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.


  • So we are the agent for an industrial company. They don't have a great website (well its pretty but doesn't rank) and have 5 product pages with a variety of products on each. We've taken those products and turned them into 50 pages with good on page optimisation. Now they've just agreed to give us a link on each page and I'm trying to figure out what the best text and link will be. As far as I can see there are three options Visit our agent for X region - sending to the home page If you are from X region you can request a sample of product group from our agent - sending to home page and product category page on our site If you are looking for X, Y, Z or P, Q, R in this region contact our agent there. - sending to home page and individual product pages The aim of this is to boost my page authority as 98% of the top 10 in SERPS have pages with zero authority and rely on the on page optimization and DA. Is this the best approach or are there other better ways of approaching the problem. It's worth noting that there is a total separation of control and ownership of the websites. I'm also starting to work with them to improve their on page optimisation and get links from their parent company to increase link juice

    | Zippy-Bungle
    0

  • Hi Mozzers I got a nice backlink from Huffingtonpost already a couple of months ago from this page to coinstackr.com: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/25/mt-gox-bitcoin_n_4854095.html However, the link doesn't show in the Google Webmaster Tools. Is that common? Cheers, Chris

    | Diderino
    0

  • I'm just starting to do some in-house link building for the first time. Having looked at some of our competitors it seems that they have paid for links on some B2B sites and I was wondering how the Domain authority and the price charged were related. The follow up question is then how do you estimate the ROI of a link? So for example looking at a site with a DA of 30  and a page authority of 17 how much should one pay for the link? How do you decide how much you should pay for a link - and whether it is value for money? btw I'm not interested in buying links I'm curious 🙂 Thanks for any thoughts

    | Zippy-Bungle
    0

  • For example, having a link on many pages (so dozens of links in total) using a product name, all pointing to that product page. Could Google see that as "spammy" and penalize that product page in the SERP's? Note: My product page has been penalized for the search term "Product Name" and there are no external links pointing that page using the product name as a term. This is new with the latest Panda Updates.

    | absoauto
    0

  • On our pages we are having icons that link to different pages.  In order to make it more user friendly we are also having some anchor text that also link to the same page as the icon.  Is it bad to have two links pointing at the same page.  We have multiple icons on the homepage and don't want to pass double of the link power! Thanks!!

    | Restore
    0

  • Hi, I would like to do guest blogging on the quality web sites, the problem is how can I decide they are good quality web sites? for example: 1)ehow.com squidoo.com wikihow.com goarticles.com/ 5)articlesnatch.com all of the above are PR 4 or higher. Thanks Derek

    | derekz101
    0

  • I work for an online retailer, which predominantly sells perfume products. In recent months, we have been spending more and more time on SEO, particularly in terms of improving our content, and as part of our strategy we have been working with beauty bloggers in particular (independent reviews, articles etc) to increase the number of links to our website. Whilst we’ve seen steady improvements, we are concerned that some of the key words/phrases we are targeting still aren’t ranking as high as we would like. Some weeks they will move up a few places, but more often than not, they will then move back down. We are more frustrated as we are seeing other websites, which are much poorer in terms of quality content, number of products, etc., ranking quite highly for these terms. From analysing these sites, it seems they are achieving their high ranking from having a considerable number of what appear to be poor quality links. We have been warned countless times to avoid link farms, etc., yet these sites have 100s even 1000s of links coming from suspect sites and it isn’t doing them any harm. Recently, we noticed a lot of our competitors are receiving links from websites such as LinkPartners. When we checked the website, we could see that whilst it appears to be a fairly SPAMMY website, its domain authority (67) is actually quite high. Should we base our decision about whether or not to place a link somewhere solely on how high their domain authority is, i.e. would it be more beneficial to us to have a link with what appears to be a link farm if their domain authority is high, than what appears to be a fantastic independent beauty blog with a low domain authority? Or should we avoid these sites whatever the circumstances? It’s slightly confusing for us as we are being warned about placing links on websites as google is apparently going to penalise us for it, but then we see our rival sites doing well by simply placing links everywhere they can.

    | DazzaH
    1

  • Is there a way, we can find out External Equity-Passing Links for Root Domain Metrics for a particular website. I am unable to find that out and need it for competitive analysis. Please let me know if someone knows the solution.

    | sidjain4you
    0

  • I have spent so much time investigating what it takes to move my domain up the ladder.   I have so far determined good quality optimized website and I am almost done with that. MOZ Rules! If I look at Open Site Explorer at my competitors it gives me some of their backlinks...  Some people say backlinks are not as important anymore.    But If I am in a Vacation Rental business and I can get other websites/blogs with high PA to post some good content that I write to link back to my website this should raise my SEO?  Correct. I am fortunate that online media assets always seem to have articles such as "The best destinations this Fall",   "Getting away for a long weekend",  etc...... In the past I have been contacted by writers/bloggers that wanted to trade free stays at my homes for an article.... back then I had no idea what a PA was,  but now I can at least point MOZ at their website to see if it is worth it. I was also thinking about hiring somebody to do this.....My question is two part... Am I on the right track about building good quality backlinks from high PA with truly good content.  I have been writing articles now for 30 days along with this other stuff and have probably 10 unique pieces plus another 20 in our recent blog... When SEO companies call me weekly they all say "we can get you to the top 3 placements in 60 days or other say 3 to 5 months or others say 6 to 7 months."  Being a business person I ask,   "How do you do it? and what tools do you use?"   I never get a straight answer,  because they say it is trade secrets..... or they say they use internal tools.... This kills me! I do not want to do this myself,  be an SEO company I just want to know the process a vendor will use to raise my SEO.    If they were to say I have contacts at these 5 major websites and I am going to get your content listed on these websites...  I would say great.    4 years ago I paid a company monthly for a year who moved my domain name from 70 to 35 but that happened in the first 3 months and then nothing.   And he would never tell me what they were doing...  plus now I realize my site optimization was crap.   Out of 10 keyword phrases,  the highest I got right now is 32 and a new guy on the block is less than 10 and has less content and backlinks...   I wonder once my site optimization is done will that really really help me. Is it too much for a SEO to tell me specifics!    I have purchased MOZ,  Authority Labs, Buzz Stream, SEO tracker,  I am committed to this... I have 15,000 facebook page likes and 80 you tube videos, pinterest and twitter too... M

    | nickcargill
    0

  • Dear all, On jun 20 I have uploaded a disavow file including some domains by error (good links), my question is could I remove from the Disavow file these domains and update it again, so Google will take the removed domains again as good links? Thank you

    | SharewarePros
    0

  • Hi There, I use my own blog to give advices and offer information related to my business service. Of course in terms of SEO my blog is useful not only to expand my brand presence but also to acquire long-tail traffic. I use to insert a maximum of one link with a relative matching anchor text in every article of my blog pointing to my own webpage. Said that, the questions are as follows: Am I involuntarily participating in a Link Scheme with my blog? And If so, how many links can I send to my own webpage ? Shall I limit the number of links to a minimum? Thanks a lot for your advices.

    | Midleton
    0

  • Hi everyone.
    We like most are struggling to link build this year in line with Google guidelines. First step for us is a back link clean up then a really thorough competitor analysis to see what the competitors have that we may wish to emulate. We also ask the clients to provide us with information about their associations, memberships, suppliers, partners etc so we can see if there is synergy to get them a decent link from sites in their immediate orbit.
    After that we produce some excellent content but getting it published, particularly with a follow link, is just getting harder and harder. We are also a PR agency so we encourage the clients to 'think out of the box' with regard to a PR campaign. It is fair to say that most clients don't understand what we are trying to do and don't have the stomach to be different.
    I was wondering if anyone else did anything different, any fabulous ideas we are missing?
    Also is anyone still submitting content to Ezine articles? They are incredibly picky about unique content, grammar etc but is it/will it  still be grouped in with the article link farms?
    Any advice much appreciated.
    Thanks Karen

    | KarenJames
    1

  • I left a comment on a site's blog post maybe 2 months or so ago. Yes, that blog has DoFollow comments on. It turns out that site uses one of those sidebar featured comment widgets, and has a crazy amount of duplicate pages due to an unruly wordpress install, pagination and attachments indexed. Well, I checked my google analytics recently and it shows that I'm getting 652 links from that site. Ahh.. Should I ask the blogger to remove my comment? Or should I let it go, and wait until google reindexes that site? My links don't technically show on all those pages anymore because since that time, the blogger has gotten more comments that are now featured instead of mine.

    | studio35design
    0

  • Hi Moz-ers! 2 part question I would love suggestions to: I'm fairly new to the SEO world and working towards targets of 4 'follow' and 6 'no_follow' links a month, in house. 1. Apart from Wikipedia and bloggers that issue 'no_follow' links, what are good 'no_follow' slink generation ideas? 2. I've read lots about the benefit of no_follow and follow links and the ongoing debate, how does this target/KPI stack up against others out there? And is it a well structured target?  I know its  a big question, but I'd love some feedback. Big Thanks!

    | FrancescaW
    0

  • I am wondering if adding your company with url on a local listing like yellowpages.com, yelp.com, merchantCircle.com, etc. actually counts as a "backlink"? I'm thinking it is not considered a link because I have never seen one listing in Open site explorer, either that, or it is considered a backlink, just not one important enough for open site explorer to show it. Does anyone know for sure??

    | DTOSI
    0

  • Hello, I have a doubt about Equity-Passing links report of OpensiteExplorer.org According to Sam Weber http://moz.com/community/users/432678 links which pass value from one page to another including followed 301 and Meta refresh links are under Equity-Passing links. I am surprising after looking at the links report generated by opensiteexplorer.org. Most of the article and directory links which have low DA and PA are under Equity-Passing links. Whereas websites like EzineArticle or Articlebase which have good DA and PA are not found in either Equity-passing links or under only nofollow category. Please suggest me if the report of Opensiteexplorer is not good enough or the links from the site like Ezine Article doesn’t pass the link equity. Thanks.

    | TopLeagueTechnologies
    0

  • I asked another SEO company to analysis my link structure (as I was too busy!) As I was flat lining on some work I was doing. They said I potentially had an algo penalty and that i need to do a disavow , even though I had no messages from Google saying I had unnatural links. stupidly I agreed to the disavow. Looking at Webmasters tools it seems they've submitted a bunch of links. Since they've done this traffic dropped by 60%, ranking dropped massively. In google Webmasters all the links which are meant to be removed are still showing. How do I know if the actual disavow has been done? And should I do a reconsideration request? Even though Google hadn't flagged an issue ??

    | Cocoonfxmedia
    0

  • Hi everyone, I'm trying to better understand what is meant by a natural link and would appreciate any assistance. Doing some competitor link analysis I've noticed a web developer who has created a directory for all its customers.  This is not a directory in the traditional sense of being of use to an end user, but to my untrained eyes, it looks like an internal directory used solely for the purpose of link building.  For all I know this might be perfectly good practice in the industry, but as a beginner, I'm attempting to get an understanding of things. My question is, what precisely is meant by a natural link?  If the above scenario is all ok, whereby there are businesses in the same field of work, but ultimately could be in any given location, on a directory, are they natural links?  Do these kind of directories that don't service an end user, exist if the common feature between them is say location only, or an seo agency only? Appreciate I could be completely out of kilter on this, but it seems the benefit on SERPs is pretty significant for something that seems pretty "unnatural" to me? Any guidance would be appreciated...tom

    | T-J-I
    1

  • I have been looking at whys to get natural links, another SEO company said that instead of doing Guest Blog Posts there now adding single links to partner pages on websites which have a follow link.  To me this sounds like basically a links page rebadged as a partners page.  Is this a dangerous practice? or does this carry some weight with the search engines?

    | Cocoonfxmedia
    0

  • Hi Everybody : how can you tell if the content on the product pages are accessible by google ? please have a look at my product page : http://www.fireplaceproducts.co.uk/stoves/aarrow-stoves/aarrow-ecoburn-defra-wood-burning-stove/ i used classes in product page to set the key features, construction ,... i notices other companies done these as text and they get better ranks do you think that's the reason ? also to test that i added the text exact same as the key features , construction ,... as additional information at the end of the product page , would you thin that would be considered as duplication ? Kind Regards Arta

    | fireproductsuk
    0

  • I have an E-Commerce site with tons of categories.  These categories live on each product page for easy navigation of the site.  This means that the entire site has some 500 internal links with optimized anchor text.  Is this an issue and if so .....what to do.

    | freestone
    0

  • Been doing some searches for this directory, we have used them for quite a few links and now it seems as though they do not show up in serps for branded terms and the actual "www.hotvsnot.com" search phrase. Scary! Have a look let me know if you are having the same issue ladies and gents.

    | waqid
    2

  • When building links to your site from other sites, what is more important or what weights more heavily? Say a site has a DA of 20 and PA of 34 for that page I want a link from. Say another site has the revese, a DA of 34 and a PA of 20. All things being equal, which site's link to me would be better? The one with a higher DA or the one with a higher PA for the on the specific page I would get a link?

    | studio35design
    0

  • fiverr.com is good for seo to buy services? Can you recommend best seller?

    | surajrathore
    0

  • Please help me understand link building.  I've read the articles on Moz, but they seem vague to me. Specific questions: 1. How do I get my webpage on good quality sites? 2. Guest blogging?  Good or not? 3. What about when people pick up one of our blog stories and publish it on their site with a link back? Is that bad now because it is duplicate content??? 4. Forum posts with a link in the signature?  Good or not? 5. Directories - I get it that these are no longer good... are they severely negative? Should I take them down. 6. PR - Looks like this is bad... right??? 7. Youtube - any value? 8. Pinterst, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram?  Any value to backlinks here? 9. What about sites like redit? 10. Anything else I should consider?

    | CalicoKitty2000
    0

  • If you're a professional SEO and a client wants to target certain keywords, other than on-page tweaks what else is there? Or am I right in presuming there's nothing you can do off-page any more?

    | Jeepster
    0

  • We're reaching out to companies that we have a business relationship with (past and present) to find out if they would be interested in linking to us. 
    All are obviously in the same industry so highly relevant. But some of the sites are low in Domain Authority (with scores of about 15-25). 
    Should we also ask these sites -- or avoid them?

    | Jeepster
    0

  • I own 3 domains. One is my blog, one is my photography business site, and one is my graphic/web design site. They are all hosted on the same VPS account. I link between each site. Also, since the links are either in the nav, footer or sidebar, all pages from one page link to the homepage of each other. Is this an issue for SEO? Should I not be doing this? Would it be beneficial to use a no follow link instead if I'm to keep them?

    | studio35design
    0

  • I have been hesitant to build links with all these penalties and need a few good tips for building good quality links. I have a wedding and photography business and we produce tons of photo content which we: blog - 1-5 times per week Facebook Social bookmark Get our work featured on other sites 1-2 times per month Any other ideas I'm missing? I know their is a ton. Just need some fresh, clean link building ideas.

    | photoseo1
    0

  • I’m a web designer and I add a “design by studio 35 “ link on the footer of all the web sites I design. By doing so, every page on a website links to me, since the sites I build can have anywhere from 10 to 100 pages (wordpress and shopify). While this does on occasion get me clients and inquiries, is this affecting the SEO to my site in a good, or in a bad way? Non of the sites are spammy, but many of them have low domain authority since they are typical small businesses and organizations and do no SEO efforts. Would it be better to add a "site credits" link to a page within a client site, and there add a bit of info and link out? That way, there is only 1 link back to my site?

    | studio35design
    0

  • Hi everyone, Imagine you are a book store owner and there is a new book which is going to be released next month. What would you do to rank for queries such as: And the Mountains Echoed And the Mountains Echoed book Of course, this book has been already released but think as it not. Thanks.

    | nedimtalovic
    0

  • Are there any do's & dont's for linking out to other helpful sites, has Moz got any best practice guides etc?

    | webguru2014
    0

  • Yes I know many of you will say that link building using web directories is old school and does not work. But after studying a website created last year, it ranks in the top 10 "how make a website" run by Peter Zaborszky.
    I noticed that he has links from web directories. Not many but he used web directories.. My question is: What you sort a list of web directories and only use ones with high PR and DA . Is this safe? Another remark, what is the difference between web directories and page where donors/sponsors are mentioned with anchor text and dofollow link?. Those pages like web directories contain quite a lot of links from same page. I'm curious how Google sees these pages.

    | affigroup
    0

  • Hello Mozzers... I would like to get a survey or feedback from other Mozzers who owns an SEO company or manages / hire link builders. **What is the average number of links does your link builder need to attain per week or month? what is their goal? ** I understand quality over quantity but I want to make sure there is a reasonable average to provide them goals and something to achieve on. Of course reward them more if they exceed or get .edu links. What do you institute? What do you think is fair and achievable per website? PS. There is no right or wrong answers here. I am looking for a measurable answer not subjectable. Again just gathering MEASURABLE GOALS.

    | ChatterBuzzMedia
    0

  • Hi there. I want to buy/subscribe to the best link risk software I can find. We are in the UK. Link Risk has been recommended to me. I specifically want a package that will allow me to check content hosts before we commit. Can anyone help with comments suggestions please? Thanks

    | KarenJames
    0

  • Hello all, Wondering if someone could please help me. I'm currently in the process of building more links to improve my keywords but how can I tell if the website is worth putting a link on? I only really want to input links of websites with good traffic. Thanks, Beth

    | cmuknbb
    0

  • So  I removed some links to a particular homepage for one of the sites we own, this page had A LOT of links pointing to it using exact match anchors. And for the most part the links were coming from low quality pages/content. After removing a good chunk of them I noticed are rankings went down from around 8-9th two weeks ago to 21 as of today. Has anyone else had a problem like this before? I'm thinking about restoring some of these links now to see if I can recover some of that. Any thoughts on doing this? Thanks

    | ThridHour
    0

  • Are there any trustworthy link exchange forums? I have over 20 PR 4-8 links

    | 0102345
    0

  • We were hit by penguin and have been going through the process of removing bad links. Things were looking up but then wasa 20% jump in our bad links. They all seem to be related. There are over 100 different domains that all seem to go back to mbiz. examples include http://www.5stone.com.cn/Literature-holders-.html http://www.building-stone.com/Display-furniture.html http://www.china-tombstone.com/Display-exhibition-products-.html It looks like they have automatically gathered data from google to create these pages. I would hope that the guys at Google are clever enough to be aware of these sorts of links. But if not I need to get them removed. I have tried whois but I cant find out how to contact these guys. Has anyone got any bright ideas? Thanks

    | Discountdisplays
    0

  • Today while looking for expired domains i found many high pr domains, checked for fake pr found they are valid but there were zero backlinks pointing to them.Is this possible?

    | IndiaFPS
    1

  • Hi there, I run an ecommerce company, www.footdistrict.com and we are trying to improve our rankings on head terms so we are optimizing our brand pages (ie http://footdistrict.com/marcas/nike.html) Note: a brand page is a category page on my store. We are adding descriptions of each category. This is great as we are adding value. On top of that, we want to add sub-categories just below the description. A sub-category is a family of items. The structure that we are trying to implement is: http://footdistrict.com/marcas/nike.html Nike History/Info of the brand Link Nike family of items A  | Link Nike family of items B |  Link Nike family of items C | Link Nike family of items C When you click on the first link of the left, you go to a page with all the products of that family and a title that matches the anchor of the category page. What do you think of this structure from a SEO perspective? How would you improve it? I see other ecommerce stores that use tabs or the internal search engine for these purposes. What are the benefits of each choice? Thanks and regards

    | footd
    0

  • I have a pagerank 1 website but i recently purchased one old pagerank 6 domain, if I 301 redirect this pr6 domain to my currrent pr1 site, will it will increase my site's pr and improve seo ?

    | IndiaFPS
    0

  • Hello! We are a small online business with a tight budget. Most of the content, social, ppc is done in-house to keep things under control & cost down. Can anyone suggest a local or offshore link building agency that we can trust or that someone else has used with good success? Some of the local agencies we've contacted quoted us 150-200/mth per keyword, is that typical? Has anyone been successful with agencies overseas? Thank You!!

    | TP_Marketing
    0

  • Hello, a couple of years ago I started publishing on my site more than 10 posts a day of content that no one else had. For this reason, my competitors started paraphrasing my content without giving proper attribution, and they ranked better in Google. That's why I realized that apart from creating content I had to work on my SEO, so I started to get some backlinks, most of them via contests on blogs. I am getting about 1 high quality link from PR2, PR3 or PR4 blogs each week. According to Open Site Explorer, I have 20 root domain links (200 total links). In reality I have more backlinks but they don't show up (they do show up in Ahrefs, about 50 root domains). To my surprise, I only have 15 Domain Authority. This is the most evident example, take a look at this screenshot: http://imgur.com/dFk2rkx My website is on the far left, two of my competitors on the right. As you can see I win every category except total links and the most important, domain authority. Are total links that important for Domain authority, even if 99% are internal? By the way, I also have more posts than these guys, I don't know why the report says otherwise. Why is the site on the right ranking so high? The same thing happens with the rest of my competitors, they have a lot of low quality links from "lists of domain sites" and in general a lot of very spammy links. According to what I have been reading, my good quality links should be more helpful than my competitors'  spammy links, which should in fact affect them. So what is going on? I have no idea if I'm doing things right. Why is my domain authority so low? Thanks for your help. dFk2rkx

    | ganapro
    0

  • I was speaking with someone today who was spreading out their link building because they were afraid that getting too many too quickly would incur penalties from Google and Bing.  Is this a real thing?  I have always been under the impression that if they are high quality links and directories that there was no limit to how many you could add other than the limited availability of the high quality links and directories themselves. I would appreciate some input on this.

    | Ron_McCabe
    0

  • Can anyone be so kind to point to me a great post on % of someones back link profile. Example % of: directories social mentions press release etc So basically an indication of how ideally someones back link profile should look to achieve high rankings! Thanks

    | webguru2014
    0

  • Hi, I was wondering if anyone had thoughts on length of time before a Penguin recovery can take place, assuming you removed all the bad links at once?  I have a client that has a Penguin penalty, with all the bad links pointing in to a domain, which then redirected to theirs.  So, I simply had that domain removed and it now returns a 404 instead of redirecting to the main site.  Now all of the bad backlinks do not pass through. All of this happened at once about 5 weeks ago.  I was glad to discover such an easy solution, but am wondering how long something like this would take.  My initial thought was it would take 2 or 3 months to see recovery, but I was hoping since the issue was fixed so quickly, recovery would be faster.  Any experience with Penguin recoveries with all spam links removed (less that 100 links) at once?

    | wiredseo
    0

  • Is anyone interested in building a private blogging network of semi-related sites?

    | jenadams
    0

  • when buying used domains, how do i see the links pointing to that domain? Sometimes the open site explorer doesn't show any links to the domain, especially if the domain is parked. Obviously a domain for sale with 1000 domains linking to it has lots of SEO Value right? Thanks mozzers!

    | Ron10
    0

  • Hi all, We have a client who has a lot of inbound links from external pages that are broken/404. The 404 pages are EXTERNAL and linking to my client's pages, but their domain still has authority and their home page (and other pages) still load. My question is: what should we do about this? Do we detox those links, or are they still sending some juice given that they have domain authority, despite the fact that the pages linking to my client are broken? So in other words: - My client is: yyyy.com - They have a link from vvvv.com/services, which is a broken page - So what should we do about this? Thanks all! Gavin

    | strategemilabs
    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.