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Category: Link Building

Chat through link building best practices and outreach techniques.


  • If I have site A linking to site B, and take down the links - does anyone have any experience in about how long they take to 'fall off', that is stop appearing in Webmaster Tools or Moz? I'm going on three weeks currently. Perhaps this takes months?

    | GFujioka
    0

  • How can ifundinternational.com with TONS of spammy links  rank  70 keywords in TOP20 in the competitive hard money lending industry? They seem to go AGAINS ALL WHITE HAT SEO and all rules by Panda, Penguing and Hummingbird. Just frustrating that they get away with it. What to do about it?

    | peterpumkineater
    0

  • The site on which I'm working has been experiencing a month-to-month decline since the Panda and Penguin updates - I didn't get an unnatural links notification, but have clearly fallen off the face of Google with many of the more important rankings. After running a scan on my backlinks, I found over 110 identical backlinks (it looks like the same medical definition and my website is listed in the endnotes as a source - just the URL, not anchor text), some from reputable websites with high pageranks and others that look very 'spammy.' We've redesigned the architecture of the site, so the actual link itself has a 301 redirect on it, but I'm just wondering exactly how much of a liability is it to have these links out there? I'm guessing it's an all or nothing kind of thing given the identical content on each page - on one hand, I'm pretty frantic to get to the root of the Google penalties and get back in their good graces. On the other hand, I don't want to kill the site completely by going after a set of valuable links. Has anyone dealt with this before?

    | travis-taylor
    0

  • Somebody embedded a link to one of my websites on the sidebar of her blog.  It ends up hundreds of links from this blog.  Will this type of links be considered unnatural links by Google?  Here is the url of the blog. http://chordsandmore.blogspot.com/ To find the link to my site, please search "yoke wong". Thanks.

    | pianomother
    0

  • It seems like it was a while ago now that Matt Cutts made his announcement "that guest posts are dead", however, does anyone know if Google has acted on this? Most particularly, for those that are targeting guest posts on high-quality sites, what has so far been the effect since the announcement on rankings? Anyone seen a dip in rankings from their high-quality blog post strategy?

    | Gavo
    0

  • We have an e-commerce site that, according to Moz, has too many on page links. The main navigation has top level links and about 45 sub-category links. Our question is -- Should we keep the main navigation and top level categories as do follow and change the sub-category navigation to no follow? Or, should we make the top level categories no follow and keep the sub-category navigation do follow?

    | MountainMedia
    0

  • ​Hi We are building a business that has multiple locations in multiple cities in the UK. We want to build a network of geographical based websites for each location / city we have a office in that we service. We are going to build about 50 sites (Standalone on their own domain) to cover all the main cities, and one main company site. The idea with the 50 x sites is to benefit from google local searches and a local location. With the 50 x sites they would all back link to the main website, so would they need to all be on seperate i.p address and hosting to get the back link to count? or can they be all hosted on the same i.p address? Obviously it would be useful to get 50 x back links from relevant sites we are just trying to work out the best to way to do this. Thanks for any advice

    | MikeIrwin
    0

  • Hi, Anyone still using guest blog tatics (sush as http://myblogguest.com/) as an effort on seo? Is that still a valid option nowadays. Thanks

    | LauraHT
    0

  • Hi guys, I've got an ecommerce client who has asked if we should generate a press release when they add a new range of products/add a new brand? Is this a good idea? Do we just publish it on their blog or do we send it our to PR websites to distribute with links back to the site. I don't want it to be spammy, just announcing a new brand. Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated. Thanks

    | trCreative
    0

  • Hi people, a friend of mine runs a payday loan site with a very valuable domain name: http://bit.ly/1lyJgME The site was penalised by Google about 18 months ago, up until then it ranked #1 for payday loan and on the 1st page for the plural, payday loans in the UK. Now the website is nowhere in the top 200 results for either of the phrases, but he has not received any notification from Google and if he checks in webmaster tools in the manual actions section  there is nothing there. He has gone through all of the links to his site several times and attempted to remove any unnatural links, those that he could not get rid of after emailing twice he disavowed - about 800, a lot were not even built by him. He has sent 2-3 reconsideration requests to Google and every time they said that the site had not been penalised, or something to that affect. The site does have lots of quality organic links from websites like Wired Magazine and the National Geographic, more then enough decent links to rank somewhere on Google for its keywords. I feel that the site may have been held to a higher standard because a lot of people think that payday loan websites are unethical. What do you think he should do? Can you spot anything on site that is wrong? He has definitely tried to remove every single unnatural link and the ones he could not he disavowed.

    | Eavesy
    1

  • Hi, **Does having over-optimised anchor text only affect the rank for that one particular keyword being used as the anchor text or can it negatively affect our rank for other search terms as well? **

    | Syed_Raza
    0

  • We've recently been told that one of reasons why our site doesnt rank as well as a particular competitors because they have much more product pages than us.  We can see that they have better quality links, which we are working on improving, which we sort of understand can be helping them beat us, but we didn't think that they would be ranked higher just because of more products.  They also do not have much interesting blog / content on site. So should our limited resources be focused on getting better links, better content, or increasing our depth of product range?  Thanks all.

    | onwardsandupwards
    0

  • Example...we write a unique article about the materials used in our products, giving a more in depth insight into the types of metals and minerals used in the products. Such articles are aimed at a small number of customers that ask more detailed questions about some of our material.  In explaining some of these materials, we reference, and credit for, classifications  used from the definitions given in wikipedia.  The rest of article is ours and unique.  Is getting these links from an authority such as wikipedia a good idea? Thank you.

    | onwardsandupwards
    1

  • When pitching a whitepaper as Push Content for Link Building (i.e. pushing out content that my client has created), is it ok to give the person I'm pitching a link to a landing page with a form on it? Or should I create a landing page with the whitepaper included on it? I’m not sure if the client will be ok with this b/c I know they use the whitepaper for sales purposes to gain leads.   For example, my pitch email would include a line such as this, "the whitepaper can be found at LINK and I'd love if you could share it with your readers." I think it may be weird/a little wrong to ask a webmaster to include a link on his site to a landing page with a form to get the whitepaper. Does this make sense? What have others done with whitepapers as Push Content for link building?

    | ArketiGroup
    1

  • We sponsor a few blogs in our niche. As part of the sponsorship, they include an advert on the RHS or LHS of the blog page.  Links are dofollow and are sitewide. Should I be concerned?  Should I be asking for a nofollow instead, if possible? I've recently disavowed links and am waiting to see what happens with this - hopefully there's a Penguin update soon - but I wondered if the blog links were part of the problem.

    | Coraltoes77
    0

  • I downloaded my links through the Google Webmaster site and I have a number of new links that appear to be coming from document download sites. They have basically taken my PDFs and have them to where they can be downloaded. They are also linking back to my site and creating what I feel are sketchy links. I don't actually want traffic coming to these PDFs. They are basically sample articles for my writing company and it's just a portfolio. Here's one of the links: http://www.give-me-doc.com/Trailer-Brake-Types.pdf So, what or can I do about them? Should I disavow them? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks,
    Valerie

    | wordsyouwant
    0

  • I am hearing all about the benefits of H tags and I tried to use them in my wordpress blog. The way I did, I used the paragraph drop down and made the selected text h1 or h2 , but size of these tags are huge . Can you help me what is the trick? Also, Can I have more than one H2 tag. For example my article title seems to be H1 by default(by the wordpress) then can I make just my subtitles in the body of the article H2. Then I will have for example 5 H2 sentences spreaded all over the body. Thanks

    | AlirezaHamidian
    0

  • hi I try to find good keywords to rank a “dog day care” site for and can't seem to find anything that makes sense. This is a company that sells franchises of their service – dog day care. So there is a “mother site” where they advertise service in general and try to sell franchises. If you go “pet franchise”; “pet franchises”; “dog day care franchise” etc – you get virtually zero traffic keywords. On the other hand if I use “doggy day care” it will bring mostly people who are looking for a place to leave their dog for a day. Doesn't make sense either way. Same goes for local sites. If you look at “doggy day care location” it brings next to nothing. Using “doggy day care” without specific location doesn't make sense either, as certain location applies only to people living in say 50 mile radius. I would really appreciate any ideas how to approach this. How to promote small “dog day care” franchising company? And how to promote particular locations? Thank you in advance, JJ

    | jjtech
    0

  • Hello all, Been happily using HARO for some time now, but was looking for some supplemental ideas/locations for hooking up some of my clients as sources.  Any ideas/suggestions are definitely welcome. Thanks!

    | NetvantageMarketing
    0

  • I have two identical sites with different urls.  I placed the canonical tag in the 2nd site.  Do I need to make all the internal links in the 2nd site point to the 1st site too? FIRST SITE:  www.aerlawgroup.com SECOND SITE:  www.losangelescitycriminaldefenseattorney.com So should the internal links in www.losangelescitycriminaldefenseattorney.com point to www.aerlgroup.com?  As well as using the canonical tag?  Or does the canonical tag make it irrelevant to point the internal links from the 2nd site to the first?

    | mrodriguez1440
    0

  • If you Google - "San Diego DUI Lawyer" (a competitive term), this guys site comes up: sandiegoduiattorneys.weebly.com/san-diego-dui-lawyer.html Run his site in Opensite Explorer and you won't believe the results.  This guy somehow has as much domain authority as Facebook, and maybe more than Moz.  How is this possible? How is he getting all those links from random Weebly sites?  I'm not saying I want to copy him, but I think it's highly problematic that somehow that site has been rigged to get all that link juice. Any feedback would be appreciated.

    | mrodriguez1440
    0

  • Hello Everyone, I am new at SEO, and I am a bit confused with the following situation: I have domain, wordpress site on it, and I am building backlinks to it (testing). I do not have "home" page among pages in wordpress, if it means anything. When I build links, i use different anchor texts, but they all point to http://somethingsomething.net -Ahrefs shows that I have 830 backlinks from 45 domains, to my URL, which is http://somethingsomething.net (it is also my site's home page address) -MOZ;s Open site explorer, on the other hand, shows the following: 8 internal links and 0 external links for page specific metrics, and 878 total links 0 external for root domain metrics. -Google Webmaster tools shows 10 external links pointing to my site Please can someone explain to me what is happening here? Thanks a lot

    | ShivFriv77
    0

  • I'm thinking of sponsoring an Event page related to a campaign topic. DOMAIN AUTHORITY
    49 /100 PAGE AUTHORITY
    49 /100 Type of link: Linked Image, with other 30 Followed External Linked Images in the same page.
    Page with a very long life. Cost of the sponsorship:
    300 Euros
    410 US Dollars It is worth?

    | wppseo
    0

  • I am a part of a business networking group that has lots of members who services home owners (a/c repair, plumber, home inspector, etc.).  I am thinking of starting a blog to help home owners be better informed how to care for their homes.  I would like to ask for sponsorship from the people in my group.  I would also like to invite them to post on the blog as a way to improve their SEO.  Would posting on this kind of blog hurt, help or not affect their SEO?  Would this violate Google's policy of selling links that pass page rank as described here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en.

    | aj613
    0

  • 'How much do citations help your seo in view of the direction that google seems to be headed where content is king? Should the citations not be relevant to your site?'.

    | arthureray
    0

  • We have found a couple of blogs that would be good for some unique content but I suspect they may be part of a network. Apart from checking the IP and for duplicate content of them both, are there any other signs that they may be part of a network?

    | KarlBantleman
    1

  • I have a number of blogs, but I'll use this one as an example: http://www.totalpackers.com/. If you look in the left column, we have "friends" links and "more Packers" links. In every case, these were links that we traded or links to our own sites. We get traffic from a number of these sites because of the link exchange, but I'm worried having these is hurting our SEO (as well these sites posting our links). It's crossed my mind that I should remove all these links from our site and ask that our links be removed from their sites. Would that be overreacting? Or is this something I should do? Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks, Monty

    | montymcmahon
    0

  • We have an older website started in 2000.  We have thousands of backlinks which we believe are hurting us. Starting with Panda our site has been devastated, traffic wise, from a million + page views a month to 1/3 of that now.  We've never solicited links, never paid for them, they just happened.  It seems every "search engine" and spammy site on the web has links to us.  Hundreds if not thousands from sites like , 29searchengines.com, 55 searchengines.net, and on and on.. 1.  How does a site know when the links are harmful?
    2.  How do you know which links should be disavowed? Thank you

    | foodsleuth
    0

  • Hi guys my site: www.dorchdanola-netbutik.dk is a e-commerce store, and generally we have many links on all pages because of the many products and categories. Im not sure if this is actually bad or good? I've been told that it will definately harm my site when google crawls it. The thing is that google visit my site often and I still have good pageranks in google. So does it actually harm my site having all these products and categories? And what can I do about it if google see every page as duplicate content? I also link to my social pages like FB, G+, e.g. Should I put rel="nofollow" or rel="me" on these social links? Thanks guys!

    | Dorchdanola
    0

  • Hi all, we've not been link building for some time now as we are a small team and been concentrating on other things, such as getting our new look site built and implementing Magento etc. We've historically used external companies to help with link building & SEO... some experience has been good, some bad. Does any one have any suggestions on how a small company can try to choose a decent external company that can help with SEO strategies? There are a lot of options, a LOT of rubbish and a lot of very expensive large agencies that are well out side of our budget (or for a "small" fee simply produce a standardised report on "how to improve your SEO" that can basically be read on the net). We've tried local, smaller companies in order to limit our options .... but that didn't go well either. Any suggestions welcomed. Next is where / how to weight our expenditure and / or our SEO time. Should it be 50% gaining external links (be it by what ever means such as social, checking out where competitiors have links and chasing those possibilities etc) and then 50% internal page SEO, blog content creation, internal linking etc? Thanks again.

    | jasef
    0

  • Can anyone give me any advise regarding anchor text in back links on external sites. I have about 8 bloggers reviewing our products on their sites. When they link to our site, they either use the words of our company name or something like “click here”  as the words in the link. There are a few key words that we are wanting to improve for so should those words be made as the live link on their site?

    | Hardley111
    0

  • I have recently given some content to another site for a link. When I originally checked the site, it was indexed by Google and seemed ok. However, when I tried to check that the catergory page that my content was posted on was indexed, I received and error message from Google, however the homepage is still being indexed by Google. Is that the sign of a penalty or not?

    | AAttias
    0

  • We're strongly considering a domain name change; this is purely for marketing reasons. We think in the long term, this will be a good thing. I believe we can mitigate the page redirection, branding changes, etc. My concern are the inbound links: from 200+ domains, 3,000+ links. So, I guess we can contact each of the top sites linking to us and hope they update our links.  I'm not hopeful.  I believe we'll loose must of the links. Has anyone been down this road and have experience to share?
    What should I expect, worst case? Is there a way to mitigate? Thanks much.
    Jim

    | jmueller0823
    0

  • I use to have very good ranking for my website, now I'm struggling with ranking, I've been trying almost everything, I purchased an advance link building, a contextual link building campaign with Submit, and doesn't seem to be working. Any recommendations!

    | desdetj
    0

  • I have a plugin that automatically adds rel="nofollow" to anchor tags that link to external websites. Now I want to make a particular link to override that nofollow tag and pass the page juice to it. How should I go about it? Will adding rel="follow" help?

    | mstoic
    0

  • Hi Mozzers. I'm designing an infographic to be used in conjunction with a report we've compiled. It's a really strong story backed up with good data. We're planning to do a bit of PR activity around it to hopefully get it in some very authoratitve publications. On top of this, to maximise the backlinks that we're able to build I've been considering posting it on some (possibly all of the infographic sites) listed on Paddy Moogans blog post about infographic distribution. Would this provide any benefit or is it likely to get me penalised in some way? Are there any tips/advice you would give to do this? i.e. link to a mixture of different pages, use non spammy anchor text? Should I limit how many infographic sites I distribute it too? Is there a maximum total I should consider or even a maximum number of infographic links I should build per week/month? Anything else I've not considered? Thanks in advance David

    | OctopusHR
    0

  • Hey People 🙂 We run an ecommerce site and we research and wrote articles on health topics , and we post the references on the articles in posts ( Magento site / Wordpress for articles ) Should I be putting rel=nofollow in the outbound links or not? I have read a few different posts but none seem to definitively fit my situation. Kind Regards
    Martin

    | s_EOgi_Bear
    0

  • Greetings, I was reading the a recent case study pertaining to Penguin 2.1.  (My website was hit hard) It stated:  "While classifying the website’s anchor texts (sorted by count), the first thing that strikes you is that the vast majority of the anchors are straight money keywords, which could be a possible reason for the penalty." My website suffers from a similar situation. Is there any advantage to replacing the links to my website on my affiliate sites with images instead of using Anchor Text?  My manager is concerned with losing so many backlinks. Thanks!

    | CFSSEO
    0

  • Our domain rank was around 40, then we hired an SEO company and our Domain Rank went up to 80, now we see it back down to 40. When we asked our SEO company, they said this was due to a 3 month delay in Domain Rank numbers. Is this true?

    | allurez
    0

  • I'm lunching my site in a month and a half, should I start getting links for my domain? (I allready own it

    | amielsosa
    0

  • We just found a backlink for our site from a brand spanking new, week-old directory site. We did not create this, so aside from submitting a request to remove it through their contact form (which we already did), do you have any other tips to get this removed beside submitting a disavow request. http://seo-company-in.com//United_States/North_Carolina/whiteboard-creations-cary-and-raleigh-nc-web-design-and-seo-service-267 Also, check to make sure your company isn't listed as well without your permission (not providing a functioning link back for them, but enter in their domain to check it out. Let me know your thoughts. - Patrick

    | WhiteboardCreations
    0

  • What kind of strategy would one implement to rank multiple domains in SERPs? (One domain per keyword) I am looking more into link blocking and that, but I don't know the effectiveness and consistency of the strategy. Does anyone have any recommendations? I really can't be arsed giving every single site it's own full SEO treatment 🙂 Thanks very kindly and in advance for your thoughts 🙂

    | Ultra_Valves
    0

  • On one of my sites I provide a free tool to other webmasters to use that allows them to copy some code to use the free tool on their website and under the tool on it says "Powered by: mysite.co.uk" with a link to "mysite.co.uk". Now I have no real control over which sites can come and use this free tool (a tool to test how fast an internet connection is), on the whole though it is aimed at a specific niche but a range of sites do use it which means good or crap sites can pick up the free code to place into their sites. The link to mysite.co.uk is now always mysite.co.uk as the anchor text, I used to use the websites name (which is the actual name of the URL - link to site at end of post) so the links were keyword rich but only to my sites genuine name, however I now just leave it as the URL to my site. I am not aiming to do anything untowards with the linking other than to get the acknowledgement that it was provided for free by my site, however I'm wondering if google etc will be able to tell they are natural and not dodgy? My site is: http://bit.ly/MsNQwS (n.b. a new improved test is being created before anyone says it's not accurate). 🙂

    | Wardy
    0

  • Hi Everyone I really need some help here, the problem I have must be one that many have.  I have a simple e-commerce style website so 1 product page can in fact get 40-50 internal links to it.  These links come from a mixture of: 1. The parent category pages that the product sits on (Rugged PDA) and in turn the 10 filter pages of this category page (Rugged PDA, ordered by battery size). 2. Alternative product list on other product pages,  So many products link to each other as alternatives. From Google analytics we can see that visitors like to browse product to product seeing 5 alternatives on each page with titles like "Smaller", "more rugged" etc. 3. Manufactuer pages, so we have a link to each product from each manufacturer home page where we talk lots about each manufacture we resell. We also have links from images used in the website. So its a nice usable website but we're finding that Google is still telling us in Webmaster tools that it thinks some links are dubious and we're trying to find out why.  We only now have 190 external links to the website, most are internal and from the website or our blog on a subdomain. The problem we think is that we generate the category and products pages all dynamically so the anchor text is looking the same.  Will this potentially create issues for us? Dave

    | Raptor-crew
    0

  • Not sure if someone has a tool for this yet or not... Say I have a page like this: http://www.merchantcircle.com/business/Spokane.Painting.Pros.509-210-2799 and I would like to find out what keywords this page ranks for on google. Is there any tool that I can paste in that link and it would give me keywords that it ranks well for? Other than the SEO moz rank checker. It's not like I want to run a campaign just for links like that but I might want to build some links to citations like that so I can move those citations up in the rankings.

    | Superflys
    0

  • We are re-doing a clients e-commerce website. Before I had entered them on SEO moz we had decided to change their domain name to one with a keyword inside. I had not known that they had an online marketing company previous working for them. They have a domain authority of 42 right now. It would be a horrible idea to switch their domain right? I looked at some of the links, they all have a variety of good anchor text. But alot of the links are coming from sites or directory categories that are not relative. We are also planning on doing 301 re-directs for the links. But this will not transfer the domain authority to the new domain right? Any thoughts?

    | DTOSI
    0

  • Hey guys, Does anyone know what Google's stance is on backlinks that come via a form, WordPress theme or badge. For example if I offer website security and provide badges for websites that are malware clean (with a back link to my website) and 100 websites sign up to my website will this be deemed as bad practice in Google's eyes? Also if I create a free WordPress theme with a backlink to myself? The second question sounds like I'm providing content for a link which seems okay but the first one can go either way. Thanks

    | conversiontactics
    0

  • A new client has come to me because they have found themselves in hot water with Google having received a manual spam action for unnatural inbound links. The sad case in this story is that I completely believe that the client has been a victim of an attack by a competitor. They finally made it onto page 1 in their competitive niche, and within a few days random links started appearing on spammy sites (often foreign language sites.) By the time the message came from Google about 2 weeks later several thousand of these links had been built. The first stage was to get the client to be very honest with me about anything he personally had done that might be considered manipulative. Unfortunately following some bad advice several months ago the client purchased one site-wide link (already in the process of removing it.) The same company that gave him this advice also built just under 100 links to his website (over the course of a couple of days) in early December. So - we know the client hasn't been whiter than white, and we are going to undo anything that he had responsibility for asap. We are also working to ensure that he is earning really high quality links in the right way (already have some great press coverage in the pipeline and are working on unique content.) My question is - given some past mistakes made by the client - is there any way that we credibly get across the fact that this recent huge volume of spam is absolutely nothing to do with him in a reconsideration request? Of course we can start work on removing these links and can disavow anything we can't remove - but my expectation is that should this be successful the same competitor is going to continue throwing spam links at my client. I appreciate that previous actions by the client would in themselves have been worthy of a manual spam action - but it seems far too much of a coincidence given the timing if this penalty was unrelated to the recent attack. I'd really appreciate any insights from the Moz community and will look forward to sharing our eventual success story as a YouMoz post! Tom

    | TomVolpe
    0

  • What's the most effective/least risky ways to engage with bloggers these days in order to build links, gain exposure and refer traffic?  I'm in a competitive niche (weddings), and there's no shortage of high quality and unique content being offered to bloggers. Currently, I do a mix of sponsorship, product giveaways, promotions etc.  But, also have some ideas in the pipeline, such as collaborating with other vendors on styled shoots, etc.  The latter is very time-consuming and, again, is something that has been done LOADS.  So, needs to be very unique to stand out. Want to avoid things like guest blogs and riskier tactics. For obvious reasons. Any fairly easy-to-do ideas that I've missed before I explore the more complex ones??

    | Coraltoes77
    0

  • Hi, Hope someone might be able to help me with this. One of our sites was built badly and the orginal url structure was to have mydomain.com/index.php but these have been changed to mydomain.com by a developer who has put the redirects in place. The problem is that in webmaster tools my link count has dropped to 18 from nearly 2300. I am assuming that Google is not seeing the redirect, any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

    | mitonmark
    0

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