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Category: Link Building

Chat through link building best practices and outreach techniques.


  • We need your guidance on SEO Agency we can consult for strategy planning for our websites. We received manual Partial penalty on both domain few months back and since then have seen tremendous fall in rankings for both of the domains. Have been trying to remove all spam links we found out of links we got from webmasters and disavow one's we were not able to get removed. But yet request for penalty removal not accepted. Would appreciate your concern on helping us out if we can take help of some agency for aggressively getting our spam links removed and plan for a better strategy to improve our rankings. Please suggest one of the best in this domain we could reach.

    | amitjain
    0

  • We are using the latest version of Wordpress for one of our website. Now every page in SERPS is like this: SEO Services, Link Building and Social Media - Oursite.com But when we look at our website's title tag its like this: <title>SEO Services, Link Building and Social Media</title> It's very strange, why the website's domain name is appended to the title in SERPS?? Any ideas? Thanks!

    | TheSEOGuy1
    0

  • Hello, Let's say I have got contact details of a contributor of ABC.com and the domain authority of this domain is 83 and the website is very relevant to my website. What sort of words I need to use to approach the contributor? Last time I sent the following message to a contributor and never heard from him. Hello John, My name is Blah blah, I have been reading some posts that you have written on ABC.com and was very impressed with your work. I was just wondering if you are able to write about our website on ABC.com and let me know what will be the cost of this project? Is that not a good approach? If not, what you reckon is a good approach and please mention the words. Thanks!

    | TheSEOGuy1
    0

  • I'm taking on a client who has two websites, one for auto sales side and the other for auto repair. We're taking on the auto repair site. They both share the same business name, address and phone number. Do you foresee any NAP errors if we direct all the directories to the auto repair site?

    | cwtaylor
    0

  • After Penguin 5 what are the major changes in onpage that is necessary and what are the best techniques for link building?

    | Chirag753
    0

  • We have just developed a nice web app, and we are excited how quickly its getting popular (based on facebook likes, shares etc). Everybody just loves it! Now, majority of the traffic to our website comes from Google Adwords, and the website is quite new. I was just wondering if I place a snippet about "Link to us" with a HTML code. What are your thoughts? If 200 people link to us, they will be using the same anchor text, isn't this unsafe? I would really appreciate some expert advice on the above. Thanks!

    | TheSEOGuy1
    0

  • Hi, After many years of on-page I've just started in the world of link building and I'm currently working on an e-commerce website. I've noticed that most blogs devoted to this sector that are worth their salt will only accept guest blog requests for payment. So here's the question, is there any way to circumvent this? Is there any other way to achieve the same results I would with guest blogging without having to pay for it? Thanks in advance

    | AaronGro
    0

  • Hello everyone, we are actively working on cleaning the backlink profile of some of our sites. But I am confused on what needs to be done. Now it's possible to find some toxic or deadly domain where our site has been linked from without our approval, but if we remove all those sites, and may be all the site that have a poor domain authority and/or no PR rank (< 1), our profile will look too clean don't you think? . My questions are : If we over clean our profile are we not manipulating our links, so Google will not like it? Is a natural profile will not be a mix of all those domains (poor and good quality)? We are trying to see what to keep or try to get deleted/disavow, so we could try to claim some of our lost ranking back 🙂 Thanks for your help on this, Cheers, Mounir

    | drimlike
    0

  • Hi Mozers!! I have a question. The ugly tools for blog commenting etc are still out there, my question is what if your competitor notices you that you are new to the business and they start building 20,000+ backlinks to your new site, and they too with one exact match anchor text that you are targeting. I know we can disavow tool, but I guess that would be too late? What are your thoughts? What will be the solution the above case scenario?

    | TheSEOGuy1
    0

  • Hello Guys! On 01 November 2013, one of our website's traffic has been dropped by more than 70%. We had added plenty of domains to the disavow tool, I am just wondering if its a Google's update or the disavow tool has destroyed the site? Any ideas? 9p3sN3p.jpg

    | TheSEOGuy1
    0

  • Hi everyone. I am really worried because of the constant penguin and panda algorithms. I hired two or three SEO agencies and they did some link building for my pages a while ago. And just this time, our rankings dropped almost sitewide some 7-8 positions. I checked our link profile in this site , and we do not seem to have spammy links. I admit that we do have some low link quality, such as directories, blog posts, etc. And it seems to have 10-15 links with overoptimized anchor text, such as keyword exact anchor text, etc. I have a couple of questions regarding this matter? - What entitles an overoptimized anchor text? I mean, i can´t control people linking to me out there, and many of them used the product or brand name. Added to the fact that my former agency used article marketing links with exact keyword. - If i "overoptimized" my anchor text, what is the best solution?, I could change some anchor text by asking some people. Should i disavow, delete? What is your best bet here? - What is (May 27 2013) best practice for anchor text or link referall. I know it will keep changing, but i want to engage in the right practice right now. should link with www.domain.com/keywordpage.html, or how would one look natural? -I saw some recent links that are really strange to me. Could the competition be sending me some bad links in order to augment the situation. Is that something normal?,  it sounds strange to me. Thanks for your valuable advice. I know many people are frustrated with these penalties and hits. Because there are still many sites with Mass EMDs, 3-page content, flash sites, that are ranking better than a high quality and engaging one. Any resource is more than welcome to recover from these dropped rankings. Regards,

    | JesusD
    0

  • Just got this: Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www. We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www. for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated ourquality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue. Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

    | sbrault74
    1

  • I'm dealing with a website that received a partial links penalty with no example provided the first time around. Clean up was done and we submitted for reconsideration. We were notified that the penalty is still in place and given 3 example links that are all from blog rolls. The puzzling thing is they are all natural links using the brand name. The domain name is an EMD, so it seems the logical explanation is that when your brand is and EMD, it's no longer the natural type of link it used to be. If this is the case, does anyone have any recommendation regarding a "safe" percentage of  external links using the brand as the anchor? Thanks.

    | cakelady
    0

  • I know there's no such thing as a perfect profile but when you're building links, do you try to maintain certain ratios such as: dofollow vs. nofollow exact match anchors vs. raw URL anchors vs. random anchors (click here, visit site, etc.) Thanks!

    | sbrault74
    0

  • As things move on will links be worth less as recent updates including the hummingbird update are moving further and further in the direction of content and social signals being the important. On the other hand good links are becoming so hard to find, that may make them become more important than ever. I'm trying to split my time up between content creation and link building/PR. which area should be focused on most. we have more quality content than we do quality links. our link profile is good but far to small. any suggestions what to focus on?

    | mark_baird
    1

  • Something I recently considered was whether a hyphen in a search term would effect the results that come up. For example, Is there a difference between using 'i-phone' and 'i phone' as anchor text? Some of my search results seem similar but do show some slight differences. Can anyone shed light on the matter?

    | davidbenjamin
    0

  • I understand there are many more variables to rank #1, but this site is currently #1 for one of our top keywords and I really don't understand what they Competior site barely has 200 words on any given page, very few content other than images with no ALT tags, titles, No H1 tags. in other words the website is not SEO optimized. My site has content, product descriptions, images, relevant titles, and definitely more optimized than competitor. My site VS competitor Total pages: 246 (me) vs 49 (them) Page Authority: 34 vs 26 MozRank: 5.3 vs 4.5 MozTrust: 5.7 vs 5.4 Domain Authority: 22 vs 17 External Links: 65 vs 7 Internal Links 152 vs 1 Followed Links 14 vs 5 More C-Blocks 14 vs 4 Total Social Shares: 127 vs 4

    | Droidman86
    0

  • Hi all! My site was managed by a SEO company that is no longer around.  I started to look for a new agency and in the process, found Moz and decided to try out the report.  While running the report, found out that my I have 3K links vs 173/1600/6344 links that my three other competitors have.  Any simple guidance will be appreciated.

    | fullerton
    0

  • By that, I mean that does Google just devalue spammy links, or does it devalue the links and penalize your site on top of it? Does it hit specific keywords, or does it have effects site wide? Does penguin run constantly, or only on specific days? If spammy links are removed, how long does it take to recover?

    | CsmBill
    0

  • Wondering if anyone could help out here please. Cut a long story short, took on a client before Christmas last year and all was going well re seo until about June when the site got hit by a penguin problem. Search traffic went down 60% over night and a warning appeared in WMT saying we have penalised your site for spam links. Not good. Digging about more it appears that the old seo company, during their contract and what appears a few months after we took it, we engaging in some heavy forum spam. When I say heavy forum spam, it was impressively heavy. They had spammed the message board of a country and western singer 17,000 times, for example. We removed as much of the article spam as we could but the blog commenting and the forum spam was too vast to do much about - what are you going to do if someone emails and says can you delete our link from 17,000 pages of your website!! We did a reconsideration request from Google and got denied, that was fine, to be expected. We did some more clearing and got rejected again. Upon the third reconsideration request things changed in our WMT. Google messaged to say that we still have issues with your links, however in the warnings in WMT the message has changed from the one about having an penalty on the site to _'Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole.' _ We are reading this one of two ways...google has just changed the way they word the message, OR, they have reviewed our request and accept that we cannot remove all the spam links and so are advising us that they are ignoring the links themselves rather than penalising the site itself. Rankings, of course, still haven't come back, but are going up slowly. This is very much to be expected, without the spam links the site wouldn't have been there in the first place, so we are perhaps back to where we should be. Does this line of thought make sense to anyone else or have I spent too long looking at country and western forums trying to find our backlinks!! Many thanks, Carl

    | Grumpy_Carl
    0

  • Hi, So we've heard all the updates from Google lately: don't get involved in buying links, link networks etc etc. My question is, does buying a link from one of the traditional large directories get penalised by Google? If I was to buy a link from Best of the Web - http://botw.org/ - would this be a waste of time? Would I get penalised? If we are only buying 2-3 high value links for our site from very high quality directories, do you think this is fine? I'm asking because BOTW is having a sale today (tomorrow US time), half price submission. Thanks! Edit: Paid directories such as this are still featured on SEOmoz - http://www.seomoz.org/directories - so I'm thinking they still have value if used sparingly?

    | bradkrussell
    0

  • Hi, I'm in the middle of a link removal campaign and getting a lot of replies from site owners asking for payment or directing me to a link which is effectively a payment page. The way I see it is my client is paying me to do their SEO. I'd rather be spending my time and their money building quality links, therefore the link removal process is in my way and requests for payment an insult. However, I am not without sympathy for site owners being expected to remove links free of charge. After all there's absolutely no incentive for them. So far I've had a zero tolerance attitude towards this and refused to pay, but just wondered what everyone else's opinion was. On the other hand, many site owners have been very helpful and removed the links at my request. Is it the right thing for me to remove these domains from my Disavow Links file? I'm finding it to be a bit of a moral conundrum to be honest!

    | Matt_Wilson
    0

  • We have disavowed a lot of spam links that were pointing to our website. We've disavowed on a domain level and a lot of links have now disappeared on GWT. However, there is a domain that we disavowed where MOST of the links have disappeared in GWT but there are STILL some remaining even a month and a half after disavowing. The disavow file has been sent in numerous times since then with new domains. Is there an explanation as to why some links still remain on this domain even though most of them have been disavowed and removed from GWT?

    | ResumeGenius
    0

  • Hey Mozzers! 🙂 I'm going to be starting link building for a website soon and I am having some trouble wrapping my head around a couple of things. First of all, in the current world of SEO, where should I be looking to generate links? Is it as simple as reaching out to bloggers and trawling through competitors links? Or is there something more? In relation to this, if I were to generate a good number of links from high authority sites, how would this effect my ranking for keywords (assuming the anchor text for those links is the website URL)? The other thing I'm a little puzzled by is, if I were to write a great article on the websites blog and it gains traction in social media circles, people would (I assume) only share a link to the blog post instead of the actual article itself. How would this effect the ranking of keywords that I have optomised (anchor text etc.) for in the article? I assume this is where guest blogging would come in? Any help would be HUGELY appreciated. I've been trying to logic this one out the last couple of days and just can't do it 😕 Thanks a lot to anyone who replies 🙂

    | CD_2016
    1

  • In the case where I've already... Just completed onsite optimisation Undergoing developing blog content Kicking away with a social media campaign I'm wondering what are some of the best things to do for offsite optimisation in that first month. Local directory submissions are all I can think of in this initial month of offsite optimisation to develop some good links before its really just all about content creation and promotion. Other than directory submissions, does anyone have any other suggestions for initial offsite optimisation activities and strategies?

    | Gavo
    0

  • This is not a question as such, more a gift 🙂 I have registered a domain name to ditch bad links. For example, let's pretend I have a page on my site: www.mydomain.com/viagra and have never done any good SEO to promote this page, just a load of spammy directory links. The page used to rank for Viagra but then Google took manual action and I lost my ranking. Booo! Now the page is of no use to me until I get all these links removed and the manual action revoked. Even then, I'll be starting from scratch re-building good links to the page. Here's another option, simply re-direct the url to badlinksbin.com and say goodbye to all those spammy links. This bypasses the lengthy link removal process. Warning: I wouldn't recommend using this method if you have some good links in the mix, unless you can contact the site owners and get the links changed. And, don't forget to change the name of the url first so the Viagra page still exists on your site. As I've already set this up, I thought no harm sharing it and letting you guys use it too. I hope it helps some people.

    | Matt_Wilson
    0

  • I found this post from Rand from 2008 http://moz.com/blog/headsmacking-tip-1-link-requests-in-order-confirmation-emails 5 years later I'm wondering in a "no-follow" for all unnatural links in the google world we currently live in, is it still a good idea? Also does is really work? or does it annoy the customer?  would it be better to use that space to up sell to your customer?

    | PaddyDisplays
    0

  • Hello Moz community! My established client recently franchised their business by adding a metro area location. We have thousands of back links built to the corporate website, a lot of which have anchor text that are geo-targeted to the new metro area website. We still find the corporate website important, but would rather focus our efforts now on the newly franchised location. Does anyone have experience with successfully having old links changed to a new domain and if so how? When changing directory listings, such as everything on get listed, is it better do do slowly or as much at once as possible? Any recommendations or information would be appreciated! Thanks!

    | FullMedia90
    0

  • There are certain places where my address or phone number appear incorrectly online.  I have tried to fix this, but many of these services are tied in with Yext, and I don't want to use Yext.  For example my phone number is incorrect on whitepages.com.  Also, my phone number was incorrect on Americantowns.com, and so i contacted them with the correct number, and then they deleted my listing altogether.  More and more directories are tied in with Yext.  Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make these corrections without using a service such as Yext?

    | RandyHT
    0

  • I have a category Kenya news with 40 posts in it. Is it good practice to place links to the other posts into the sidebar of each post? Thank you Iris

    | Rebeca1
    0

  • Hallo everybody, I am trying to improve internal linking but I am little bit confused about internal linking title. Should I use Kenya all-inclusive accommodation, Kenya full board accommodation etc or I should be using the title without the destination name, all-inclusive accommodation, full board accommodation? My worry is if it will not be too much of Kenya in each title. Any advice what is the best practice? Thank you very much

    | Rebeca1
    0

  • Hey guys, I'm sorta at my wits end here. I know that some link building methods (such as private blog networks) used to work before the latest Google update (Penguin 2.1), but I have evidence that it's not working any more. At least not with the private blog networks that I used. So, my question is if there's a sure fire way to quickly and efficiently build back links nowadays? Do private blog networks still work for you? If so, which ones? If not, what do you use instead?

    | VinceWicks
    0

  • Can anyone tell me why compertors doing this kind of spam is outranking me? http://boatingblog.discoverboating.com/dfennewald/archive/2009/08/31/discover-boating-becomes-a-chicago-sun-times-headliner.aspx One of my main competitors also has links in the footer of: http://www.cricketlinks.net/default.asp?country=SA This one competitor has nearly 2000 links coming from just 8 root domains. I've been avoiding this stuff like the plague but sometimes it makes you wonder...

    | SamCUK
    0

  • On my site http://villasdiani.com I am using yoast seo plugin and have I am using tags to organize category with villas on self-catering, full board etc but I have them set no-index as I believe they would create only duplicate content for the categories. Is it still ok to use this tags for internal linking? Example: I have a post in my blog which links to category Beach Villas(they are set to be indexed) and I would like to add option also for self-catering villas itself, which is a tag(set no-index) I am not sure if I am getting this right. Thank you very much, Iris

    | Rebeca1
    0

  • Hi, in the past few weeks 100's of .info links appeared in WMT pointing to my site. Should I be worried about these links ? What can I do to block them ? Thanks nick [edited for proper category - Keri]

    | orion68
    0

  • Hi guys, We are currently setting up Google+ accounts for our website www.troteclaser.com. We'd like to use them to indicate authorship of our content. As we provide content in 10 different countries, we have to set up a Google+ account for every office location. Here my questions: Do we have to set up two separate accounts - one for the authorship (for the person who wrote the texts) and another one for our office location (to link with Google places)? Or would a single (unpersonal) corporate account do the job, too? What's your experience with this? Thomas

    | Troteclaser
    1

  • I have identified some potential long tail keywords. But I am not a good writer. My strengths are in programming so I am coding the web site. In the mean time, what is the best way to create related content in terms of blog entries. I intend to have landing page in my blog and rank it as high as possible. How did you outsource the good content creation. How much did you pay? Thanks..

    | zsyed
    0

  • Hello, I have a quick question for the MOZ readers about my companies current backlink audit. We've noticed many of the backlinks that the Google Webmaster Tool has found come from websites that are no longer in existence or have error messages. Are these websites counting negatively against us or should we ignore them? Thanks! Alex Rubin

    | PlanetDISH
    0

  • Hello everybody, My company is getting ready to start a new mediacampaign on a very specific subject. The mediacampaign is not directly targeted at our core business, the goal is more to inform our customers about a subject and do a little branding for our company. A nice (and expensive) infographic was built that is going to be the core content of the campaign. We want the infographic to get shared a lot and therefore some of my colleagues want the url to be as short as possible. The idea is to host the infographic on a url on our companysite, but use a 301'd, shorter domainname in our communications. We are going to be getting a lot of links to this empty 301'd domain which does nothing else then 301 to our companysite. I know that linkbuilding to a 301'd domain is an old blackhat tactic, that's the main reason I don't feel good about this. But i can't really find any info on this subject.

    | Laurensvda
    0

  • I am working on a new client that offer appliance repair in all of california and I was wondering would it be ok if I just target general keywords like "appliance repair" instead of city specific keywords like "los angeles appliance repair"  for the back link campaign . I am sure city specific would be better for rankings, but would the general keywords help local seo at all? What is the best way to go about this with out having to make a city specific page for all listings? thanks

    | jesse1341
    0

  • Our website took a huge hit due to Penguin 2.1 we are looking to keep our domain but create a new site to disavow all our links. Will this work? Any Ideas on this tactic?

    | Relevant13
    0

  • I've read a lot about the "Magic 7" ranking factors for local search, and I feel like in a lot of ways, my site (www.imageworkscreative.com) is doing all the right things and still not having terrific results.  The only thing I can think of to really improve upon is how often our local keywords are mentioned on our pages - maybe setting up a local blog or something similar would be helpful?  Adding footers that include the names of local cities? Does anyone have any pointers for me?  We would really like to rank for things like dc web design, web design va, etc. - and fast. We have (recent) links from two local Chambers of Commerce and we're working on getting accredited by the BBB.  I feel like those listings will help us, but there has to be more we can do.

    | ScottImageWorks
    0

  • Hello everyone, We run classes and we just released our 2014 schedule. I am thinking of manually posting each class on the various event sites on the web (zvents, eventbrite, yelp, etc.) Should I worry about any sort of penalty if the content of these events are exactly the same? Also, some allow links within the description, my plan was to have 1-3 links going back to my product page with varying anchor text. Is there anything I should worry about with this plan? Thanks in advance for any help

    | CleanEdisonInc
    0

  • Our Google Webmaster 'page not found' reports consistently show two Chinese websites that have approximately 50 broken links each to non-existent pages on our website. One site is a PR5, the other a PR1. Two of our Chinese employees have contacted the site owners (even talking with them over the phone) to discuss the errors, where the broken links live on their sites, and how to fix them. They have contacted the site owners three times in the past three months, but still the broken links have not be fixed. What do you recommend we do?

    | Prospector-Plastics
    0

  • I would like to rank for Diani beach, unfortunately very unsuccessful over one year:-(. I have on the main menu Diani beach page. Most of my articles is consisting the keyword, would it be smart to link from all that articles to that Diani beach page? Any advice on this would be realy great.

    | Rebeca1
    0

  • Couldn't find the answer to my question anywhere so I'll give it a try here. If you have a site called www.example.com, and then want to add a keyword to this site, like this: www.example.com/keyword How do you add a keyword to your url like this? Without making the URL with the keyword your "main" URL, meaning you don't have to enter the keyworded URL to get to the homepage (www.example.com), and still rank better on the keyword put in the url. I'm a bit confused on the subject, would love for someone to help me understand! Thanks.

    | danielpett
    0

  • I'm curious, if I go to webmasters and suggest a change to an article in their archives (convincing them that the new link offers more value to their readers), how would Google look at that? It seems to me that if a two-year-old article all of a sudden gets a new link, it might look fishy, and might even bring penalties with it. Thoughts?

    | JABacchetta
    0

  • Anybody knows any Link Detox alternatives? http://www.linkdetox.com/

    | VinceWicks
    0

  • I've been doing some reading on broken backlink building but have not had much success with implementing a fine tuned process with my team. I've already read the moz post about broken backlink building. I've also used the www.<a>brokenlinkbuilding</a><a>.com</a> tool by citation labs but found it to be kind of clunky. Could have just been me though : ). Any helpful resources would be appreciated to automate the process better?

    | Keith-Eneix
    0

  • Hi there. Apologies in advance for this long message! I have come from a large client-side SEO position where I had a small team of online marketers to assist in our SEO efforts. The effect was that we were able to work on link building and onsite optimisation at the same time and obviously give it 100% of our attention (and the website had very high DA and Trust). I have recently moved to a small agency where I am the sole SEO-Guy and my clients are small. I typically have no more than 8 hours to spend per month on all aspects of SEO (analysis, reporting, link building and content optimisation) per client and I have to strictly adhere to this. To make matters more difficult, these clients typically have weak back-link profiles (low in number and quality and all pointing to the home page) and poorly optimised content (which contributes to low DA & PR). I went through my first 'monthly process' for a particular client in September and focused my 8 hours on optimising the site content for a particular section of the website. This involved optimising meta titles & descriptions, body content and images for our chosen keywords. I didn't focus on links at all. I published the changes to the site on 23rd September. When I look at my rankings as of 6th October, one keyword in particular has dropped by 28 places (from 11 to 39) which seems excessive to me. In my mind, the changes I made were small, so this drop concerns me. The particular URL was ranking in position 11 for a keyword that I subsequently targeted to another (more relevant) page in the site. Both pages have the same MR, PA and links etc. I think I may have effectively cannibalised the keyword and to make matters worse, the new page isn't even in the top 50! Both pages are in the Google Index. So, this is my longwinded way of asking for your opinion on whether other SEOs in my position would recommend spending time on building the back link profile to strengthen DA and PR of deeper pages before you start making content optimisations (given I am unable to do them at the same time). It's tricky with small clients as they don't necessarily understand how long these things can take. Cheers! Laurie

    | Laurie-Tomahawk
    0

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