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Category: Link Building

Chat through link building best practices and outreach techniques.

  • dad7more


    several people have suggested that i try guest blogging as a way to improve my site's position but i am wondering how do i go about finding the right blogs to contribute to? for example, my clients are usually dentists. how do i know what would be a good blog to write to for that industry? also, how do i link back to the site, in the content or the signature?

    | dad7more
    0
  • EdgySEO


    Some ideas to start this discussion: Guestblogging / articles Answerings Q&A's as dentist Starting a blog Any other good link building ideas for dentists?

    | EdgySEO
    0
  • GrumpyCarl


    Trying to clear up a manual link penalty a client has received and I have found the client's site has been blog commenting 14,000 times on just one domain!! I need to do a reconsideration request and show Google that I have cleaned up the mess (the client has 50k backlinks, of which I am not happy with about 75% so far!!) but I cannot expect the website in question to go through 14k pages. What would people advise here. Would you state the sheer number of links on this site in the reconsideration request and use the disavow tool? Doesn't this suggest that I have been lazy and not put the effort into to clearing things up up

    | GrumpyCarl
    0
  • FRUTIKO


    Hey Moz friends, Need some advise of yours. Trying to add new products and content to my website regularly(nowadays a bit more) to be able to have more internal links and attact the visiters. Figured out most websites dont use nofollow internal links. Are we doing something wrong? this internal nofollow links are affecting the anchor text i assume. Any advantage to make that links follow? Thanks in advance

    | FRUTIKO
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, I had a Moz associate look at our niche, and he suggested using phone calls and emails for outreach. We are marketing an article that appeals to the humanitarian side of the organizations and companies we're contacting. We're contacting sites that are already listing useful articles. When you have the choice between a phone call or an email for outreach, which do you choose? The emails would be personalized, to a specific person when possible, and letting them know that we are a reciprocator by sharing across social channels and/or blog post commenting for them. The phone calls would be to the companies' general contact numbers. Which do you do first?

    | BobGW
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  • BobGW


    Hello, We have a useful article on a topic that there isn't much information on in our niche. Some of these organizations which we're outreaching to have general phone contact numbers. Would it be a good idea to call them? If so, can you give me some pointers as what to say? Thanks

    | BobGW
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  • kchandler


    I have a new client who has been fighting to get past an unnatural links penalty. One of the biggest reasons behind it was that they paid to get a followed link/ad on a blog network, well this ad ended up being a site wide link which ended up giving them thousands of back links within a few days. After getting the owner of the blog network to remove the link i manually spot checked a handful of pages and used screaming frog to crawl looking for a link referencing their site. From what i can tell they are all gone. However they are still in Google Webmaster Tools as well as Google's index and it has been a couple months since they have been removed. Does anyone have any advice on getting them removed from Google's entities even though they are already off of the website? Thank you in advance,
    Kyle

    | kchandler
    0
  • bizzer


    A site of my is in the yahoo directory (3dprinter.net). It's been there for a long time.  I just went into OpenSiteExplorer to see where the link ranked, and it's not there.   Why would not not show up? And if it doesn't show up, is it even worth my money to do for other sites?

    | bizzer
    0
  • mrsmelmitch


    I'm helping a friend build links to his site because he recently moved across country. His primary domain isn't very SEO friendly (shef1.com) so he registered another domain (stephenshefrinphotography.com). Shef1.com has been around for awhile and has at least been crawled with a page rank of 1 so we decided to keep shef1.com as the main website and redirect stephenshefrinphotography.com to it. So for SEO sake I know it's best to at least have a keyword in your URL so I have been using the url stephenshefrinphotography.com in my link building efforts for local directories and blog comments. Is this the right way to go about this or should I be using the main url shef1.com? He had virtually no backlinks until I started helping him but the ones I have created over the last month are not showing up on the link analysis in my campaigns. I just want to make sure my efforts aren't in vain. Advice please. Thanks!

    | mrsmelmitch
    0
  • ross88guy


    I have tried checking out a few of the big guest blogging sites out there but every time I create a killer article the site that offers to publish it is normally some suspiciously spammy side with a low Moz score. Does anyone know any sites where guest bloggers can link up to swap high quality blog posts. Maybe one that requires some filtering of poor quality host blogs?

    | ross88guy
    0
  • nirpan


    Hello all, We have a domain with one of the primary keyword within the domain itself (audisite) and reading through some of the topics, having a keyword within the domain itself seems to be not as significant as we had assumed. We currently have a URL strucuture ( http://audisite.co.uk/new-audi/a4 ) which we were thinking of modifying to something like audisite.co.uk/a4 based on the premise that the 'audi' keyword is already in the domain itself. Also in terms of URL optimization, which of these will be the most effective URL (if the content is exactly the same). Or is my whole approach incorrect to URL optimization fundamentally incorrect? /a4 /new-audi-a4 /new/audi-a4 /new-audi/a4 /new/audi/a4 I will be very grateful for any advice/suggestions/pointers. Thank you very much for your time.

    | nirpan
    0
  • deaddogdesign


    Do you feel creating Wordpress Themes With Your Branded Keyword Is Still Effective?  Since, the recent change was wondering if footer links should be avoided.  Also, what are some good places to submit your developed themes to?

    | deaddogdesign
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, Could I get some feedback on how to make a good outreach email? I'm using buzzstream and Rand's awesome whiteboard friday. Here's what I've put together: Hi [first name] have you seen this [our niche] article? Paragraph 1 (short paragraph) comments on what the person is involved in, and ask them how these things are going Paragraph 2 (short paragraph) talks about how I've shared and retweeted their recent important posts. Paragraph 3 (short paragraph) Asks if they would link to our article. This niche article is really useful and needed to these people. Paragraph 4 (short paragraph) I'm not sure how to reasearch and put something interesting here. [my name] co-owner [our website]

    | BobGW
    0
  • Fergus_Macdonald


    Wondering what people's thoughts are on whether to keep WordPress sidebar links? For example I write a personal blog and usually write about tech related things, but have a sidebar link with keyword anchor text pointing to my clothing based website - completely unrelated to the content on my blog. As it's a sidebar link, it shows up for every page on the site (easily thousands due to all posts having a page, tags, categories etc). Are those valuable links to keep? There's an argument that all links are good links. Should I change them to have anchor text of the brand name rather than the keyword?

    | Fergus_Macdonald
    0
  • FRUTIKO


    I have two question in my mind, decided to first time post and ask the community for better information. 1-How important Educational and Govermental Ref Domains/backlinks are? Shell we try to gain them? Or they are just like the others backlinks/domains? 2-When we break down the backlinks to Images-textlinks. What percent of backlinks should be images? (for info my website has 97 percent textlink and 3 percent image backlinks)

    | FRUTIKO
    0
  • dusty7969


    I built way too many anchor text links to an internal page and was penalized for the associated keyword. However, I do rank on that page for less significant keywords that I didn't build anchor text links for, though not super high. Subsequently, I've found that the sites that rank highly for the keyword that I was looking to rank for are high domain authority with almost no links built to those pages. Can I 301 re-direct that URL to my homepage, where I'm not trying to rank for that term, to make use of that authority of the links I've built to that page and start over on the page that I was hit by penguin on? This appears to make sense to me as my pages that have been hit are specifically for the terms that I have gone overboard on anchor text links. Terms that I haven't built too many anchor text links to still rank on those pages.

    | dusty7969
    0
  • DA2013


    I'm working with a company that that is doing a lot of black-hat link building, and they got hit by Penguin 2.0. Should they stop all spammy link building immediately or slowly, over time? Is it possible that stopping all the spammy link building immediately will hurt the site? Thank you for reading!

    | DA2013
    0
  • Nightwing


    Buongiorno from the river Wharfe 🙂 With Googles crusade to penalise sites with dodgy backlink profiles I'm looking for an automated tool which could flag up any dodgy links. Yes ive used Open Site Explorer but I really am after something that gives me a simple "yes theres a problem and heres where it is" type solution. Any inights welcome 🙂
    Grazie tanto,
    David

    | Nightwing
    0
  • Studio33


    Is guest posting to get links a good idea? I have the blogs to post but do not have the time to find, approach and build a relationship with bloggers to get the guest posts.  Are guest posting services a good idea and if so can anyone recommend one? Thanks

    | Studio33
    0
  • wellnesswooz


    What are the best tools to find the links gained on (monthly basis) by your competitors?

    | wellnesswooz
    0
  • Rubix


    Hi, One of our clients provides legal documents online and one of the document is bespoke 'Privacy Policy' for websites. It normally comes with a price as solicitors draft each policy manually. We were thinking to offer this for Free 1 - As a promotion so that we can attract webmasters 2- to earn links that we will ask webmasters to give us a link from their website once they add the text I wanted to get the understanding from you before i go ahead if this is a good a way to gain links or not? I appreciate your input Thank you

    | Rubix
    0
  • Humanovation


    I have a gadget site and have MANY links to my site from sites that offer web analysis or SEO tools.  For example, the site chkme.com has over 1,000 links to my home page.  I don't know who they are, why they are linking to my site, and their site is irrelevant to my industry.  Should I disavow links from sites like these?  My site seems to be linked to from a lot of "website worth" type sites as well.  I think I may have been hit with an unnatural site penalty but I do NO blackhat or any type of link building whatsoever. Thanks in advance 😉

    | Humanovation
    0
  • maribha


    I publish a link roundup on my company blog on weekdays.
    Example: http://www.shack.co.in/blog/argolinkroundups/daily-trail-game-jams-future-of-mapping-and-chomsky-on-education/  I do this using a Wordpress plugin created by Project Argo for NPR news websites. Right now, these link roundup pages have a very low authority score. Could you suggest a checklist of things to keep in mind while doing SEO for link roundups? Thanks, Abhiram

    | maribha
    0
  • SeanMatyja


    I recently rebuilt my website last year, the address is enjoyparkcity.com. I used to have a great link from cnbc.com at http://www.cnbc.com/id/34977253/page/5, but when I rebuilt my website, that landing page url no longer existed (http://www.enjoyparkcity.com/search_featured.html). I recently rebuilt a page to catch that link again, and it works fine. Is there a way for Google to re-recognize it? I think its a normal do=follow link so Im guessing it should be valuable? Hoping it could help my rankings? Thanks in advance for any advice!

    | SeanMatyja
    0
  • MRiley


    I have a site for a local electrician that I just can't seem to get to move up the SERPS. I've tried everything form on-page optimization to local link building but It seems to always hover around position 11-17 for my keyword 'electricians grimsby' - which is not very competitive. Any advice would be invaluable.

    | MRiley
    0
  • 2bloggers


    I wrote a comment on another blog and now every single time that blog posts an article, it comes up as a nofollow backlink in OpenExplorer. It is really annoying to see when I check for new follow backlinks. I just wrote ONE comment on ONE blog post. How can I stop this? There are at least 10 showing up today! Thanks!

    | 2bloggers
    0
  • capitanhajs


    HI What do you think about nofollow links, are they still give rank for domains. DJ

    | capitanhajs
    0
  • JohnDE


    Hi there. I just bought a Moz Pro membership with the goal to start with a new domain name and create a content channel.  The domain name is completely fresh so it doesn't have any authority or trust associated with it.  I did initial keyword research with the Google Keyword Tool for the niche I want to address and know what content I can get out. I would like to prioritize content creation based on what will rank easily in Google and then work my way up from there.  Do you have ideas on how I could best prioritize these keywords to this? How can I identify the low hanging fruit for getting some incoming links to my website such that there is already some incoming link juice?  (without using any black hat tricks) Any hints or tips are greatly appreciated.  Thanks! PS: The website is in Europe where the blogosphere is really underdeveloped for the niche.

    | JohnDE
    0
  • rlaughlin


    Hi Moz Community, Long time lurker, first time poster. I work for a real estate firm and have recently done some link analysis. I'm noticing that my company is not getting linked to as frequently as we should be. Several news outlets (including NYT & Bloomberg) have cited our reports, interviews with employees and other original content belonging to my company without linking back to our site (although they do mention us).Some publications are even linking back to our competitors for similar content but not ours. Is it appropriate to reach out and ask for links from these outlets after they've been published? Does anybody have tips on making others aware we want links shared for future articles? Thanks in advance!

    | rlaughlin
    0
  • AMA-DataSet


    Hi Everyone,
    I've started doing some link analysis on one of my site that has over nearly 800 links in total (which I got from the webmaster tools downloading the latest links). When I go on to Google and use the "link:www.mysite.com" directive it will only display 12 links. Does this mean Google is only counting 12 links from the link profile? Iv checked the freshness of some the links it wasn't displaying within Google to check they hadn't all expired. Links from march 2013 still don't appear. This sites link profile has been untouched for at least a year now and is full of directories many of which have a page rank of N/A hence my question. (I'm surprised it hasn't been hit by penguin!) Thanks in advance.

    | AMA-DataSet
    0
  • waynekolenchuk


    Is there anything like Followerwonk for Facebook that I can use to look for link prospects?

    | waynekolenchuk
    0
  • Fergus_Macdonald


    Hey guys, Suffering a horrible rankings drop after penguin 2.0. We have 4 popular sites and have seen a steady decline in rankings and traffic after 22nd May. I've looked into it a little bit and am wondering if WordPress blog sidebar links might be hurting us. Specifically my brother and I both have sidebar links on our personal blogs which are getting indexed on every page, and I'm wondering if it's distorting our link profiles. Specifically, I read something about links coming from sites which aren't relevant to your niche and overly optimised anchor text. Both sites have very simple single keyword anchor texts on the links. We're pretty white hat in terms of SEO, we've never done that much link building, and when we do, it's usually with worthwhile directories or with sites we have relationships with. Therefore we don't have that many links. Any ideas on how best to investigate this? Thanks.

    | Fergus_Macdonald
    0
  • Ron10


    I saw some test results of no follow links from some years back and it seemed to indicate that Google still counts the anchor text in no follow links provided the page is already indexed and has do follow links pointing to it.  The test results seemed to indicate that Google does count the links and uses the anchor text to cause the page to rank higher in the serps for those key words.  any truth to this?  If i don't expect any traffic whatsoever from a no follow link should i not build it? Take care, Ron

    | Ron10
    1
  • skyten


    Lower DA Back link will hurt your side? Or is meaningless for those back link with lower DA?

    | skyten
    0
  • 2bloggers


    On July 20, my site peaked in terms of google impressions. On July 21 it crashed and then got worse. Here is my chart from Google Webmasters. http://tinypic.com/r/abruv7/5 I have been working really hard to get qualify backlinks from my niche (mom deals/coupons) and I know people like my site due to the growth in newsletter subscriptions etc. So what happened with Google? Is it Google Panda? Nothing on my site changed except maybe I had been getting less backlinks for a few days. I am having duplicate content issues which I posted about in another question. For some reason Google is indexing past page 1 of my category pages even though Yoast Wordpress SEO is set NOT to. So I am getting duplicate title tag errors from the subpages. I also have some crawl errors/404s due to deleting and renaming categories to improve my site. Any SEO issues my site might have (shorter posts than 300 words, affiliate links etc) are the same issues my competitor's have who are on page 1 of Google. Any input would be appreciated.

    | 2bloggers
    0
  • aafpitadmin


    First, forgive me if I miss something obvious. I'm a user experience designer who handles all SEO efforts for our organization in my spare time. This question is about our patient / health education website, http://familydoctor.org NIH's Medline Plus ( http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ ) has linked to http://familydoctor.org for a very, very long time, before we had advertisements on the site. To get an idea of where Medline Plus links to familydoctor.org, visit http://goo.gl/1yaofC or use the following query in Google.com: site:www.nlm.nih.gov inurl:medlineplus American Academy of Family Physicians After we redesigned and started putting ads on FD.org, I think these two things happened simultaneously, we received a contact from someone at NIH stating they could no longer link to our site because of the ads. NIH is a highly-trusted and ranked domain, so we agreed to let them link to the printer-friendly versions of our content to avoid the ads. A few years later, we restructured the content. For an article about depression, instead of having one page with all of the content ( http://web.archive.org/web/20090215071258/http://familydoctor.org/online/famdocen/home/common/mentalhealth/depression/046.html ), we broke it up into many shorter pages ( http://familydoctor.org/familydoctor/en/diseases-conditions/depression.html ), such as Overview, Symptoms, Causes, Diagnosis, Treatment, etc. I don't know if NIH crossed anyone's mind until go-live day, when we noticed a high number of referrals to the error page coming from NIH.gov. We wanted to fix this quickly, so Medline didn't stop linking to us and Google didn't de-value the relationship because of the broken links. We redirected all of the printer-friendly links from the previous site to the printer-friendly whole article (lets you see all the information on one page) on the new site. We did this because there is no way to move between now split up content pages in the split up printer-friendly versions of the site. Even if there was, we didn't think NIH would take too kindly to this. There is a return to the web link on the printer-friendly whole article page. This is a followed link and I realize the anchor text could be improved. We added the following on printer-friendly pages in an effort to not get penalized by search engines for duplicate content. Are we doing all we can to take advantage of these high-value links? Is the meta robots tag necessary, helpful, or not?

    | aafpitadmin
    0
  • GetApp


    Hi guys, Wanted to get your opinion. Ran a backlink profile of a client and discovered there is a number of sites that linked to the main site. The number of sites are owned by the client and seems to be built on the purpose of just backlinking, there is footer links (exact match keyword links) The website aren't linked together in analytics or webmasters but shows up in whois under the same company.  I think the best bet is get all those links removed from footer and let  the domains expire once it finishes - seems to serve no purpose. But the bigger question is what are good reasons I can feed back to the client that it's has a negative affect?

    | GetApp
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  • MarkasKR


    http://www.business-baltics.com what would you change in terms of on page seo? Should all categories have a longer introduction text + an image that reflect that category? Most companies don't have any text in their profile for example: http://www.business-baltics.com/baltmar-trade-ou-503456 All content is paid (if they don't pay they don't get a chance to introduce themselves) ... how would you improve the rankings of companies like that? By the way I cannot change that, it is the company policy. Should we make a chance for people to "vote" for a company that google would have the stars next to all companies. Would that help to get more visits from Google? How should we rank better in Yandex and Baidu? (Baidu sent 1 visitor in last month). And yes we have the chinese language... Yandex is improving but we are not getting the results we want. Thank you for all your tips.

    | MarkasKR
    0
  • pauledwards


    If i submit links via Google webmaster tools disvow tools - do i get any kind of confirmation it worked or not from Google? I have a standard message saying 'disvow links updated' as soon as i submitted it. Also how long roughly does this take to work, does it work much? I removed as many links as i could and the remaining ones submitted to this tool in the correct format. Any info much appreciated as usual people.

    | pauledwards
    0
  • trumpfinc


    Hi guys, I have a site that I run which has been around for a little while. It is actually in phpnuke, it also has a phpbb forum.. The site is so customized that I need to move it to something newer. So I am moving it to Joomla. I created a new domain just to get the joomla site created so I can move it to the main domain. My question is this. How should I go about switching from phpnuke to joomla without losing the links that are going to my site. Also, where can I find the links that are pointing to my site? Thanks for looking.

    | trumpfinc
    0
  • WhiteboardCreations


    Hey everyone! What methods are best to use for SEO campaigns working with 1 website for a company which has 2, 3, 4, or more locations in order to get keywords for their services to rank well... in all their location cities? I feel we know the answer could be any one of the below notes, however, it's always nice to learn more about what all you other SEO's are doing or have done which saw success. Please note: We have heard about building microsites on sub-domains example city.domainname.com/keyword-or-service
    We have heard about building sections off the root domain such as domainname.com/city/keyword-or-service
    We have heard about just pushing more content to the blog which can target a wider range of keywords and cities
    We have heard about building a new site for each city location replicating the main website and swapping out content for 100% originality
    We have heard about just building more and more backlinks with different anchor text using the cities in the anchor text Thanks in advance and look forward to hearing from some other experts facing these same challenges!

    | WhiteboardCreations
    1
  • BrandmanU


    So I have my list of domains and contact information for link building. What is the best approach to contact webmasters to link build? Is there any standard way to ask them to add my link on their page? Does anyone have a generic boilerplate email?

    | BrandmanU
    1
  • reidsteven75


    I'm trying to raise the authority of a clients website.  It's a local business so I'm submitting it to various applicable high authority business directories to earn more external links.  I've submitted it to about 15 directories so far; however when I run Moz's Open Site Explorer, it doesn't state that any of these directories are linking.  It's been about 3 weeks now so I assume that's enough time for the directory submissions to be indexed by Google.  Has anyone else run into this problem, and if so how did you solve this so these links are counted?

    | reidsteven75
    0
  • surfeasy


    I have an app in the Google Play store and I am trying to improve it in the play store search rankings.  I was wondering if back-links to our play store URL help?  If so do today's rules around back-link quality matter or its it about volume? Any other advice would be welcomed. thanks

    | surfeasy
    0
  • yvonneq


    ubl.org, getlisted.org, localeze.com (neustar now), yext.com ? They all have some overlap, but what is worth paying for? Can you cover 90% of the market with e.g. just Yext and ubl.org or?

    | yvonneq
    0
  • Techbate


    If I create a fresh link pointing to specific page on my site, apart from adding a number to "page linking root domains" does it also add up to root domain linking ?

    | Techbate
    1
  • Palmbourne


    Hello Since the latest Google update our main keyword has been dropping. We employed a SEO company about 6 weeks ago and since then the keyword has dropped a couple of pages further on Google. We have been using the Remove'em site to check our backlinks and a blog this SEO company have done has appeared on the list. The DA is good but the PA is low. In the blog they have linked the exact keyword to our site homepage. Do you think the blogs the SEO company are doing will be causing us more problems? Any help is very much appreciated. Thanks

    | Palmbourne
    0
  • mr_w


    Today I looked at site explorer and found over 1100 linking root domains and over 750 linking c-blocks. My site was hovering around 200 linking root domains and 150 linking c-blocks. I have not paid anyone to link to my site...  Is this one of my competitors trying to create negative seo for a specific key word? I've worked very hard to never try to build links and only get links naturally by providing good content that people would want to link to. Can all hundreds of new links hurt me? What can I do? my site is www.yakangler.com |   |   |
    |   |   |

    | mr_w
    0
  • dhidalgo1


    Is there any specific format to update the Disavow file? Also if I submitted the file a months ago, and need to update it now... should I leave the old 'excluded domains' or should I remove them? Lets say this is what I have: How would you update it? #explanation from to Google went here... and ended here.
    "domain:exampledomainalreadysubmitted1.com"
    "domain:exampledomainalreadysubmitted2.com"
    "domain:exampledomainalreadysubmitted3.com" Thanks for your input

    | dhidalgo1
    0
  • chainreaction


    Is linkbuilding in middle east dead? if not from where i can get the backlinks?

    | chainreaction
    0

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