.microsite.com (I'd include the actual websites but don't want to air their dirty laundry). The problem is that a lot of the listings in google are starting to show up using the http://microsite.company.com url instead of the actual url we're about to start promoting and I'm sure that's going to split rankings. Is there a way to appease both sides here. Keep the subdomain from the main site but transfer the juice from that main link to the microsite url? To be clear, I can't just use a 301 redirect because that will change the url from the subdomain to the microsite url (unless i'm wrong) and corporate doesn't want that. Does any of this make sense? Any help would be greatly appreciated

    | CubicleFugitive
    0

  • When linking out to other sites, such as resources on .gov pages, should I use follow or nofollow links?

    | AHC_SEO
    0

  • Community, I would be interested to see if anyone has been seeing any experiments, experience documentation, or other data that would give context around the impact of pointing backlinks not just to your money page / home page but distribute it across pages. When doing competitive research I often run into competition which has lower domain strength and page rank but a link profile that is more spread out across their domain; these competitors often outrank my site despite their individual page properties being weaker. Any reference to existing documented experiments, personal experience or guidance is welcome.

    | italiansoc
    0

  • Hi Guy's We have a website with a total of 133 incoming links. It's a https:// webshop and when i checked our incoming links i noticed that: http:// has 23 refferring domains
    https:// has 110 refferring domains Is it better to ask if the link could be replaced in https:// ? There is a 301 redirect to the seruce website, on all www / non-www and non-https url's Thanks!

    | Happy-SEO
    0

  • Hello, Was wondering if you all could point me to case studies reflecting successful linkbuilding campaigns / practices. We'd love to learn more about companies (like Trip Advisor) that have had success in producing great (10x) content and securing many links to increase in ranking. Thanks!

    | CuriosityMedia
    0

  • I send press releases through 2 different press release agencies. I noticed in the past year or so that one of the agencies started tagging all of the links in my press release with rel=nofollow while the other did not. I couldn't figure out why, so I actually called the "nofollow" agency...they told me that they do this because it is actually BETTER for SEO and that google would penalize you for creating new press releases that do not contain "nofollow" tag.. and that this was done as a result of some recent change to google's algorithm....now I do not know who to believe. Has anyone else heard of this issue and maybe could this be specific to press releases?

    | TrueResults
    1

  • Site Review am seeing slight improvement with a few keywords and have revamp site do i need to first on page before link building ? I was wondering do i need to complete all on page seo before i move on to link building & marketing content ?? Kindest regards, Stephen sportingdesires

    | sportingdesires
    0

  • Hi users MOZ:
    I bought a couple of expired domains to create a private blog network but I can't create the sites yet. While i prepare the sites, it is good idea to do a 301 redirect with them?

    | NachoRetta
    1

  • Hi Guys. We have an opportunity to get a back link from a charity site...the site of "Friends of Richmond park'. I've just checked it out in open site explorer and Moz grades it's domain authority as 25/100.  However, looking in more detail the site has gained quite a few high authority links, both in terms of DA and PA.   Many of these links are reciprocal i.e) Friends of Richmond park have links to sites which also link back to them. So i'm wondering... should the 25/100 DA be taken as a basic guideline?  Or is this quite a sophisticated measure that has taken into consideration the reciprocal links and 'downgraded' them as Google might? Isaac.

    | isaac663
    0

  • When building links, what would you say is more valuable in boosting your google rankings when you, for example, are currently on pages 2 and 3 for keywords, have a DA of 18, and have a few relevant links from niche directories etc...? 1 irrelevant linking root domain with a DA of 80 **or **8 relevant linking root domains with a DA of 10 each. There is no right answer (I think :-)), but I would like to see how different people view relevancy, and quantity vs. quality. Also, would you answer differently for a site that is well established (DA= 30-40) with a number of both relevant, irrelevant, high DA, and low DA linking domains. Discuss please 🙂

    | AHC_SEO
    1

  • Hello, I am trying to rank better for 'keyword X', a critical query that I'm outside the top 50 for, though we grade out at an A via Moz's on-page grader. One of our main competitors ranks #1 for this keyword, despite not using 'keyword X' once in their meta title, body content, or image tags. My assumption is that the volume and quality of backlinks to the competitor's site is driving their high ranking. If this is the case, how can I identify backlinking opportunities to compete better? Are there other factors I'm overlooking here? Thanks

    | Sorgod
    0

  • Is there a way to consolidate link prospects in Moz or should we look for an external tool e.g. Raven Tools, Buzz Stream etc.? Thanks. 🙂

    | HeatherBakerTopLine
    0

  • hi i am creating a new accommodation site and will have some great videos on it (fly bys of local beaches and virtual tours of hotels etc). from an seo perspective i have two questions: 1. should i host on my own site or youtube/vimeo  - its a new site but in the long run i want my site to get the credit 2. i will be giving the hotels the chance to embed and video content i have on their own sites.  does this help my own seo juice and if so is there a particular way it should be done.  there will be around 90 well established local hotels in total so figured it should add up.

    | neilhenderson
    0

  • Hi I have a fairly new site (domain around 1 year and 6 months old) and in December it was sitting on Google's second page for our main keyword "cv writing service" In late December we had a couple of stories picked up by the press and got some really good contextual links from a handful of well known media sites with DA60 and above. Naturally I thought this would have a positive effect on our position for our keyword so I checked and was shocked to see that the site is now sitting on page 4... A drop of 2 pages Also my site has dropped one point in DA on the Moz open site explorer I have some possible theroies for the drop but would really appreicate if anyone could point me in the right direction for the possible cause of this drop and what I need to focus on to fix tihs issue. Theories.... I made some big changes to the copy of my homepage and aboutapge a few weeks before the stories were picked up - although the copy is still similar content and optimised for my keywords I had some early SEO work done by a freelancer in the early days and I now realise that a lot of the links are very weak and on quite poor looking sites (although they are not flagged as spammy in OSE, I think they are spammy) The story that got picked up by the media was slightly off topic - it was about jobs rather than CV's - could this make google think that my site is not relevant? Prior to these stories being picked up - we took a short break from link building for a few months due to resource issues So if anyone knows if any of these factors are likely to have caused the drop I would be grateful to know! Thanks Andrew

    | Fennzil
    0

  • I know I have read that Google doesn't give much value to paid link backs.  My company has worked with a charitable organization (marine research and conservation) in the past and we were considering a corporate donation to them.  My question is, would there be value in this from an SEO standpoint?  There are many many other company links listed on this page.  The area we would be listed would be towards the top of the page. Also, they have a really good DA, 71.  I don't believe I have many if any .org / charitable organizations in my link profile.  Thanks!

    | CalicoKitty2000
    1

  • Someone answered me on Google plus but just to confirm. If I have a pet shop in one city and ranking well local. But want to rank even better in the surrounding cities. Is it a good idea to go to different pet shops in different cities and asked to trade links and help each other out . Will that be beneficial for my pet shop or not?

    | LittleDog
    0

  • We have received a lot of backlinks over the years by users putting links on their websites to their home pages on our site, eg: our.domain/user1 our.domain/user2 … our.domain/user100000 There are 10’s of thousands of these backlinks, all natural, but many of them come from blogs that are completely outside of our niche. Only a small percentage of our backlinks 1% to 5% could actually be coming from pages related to our niche, the other 95%+ could be users just linking to their home pages. Could this really hurt us..? We have 1000’s of backlinks related to our niche, yet we’ve noticed that some competitors with less than 50 backlinks can outrank us for certain keywords.. Also related, we’ve noticed these user links popping up on a lot of spammy sites, directories, etc. We didn’t create them but we’re disavowing them now to be safe. So this could also be hitting our rankings.

    | dsumter
    0

  • Hello Moz, I want to do SEO a website that is 2 years old and in a different language from English. That website has a very wrong link profile. It has totally about 1500 inbound links and 90% of these inbound links are to home page. Also somewhat of these inbound links are from low quality web sites that have less than 80 inbound links. I think that I can follow 2 strategies to solve this link building problem. First strategy is only link building to internal pages till inbound links to internal pages reach about 80% of total inbound links.  Second strategy is disavowing low quality inbound links to homepage and link building to internal pages till again same condition occurs. I think if I only implement link building, I have to produce a large number of content. But if I disavow many inbound links, will I encounter a sharply lose in rankings? If you have a different idea to solve this problem, I will be glad to hear. Also I wonder that if I follow these strategies, how fast I have to implement these? Thanks in advance for your interest.

    | annettakuchera
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, I've been receiving a ton of links from low-quality websites that look like image directories or search engines?  They are displaying the images that are hosted on our own website.  They all seem very similar. Has anyone experienced this and are these harmful?  Should they be left alone or disavowed or..? Here are a few examples: http://myimagecollection.net http://pix-collection.com http://theimagess.org/ http://123coolpictures.com etc. Thanks in advance!

    | SylviaH
    1

  • Hi Guys, I have a case which seems to occur more often for our customers. The websites of our customers seem to receive tons of backlinks from websites all over the world (China, Russia, Ukrain, etc). It’s spam we never asked for, we didn’t buy any dodgy linkbuilding packages or anything. Do any of you guys have experience with this matter? We try to disavow the links but it takes too much time and we will never manage to disavow 100% of all links. Examples are www.keukensduitsland.nl and www.m2beveiliging.nl Hope anyone has experience and maybe even solutions for this matter. Thanks!

    | Happy-SEO
    1

  • After links have been removed from site a to site b. How long will it take until site b will see it in the webmaster tools that the links to his site are no longer there?

    | FusionMediaLimited
    0

  • If a backlink location has less authority/trust than my own site would it likely pass any value or not?

    | seoman10
    0

  • What would be the negative aspects to sending customer's requests for a backlink in conjunction with asking how their experience with us was? Backlinks are one of the toughest for our niche industry to acquire and this seems like one of the best angles to cover, since we have .edu , .mil , .gov , and many bigname companies making purchases from us. Would if be wrong to offer a small 5% discount during their next purchase if they create a backlink with us? Or if we added a " Customer's we've served " section including their logo or text link? Thank you! I hope you're all having an awesome day / week / month!

    | Deacyde
    1

  • Hello Moz Community! We're getting many back links with random anchor text (completely irrelevant) from a website called healthygallbladder.com and various subdomains under that domain.  Has anyone else come across this website? I can't seem to load the pages at all.  It always comes up with a bandwidth exceeded message.

    | SylviaH
    0

  • Back in May, my client's website www.mfcomm.co.uk was hacked. Pages were added to the site which instantly received backlinks & traffic.  The secuirty flaw was plugged & offending pages deleted within the following weeks.  I also created 301 redirects for the most popular pages because the domain appeared to be affected by the increase in 404 errors. Reviewing stats & Moz reports, I notice fresh backlinks - one from http://forum.kolodec.info/.  By association to the spurious page that was created as part of the security breach, should I distance the domain with any traffic from all referring sites? Reviewing http://forum.kolodec.info/ in Open Site Explorer it only gets spam score = 4 So my question is, should I count all traffic by association as bad traffic & blacklist the domain or be more lenient?  More the point, what would Google think? Regards, Terry

    | MFCommunications
    0

  • I have just started using Link Detox to determine if our clients have links/domains pointing to their sites that could be harming them in organic search. In a few cases 7%-9% of links have been flagged as a high priority to be disavowed. I would be interested in your opinion on the following: If your site does not have a Google penalty is there an advantage to disavowing pages that have been flagged as high risk? When I go to those pages they look spammy and have no real value other than an inbound link. If a client acquires another website/company and that website is now 301 redirected to the client's site, would "high risk" inbound links from the acquired company cause a problem for my client? A client has taken down content from their site that was completely unrelated to their current business. Is there a benefit in disavowing those links to the old content that are deemed by Link Detox as being high risk? Thank you, Rosemary

    | RosemaryB
    2

  • Dear  MOZers, I have one concern i would like to ask you.. My website have valuable backlinks to the most important page which is awesome. But, some of those backlinks is old URL which is 301 redirected to the URL I use today. As far as i know 301 redirects pass page rank, so it should be alright. (?) Link i use today: domain.com/awesome-url/ My backlink: domain.com/old-boring-url/    301 redirected to  domain.com/awesome-url/ What bothers me is that in MOZ report (Link opportunities) MOZ indicates my important URL (domain.com/old-boring-url/) return 404. But, it is not true. It is 301 redirected to domain.com/awesome-url/ and it works! I am worried i am losing important link juice here(!?) Also, my On Page Grader tool for domain.com/awesome-url/ reports 0 backlinks. And that is not true! I know exactly which websites are linking back, only problem is that those website are using old URL (domain.com/old-boring-url/) to link back to my website. Am i doing something wrong? Is there a better way to redirect and save valuable link juice for my page? Thank you very much! PS The URL was changed in March 2015.

    | Chemometec
    0

  • I have a situation where there is a product category page with multiple products listed linking to individual product pages. The pages been around some time with no change.  The strange thing is although page rank is reasonable on the category page it doesn't seem to be passing any rank to the individual product pages. Any ideas to swing the roundabouts on this? Thanks

    | seoman10
    0

  • In August, my client's site (I work at a marketing agency) had about 15,000 backlinks. Now they suddenly have about 10,000 backlinks. And their Domain Authority has dropped from 48 to 40! Can someone please help me understand what could've happened? At first I assumed this had something to do with the latest Penguin update, since I knew my client's site had some extremely spammy backlinks they hadn't cleaned up yet. (The site was hacked at some point and hidden pages were created as part of some kind of link-building scheme, and there were lots of links from sketchy sites to those pages. The hidden pages have been taken down and the URLs now redirect to my client's home page.) But that would only explain a sudden drop in Domain Authority, right? How could Penguin suddenly cause my client to lose 5,000 backlinks? And if it's not Penguin, what could it be? Thanks in advance for any insight that anyone can share!

    | matt-14567
    0

  • I have the opoprtunity to exchange links w/ some partner sites relevant to our industry.

    | ElizaDay
    0

  • I'm looking for a bit of advice on best practices when it comes to linking domains that are operated by the same umbrella corporation.  Are links from the header/footer no longer beneficial?  Is there such a thing as too many links among domains?  How would you reap the SEO value of a small network of sites that were associated?  Thanks!!

    | ElizaDay
    0

  • Hi, I have a press release and 10 sites to send it to is it OK to send the same press release to 10 press release sites or I need to write 10 different ones and can you recommend the top 3 websites non paid press release websites in your experience?

    | ReSEOlve
    0

  • When building dofollow links if the two websites are in different countries is the main authority still passed from the linking site to the destination?

    | seoman10
    0

  • We have a lot sites we've built sitting on the same IP as our web site. Given that a lot of web companies rely quite heavily on the backlinks they get from their clients (some rather dubious footer links are common in this space), are we getting the most out of these valuable backlinks by sharing the same IP?

    | wearehappymedia
    0

  • Howdy Mozfans, I am fixing some broken links and I was wondering if someone could help me out. Multiple old domains (www.olddomain1.com, www.olddomain2.com and so on) have been migrated to www.currentdomain.com/olddomain1 and www.currentdomain.com/olddomain2 over a year ago. The old domains redirect to the current domain but we found that a lot of those were redirecting to 404 pages at the current domain. We now redirected all URL’s that were on the old domains correctly. Will those redirects ever get indexed (and passing linkjuice) since the old domains haven’t been used for such a long time? If not, would it be a good idea to redirect the 404 pages on the current domain (that were a result of the previous redirects)? Thanks in advance!

    | SEO-Bas
    0

  • We have seen a sizeable drop in Page Authority for three of our key category pages over the last one week.The total number of linking root domains has increased for all the three pages. We have  disavowed a few spammy links but we doubt that would cause a drop in page authority. The domain authority is unchanged.Is there any way we could figure out the cause of the drop? Has anyone else also noticed a drop in page authority for their pages? Hello,We have seen a sizeable drop in Page Authority for three of our key category pages over the last one week.The total number of linking root domains has increased for all the three pages. We have  disavowed a few spammy links but we doubt that would cause a drop in page authority. The domain authority is unchanged.Is there any way we could figure out the cause of the drop? Has anyone else also noticed a drop in page authority for their pages?

    | vikassocialbeat
    0

  • I have a question to moz pros. I have a blog about tattoos and i am using extremely low competition keywords in all my post. Some of my keywords are ranked in top 10 results in google but they are stuck, e.g. i've target a keyword "lion king tattoos" and it is currently ranking on no 6. its been a long time its stuck on no 6 and i am not getting any traffic from this keyword as well. i am very new in SEO and want some suggestions so that i can improve my rankings and traffic. my blog link is http://tattoosalbum.com please have a look and help me 🙂 thanx

    | SyedNumanshah
    0

  • After doing some backlink searching on competitors, I see a great deal of competitor's backlinks are obvious linkfarms and just completely unrelated to their field. Also I see a lot of forum comments using links are showing as backlinks, upon inspecting the html element I see they're " no follow " links. Why are they showing up as backlinks with link equity then?

    | Deacyde
    0

  • After inquiring to Moz.org about this, they suggested this might be due to a new feature that was rolled out, however, this 2 year old backlink still hasn't shown up and I'm a little concerned. Has anyone else experienced this?

    | Deacyde
    0

  • Hi there, We operate about a dozen websites that are part of the same parent company. All these websites are in the same vertical, and link among each other in the footer section. The anchor for each link is the brand name, so we are merely doing it to show what other products the parent company has to offer. My question is: do you think this is still advisable, or it might trigger a penalty? Also, what would you choose between: Sitewide footer links from each site to the other sites. A single footer link on the homepage from each site to the other sites. A presentation page on each website, one click away from the homepage, which presents the company's other websites. Thanks.

    | propertyshark
    0

  • Hi! I´m trying to get some understanding of local SEO. Most of my clients are based in Norway, will building citations in other countries have any effect on the rankings (negative / positive) Will it be better spending my time creating citations on norwegian listings?

    | AleksanderOlsen
    0

  • Hi! One of my clients, a Chiropractic clinic, has a lot of unique content in norwegian. Problem is; we still have problems building backlinks here in norway. Is one possibility to translate this content to another language and try to get backlinks this way? Would a backlink from another country have the same value as a "local" one? If translating the content is an option how would I go about spreading this content? Is outsourcing an option? Cheers!

    | AleksanderOlsen
    0

  • Howdy Moz Fans! (Said as I twirl my non-existent mustache... damn you Rand and your cool 'stache"..!!) So I am wondering, how often should one go through and do a link audit? The last time that I really went through a link audit was 8-12 months ago (actually, looking at my disavow upload it was Jan 2015). Is it time that I do another full scale audit of my backlinks?

    | GoAbroadKP
    1

  • Hi Guys. We recently acquired a really good backlink from a charity site that has high DA. 71/100 on Open site explorer. I understand traffic is also a key component in a backlinks value, not just the DA.  Is it worth spending time and energy (we don't have much as it's the lead up to Christmas) encouraging people onto the blog post to hopefully get some extra traffic through that link? And more generally, how much does traffic effect the value of link?   Any insights would be greatly appreciated 🙂 Isaac.

    | isaac663
    0

  • Since the calamity of Penguin I know several article submission websites got a really bad wrap (many deservedly so).  However if done carefully and legitimately I believe article promotion can still be a bona fide SEO link building tool. I currently have a client that has hundreds of good blog posts.  We have done some modest article promotions via local news websites.  However I feel like this content could use more of a push. Does anybody know of any reputable article/blog post promotion websites?

    | RosemaryB
    0

  • A colleague of mine has been sent a marketing pack from www.applegate.co.uk  - is it good SEO practice to use free directories, or are these days over?

    | Catherine_Selectaglaze
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.