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Category: Link Building

Chat through link building best practices and outreach techniques.


  • I understand that some may respond to this question advising that we should concentrate on building good quality content, and eventually the links will come. And I do agree. The problem is that while we are implementing a content strategy and we're absolutely focused on creating unique, quality content for our audience, we're also a brand new business with a current grand total of (wait for it...) - 4 back-links! So while we're devoting our efforts to create the most engaging content we can, we need to find someone that can help us build our back-link profile and help to promote our brand and content in the most legitimate way possible. Obviously typing "SEO" into Google is not necessarily the most effective way to find the right person for the job and I'm a bit apprehensive about posting ads on eLance, oDesk, etc Does anyone have any idea how we can find someone smart and highly experienced that understands the importance of doing this right? We are Australian based but they don't have to be local. Thanks in advance. Stu

    | stuart_h_1978
    0

  • Dear All, Today I noticed that our page authority and domain authority is down, and the number of linking domains is also down. We do not have too many linking domains to our site, but at least one blogger link to us, with a very nice article about our site (since some months ago) and this link does not appear in the site explorer (follow link). This blog is well indexed by google, but impossible to see using open site explorer for some reason unknown to me; and two pages we helped, and they link also to us (follow links): their links appear in the webmaster tools, but not in the site explorer. Neither the blog nor those two pages were in the site explorer before, the links that were removed are from other sources (SEO analisys pages, automatic generated when I run a test by them, so I supossed not high quality links at all, not content related, we don't miss them). Our site was partially down for 1 1/2 day this week due change of server, from a shared hosting to a VPS. Now all pages are up again, and we are improving everything, working really hard (almost no sleep at all in two days). Could it also have something to do with the lower domain authority? How bad penalized google the time down of a domain? How long will we feel the effects of that? Listing published in our site are ranking exactly as before, but I am afraid this could change in the near future. Since the end of December (not directly related to my question), we do not have this nice snipped showing the main pages of our site, when we writte the exact domain name in google. At the time, we did not any change, and this did not affect the listings ranking (they even improved in some cases); we rank better for the main keyword, so the snipped changed, without other problems. So, the questions: Have made site explorer any change in the last days, to discard low quality links? Could be the lower domain authority related to the down time of our site? How long can be felt the effects of the down time in google results? Is it something that can be felt forever? =( Do you have any idea why google decides in some cases to remove the site links in the snipped? General question, I know it is not possible to answer it for any specific domain without looking at it. We would like to have those links again. Is there something we can do in order site explorer visit that blog I mentioned? I will try to crawl it using the dashboard to see what happen. Many thanks for your help! Daniel

    | te_c
    0

  • How much value do you put on guest post opportunities on blogspot.com or wordpress.com sites (or similar). If the blog is established, gets good readership and traffic, do you consider it to be as useful as a privately hosted blog? I'm not really looking for a definitive answer here, just people's thoughts. Cheers, Bede

    | BedeFahey
    0

  • Firstly I'm only a recently new member but am already a big fan and rely on the tools a lot. For the sake of context, our site is www.cleancruising.com.au which we've steadily built into one of Australia's top cruise sites. We've focussed on building unique content including a mapping engine to show over 10,000 cruise routes, 3D ship models for virtual tour simulations and over 350,000 words of unique descriptive content. So we think we've got some good content which we currently rank quite well for, but think there's a lot of room for improvement with the links, both internal and inbound. Looking at the internal links, I thought  the site architecture was pretty good but now I'm not so sure. The site hierarchy is like this: home > cruiseline (20) > ship (200) > itinerary page (12000) > enquiry form and home > region (25) > port (1400) > itinerary page (12000) > enquiry form My question is, am I wasting link juice by doing the following? A sample itinerary page shows lots of links through to the enquiry form (with different parameters). However years ago we added the enquiry form to be blocked via robots.txt and none of these page variations are indexed by google. Is this stuffing up the link flow, and should I allow the forms to be indexed so their links can add value back through the site? Are there any tools for visualizing a site link structure? Lots of questions and hope this is appropriate. 1am in Australia so may take a few hours before any follow up posts, cheers

    | cruiserDan
    0

  • Guest blogging, guest blogging, guest blogging. Since I started my career as a "brand manager" I've heard the term "guest blogging" at least a million times. So I've put a fair amount of energy into it and for a long time it worked beautifully, still is in many ways. However, in the last month or two nearly every blog I have contacted about guest blogging has said that "due to an increase in guest blogging request we are now charging a fee of x" so on and so forth. Doesn't paying for links put you at great risk for being deindexed? And can't bloggers get in trouble for this as well? Do they not know, not care or think it doesn't apply to them? And if it's a sponsored post, say I send them $100 of free product and pay them $100 to do it, isn't that just hiring someone to talk about my brand? Why would google punish me for that? Anyway around it? Thank you so much! I look forward to your suggestions/advice/criticism.

    | WNL
    0

  • Hello, Which do you guys think would bring in more sales: doubling the content across all category pages and top 30 products, or getting 10% more good unique root domain backlinks from broken link building? 350 products in total 50 main categories 150 subcategories. Product page content would be frequently asked questions for the product and would be added by the site owner who is an expert. Thanks.

    | BobGW
    0

  • This is really messed up! I've been investigating this issue for almost a year now. I had discussion about this in SEOMoz before and people told me that my site was not optimized for SEO. However, I've finally come to conclusion that massive back link building is still the best way to rank in Google Turkey. Many high PR content websites do not seem to get their unique content ranked here because some shitty website can be ranked on the top by using back links with targeted anchors for the keyword they want. I've spent a lot of money for content but no it does not get listed unless I provide back links for each article. This does not happen in the US anymore. Google catches you for massive back link building and penalize you. SEOMoz authors suggest using social media more but it seems to have no effect whatsoever in Google Turkey. I really want to open a ticket for this in Google but don't know how to do it. Think about searching "urology" keyword in the US, would you see an informative website about urology or a site that contains a small article and wants to sell a bullshit product to you? If anyone knows how I can contact Google regarding to this, please let me know. Thanks.

    | mertsevinc
    0

  • Hi there, since I have never before made microsites for a main domain, is there any tutorial which can show me more information in details how to do that and when is good to do that?

    | vladokan
    0

  • One of our account managers messaged me today.  Click here to see the conversation:  http://imgur.com/apZ9Z  Does anyone have any tips for dealing with really ignorant clients?

    | MicahMMG
    1

  • Is this section still being used? http://www.seomoz.org/directories I wasn't sure about the quality of some of them (ex. porn chat). I've seen better lists of directories! 🙂

    | dvduval
    0

  • After developing a relationship with a blog owner and being told you may guest posts on their blog for your client: How do you compose and write a great guest post? How do you pick a good topic? How to you compose the post to serve the blog your are guest posting for and your client? Should you write the post like you are a member/writer for the blog you are posting for? How much should you keep your client in the loop of what you are posting on behalf of their company? Does anyone have any good examples or experiences when creating a great guest post?

    | VentaMarketing
    0

  • I am thinking of going with them for a back linking strategy. Wanted to know if anyone has any experience with them and what they thought.

    | cbielich
    0

  • I've got 280 links on my wordpress blog site, apparently it's recommended to keep under 100 links. How would I know which links to get rid of and which links to keep?

    | gimes
    0

  • I was just looking at a forum post written on SEOmoz back in Jan 2012 about the best strategies for 2012 and the first recommendation I saw was blog networks - OUCH! What are your thoughts on which link building strategies you think will work well in 2013 in order of effectiveness?

    | Clicksjim
    0

  • Hi, I have someone who asked me for some advice on his website and I want to make sure I don't give him the wrong advice. Basically he runs a mortgage company and is linked to from a popular estate agent. Now he has over 11,000 links coming from this agent because his link appears on each listing. Someone said that the link should be made nofollow which i understand, but it has been like this for over a year and he is ranking highly for a search term that he cannot afford to lose. Should he just leave it as is or should he change it from dofollow to nofollow. Looking at open site explorer it says he only has 25 inbound links but lists the thousands, but If i remember rightly it only counts links from the same domain once. Hopefully someone can help me with this as I want to make sure what I tell his is correct. Thanks Paul

    | propertyhunter
    0

  • I have recently been gaining a lot of backlinks which have anchortext that is not exactly related to the keywords we are targeting.  I have no control over the anchotext used in these backlinks in this situation. Given that we already rank in a certain position for keyword2 based on the existing backlinks we have with keyword2 in them. Will adding another say 50 high authority backlinks with anchortext keyword1 hurt our rankings for keyword2? What i am trying to ask here, is can you dilute existing backlink keyword anchortext by gaining backlinks with different anchortext?

    | adriandg
    0

  • I've been offered the opportunity to contribute to a blog as often as I want and have a link included at the bottom of each post. Will this be much help to me in my link building SEO campaign? As I understand it more links from different root domains are what really count? So 20 links each from a different site is more valuable that 20 links from one site? Should I take up this opportunity or are my efforts best spent elsewhere?

    | SamCUK
    0

  • The only backlink building I am doing is guest blogging as it seems most other methods have potential to harm rankings in the post panda/penguin era. As mentioned in another post I'm trying to get a strategy for social media that works as I believe social likes/shares are important. What other link building methods can I use that are totally safe? Is it okay to 'buy' a link on botw r examleas theyre editorally reviewed? I'm asking myself 2 questions when acquiring limks. 1. Would I want this link if google didn't exist and 2. Will it bring me relevant traffic. I'm almost scared of link building in case google punishes me. Are there any legitimate methods I'm missing?

    | SamCUK
    0

  • I work with a lot of clients in the insurance industry. For many of them, local results are their best chance for showing up on page one of search results for these competitive keywords. I've been looking at signing them up for enhanced Localeze accounts to help increase their structured citations. Is Localeze an effective solutions for claiming structured citations, or is manually claiming listings more effective? Thanks in advance for your help!

    | copyjack
    0

  • Hi everybody, My company recently stopped our SEO service as a cost-saving measure.  Now it's up to me to do SEO in-house.  I mainly do marketing and graphic design.  Though I know exactly (maybe not) what to do to successfully maintain our rankings the SEO company achieved and rank for new keywords, not sure where to start. I know i need to make sure our website is optimized for SEO.  Got that in the works (Our SEO company never advised on on-site seo) I know I need to create good content with the proper keywords and use anchor links.  Where do i put this content? Do i purchase a domain and just put it up there? EZinearticles? or any of those article sites.  I've already reached out to do guest blogging on some sites but have not received any response yet.  Should i hire a writer? If anybody can give some pointers on where to start.  I've got my list of keywords and keyphrases, I'm all ready to go.  How can I begin my in-house SEO campaign? Thank you so much!

    | mike_sif
    0

  • So I just got the link - yippee! When I look at the source code href line with my url I don't see the term 'no follow'. Does this mean I have a followed link?

    | Clicksjim
    0

  • Im looking to the community to help me decide if zemanta.com is a good link builiding method. Is it worth the money?

    | DavidKonigsberg
    0

  • I recently developed a nice article for a career site and they agreed to publish it as a guest post. Once they published the article I noticed they had removed the link back to my site in the byline. What is a best way to approach this situation? Would you ask them to take down the article if they are unwilling to link back to your site?

    | Charlessipe
    0

  • Anyone have experience in getting clients' sites listed on webcam-listing sites for SEO purposes? If so, which sites would you recommend? What was your experience? Any  tips or tricks? Any pitfalls? Thanks!

    | DanielFreedman
    0

  • I've been doing a lot of back link analysis on my competitors and noticed that a lot of links are coming from wordpress.com, blog.com, blogspot.com, etc blogs. These are free blogs in the format of http://www.username.blogplatform.com.  These individual blogs seem to have product reviews and mentions for many different products (we are an e-commerce website). I would like to know if anyone has done any outreach to the owners of the third party blogs. This looks very different from guest blogging and I want to know if there is a way to reach out to these blog owners in order for them to write something about our products. Please let me know if anyone had any success with this, Thank you

    | BryanCroft
    0

  • Is it worth getting links from Suite101 post-Panda? They claim to have tidied up. But what does Google think?

    | MarkHodson
    0

  • Hi, I was wondering if anyone could lend some advice to getting a 301 redirect on yahoo web hosting; I spoke with someone in SEO and they referred me to a site that had step by step instruction, the only problem is that was for the yahoo store, my business is not e commerce rather a service website. I was wondering if anyone had the same problem, some say that Yahoo does not offer "301 redirects" on their hosting, however, they say there are methods to cirumvent that, my site is html. Any suggestions would be great - thanks best regards, James C

    | jimmy0225
    0

  • Hey guys, I was hoping somebody might be help with my current dilema. We have a international website due to go live soon which has changed its brand name. It is International educational website funded by the government is all I can tell you I'm afraid. They have over 40,000 inbound links many of which are images. I'm wondering what i site best approach. To contact the web master of the top PR sites and ask them to change the listing to the new brand? I was also thinking if I was to leave most of them there as they would be redirected anyhow. Could I be clever and add the new brand link to some of these sites without removing the old and reap the benefits of having two links, the old site url and the new site url? Here is the main dilema though, the commission wish to keep the old site live for 6 months before we can redirect. Thanks, Rob

    | daracreative
    0

  • Hey Everyone, I was wondering about the merit of using Yahoo Answers to build back links. I find it valuable to keep my ear to the ground but have not seen any of the links coming back. Forgive me if this is a newbie question but I'm still trying to figure it all out. Best, Mike

    | Rvinyl
    0

  • Hi everyone, If a high DA site (93) (such as a reputable newspaper site) adds a link to your site, but for a short 2 week period (running over the course of a product promotion period), does this have any real positive SEO advantage?  (I have a DA OF 53) From a brand building perspective, it has obvious benefits, but I can't work out how much it will contribute to our SEO, Can anyone help answer this for me? Thanks Pat

    | pat12
    0

  • We release a press release nearly a year ago: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/2/prweb9185282.htm However, I can't find the links or the prweb.com linking domain in our link profile.  I've see MarketWire links show up in competitors' profiles.  Is this just an issue specific to PRWeb or am I missing something? Thanks!

    | Kibin
    0

  • I just create blog then review my product in my post with put the keyword and link back to my product. So if you have more detail please tell me and strategy. I would like to see case study. Sometime I read some blog I just know but I can not implement that for successful.

    | taradmkt
    0

  • Ok, I'm really trying to wrap my self around all this SEO stuff.  Right when I think I'm grasping it, I come across something like this. When running a keyword difficulty report for the term "essay editing", the top two results are: www.papercheck.com/essay-editing.html www.gradesaver.com/essay-editing/ The first result has a PA of 37, 2 linking page domains, DA of 48, and 197 root linking domains. The second has a PA of 65, 32 linking page domains, DA of 68, and 2,572 root linking domains. What the heck is going on here!?!?  I can't understand it.  I checked anchor text and that doesn't appear to be it.  The only thing I can find is that the papercheck has a link from a site (marketwire) with a DA of 90 while the #2 guy's highest linking domain has a DA of 60. However, I have a really hard time wrapping my head around this considering the total linking domain stats compared to one another. Any insight is much appreciate... this is frustrating trying to grasp these situations! Thanks!

    | Kibin
    0

  • I am thinking of starting a couple off site blogs for myself.  1 I might share some client information and link building and the other would be for me to rant. I was thinking about doing a wordpress or blogger blog, someone recommended Tumblr. Anyone have any suggestions?

    | ClickIt
    0

  • Hi all, I wish to publish an article and it contain url utm parameter inside the content.  May i know google will treat it as quality backlink? i have set canonical tags on the my own site. Thanks

    | willy66
    0

  • today I've checked link building progress for a site I am working on. I've noticed lots of new links and new domains, I was happy but a bit surprised because I havent'y done any serious link building yet. investigating more, I've checked the pages that should be linking my site, and these pages are on totally unreleated sites or they doesn't even exist! as an example, my site is about road bicycles, and opensite report this links: www.murrayschicken.com/
    murrayschicken.com/alejandro-suaya
    murrayschicken.com/weeds-actress
    murrayschicken.com/gt-bikes-bump
    murrayschicken.com/goldie-gray
    murrayschicken.com/anna-elias
    murrayschicken.com/brian-joseph-ochab and 14 more as you can see, these pages are down. probably never existed. so what's happen? opensite is getting crazy? www.murrayschicken.com/ has been got hacked? my client is doing some black hat link building? any opinions?

    | DavideM
    0

  • Hi there... My company develops policy management software for SharePoint (called DocRead). Obviously, our main SEO push is purely for the product as that's what pays the bills. However, we also issue a weekly SharePoint Community newsletter in HTML as we run a large community group for SharePoint. Each newsletter has lots of outbound links (all coming from the same domain as our product is hosted on). These links won't really have anything to do with 'Policy Management' as they are purely to do with SharePoint. I was wondering if these will harm our ranking in anyway? FYI  : The newsletters are here : http://www.collaboris.com/sharepoint-newsletters/all-newsletters and the product is here : http://www.collaboris.com/products/policy-and-procedure-management-software Thanks in advance Mark

    | MarkQJones
    0

  • Hello, A client of mine is looking to guest post on other sites. What's an example of a good Author page that is working well. We're interested in knowing what to put on this page, and if the author page should be in the main navigation of my client's website. Thanks!

    | BobGW
    0

  • OK, so I've been diving into SEO pretty hard lately and learning everything I can. Something I'm not quite understanding is how to rank for a lot of different keywords. We're in the proofreading and editing space which can be broken down into many categories: general proofreading & editing essay editing book editing etc. If I consider the "essay editing" category, the main keyword I want to target is, in fact, "essay editing".  However, I'd also want to target: essay editing service, edit my essay, fix my essay, revise my essay, etc. Basically, a lot of modifiers. I can easily target our main page for essay editing and essay editing service keywords, but how do I start ranking for those longer tail keywords? Is it simply building content that includes them? Is it getting links utilizing anchor text? Or is there something I'm missing? I don't see the point in building separate service pages for those other keywords; I think that's a waste and bad site architecture practices. I'm just looking for my "aha" moment on these longer-tail rankings. Thanks!

    | Kibin
    0

  • I was wondering why some of my best (high-ranking) links don't show up either in Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO's backlinks tool.  Does Google even see them?

    | cathiedducktoes
    0

  • Hello, We've decided to focus on guest posting for my client's site. What do we need to do to my client's website to be ready for guest posting. I assume those providing guest posting opportunities will look at our site and evaluate how good it is and how good our writing is. Here's what we're doing, and I'm wondering what's important 1. We went from a junky design to a pretty good one. 2. The logo is still average - we're thinking of upgrading it 3. all of the buttons for the store are still bad looking - we're going to make them pretty 4. All the category text was keyword stuffed and not good, we're rewriting all category text which is a huge effort 5. There was 20 short OK articles. We're making 5 long good ones to take their places. What are they going to look at to make their decision?

    | BobGW
    0

  • I've been looking for a link building company-person for ages now and can't seem to find someone worthwhile. The reason of course is that most of what I have seen is that they don't actually know what they are doing. I can link build but don't have enough time, I am looking for someone to build links to inner pages of my site to get its authority up without risking getting hit by any update or banging my head against the wall 6 months from now. Im on a shoestring budget but I think it would be enough to get someone worthwhile to do some long term link building. Anyone have some good recommendations for lets say $500 or less a month ?

    | NikolasNikolaou
    0

  • Hi all!  I'm putting together a list of sites I want to attack for link building.  I'm looking at my competitors while also seeking specific sites I know would work well to link to us. My question is, since this is very time-consuming, do you have a minimum PA and/or DA that you require in order to perform manual link-building outreach. For example, if a site has a DA below X and PA below X, what would X have to be for you to not consider it worth your time. I'm just trying to gauge where my efforts will be best spent and trying to get some benchmarks.  Thanks!

    | Kibin
    0

  • So, I was perusing SEOMoz's suggested link directory list and noticed some sites there require paid links. I have a couple questions regarding this: Is paying for directory listings a good idea? I'm not crazy enough to buy a bunch of links; I want to create a sustainable SEO strategy. But I do know that most everyone does at least a little paid linking.  Is there a budget or percentage of ones total links you would recommend for this?  Is it REALLY ok to do this at all? Also, assuming I have about $200-$500/month I could spend purchasing links, what sites are best to get links for first? Just  a bit of background: we're starting a content marketing strategy for our business and are spending about $2,000 per month "buying" content (design, data, writing, etc.) so purchasing links is definitely NOT our strategy and never will be. Thanks!

    | Kibin
    1

  • I work for a company that has www.widget.com. This is the site we do all our business under. Right now there is no linkbuilding so I would like to create a blog to start linkbuilding. We also own www.widget.info. Can I run the blog under .info and still get the credit on the .com or are they considered completely separate entities that have nothing to do with one another? The reason I would prefer it on the .info is it gives me complete control. By putting it on out .com I have to talk to the developers to install wordpress and mysql, when I would much rather just be able to do it on my own. Any ideas?

    | EcommerceSite
    0

  • Why is it that OSE does not display my strongest backlinks, including those from Wikipedia, a legitamite .edu, Squidoo, etc.? Some of those links have been live for a long time, and some (not all) are "dofollow". Impossible to do a thorough backlink analysis in this situation.

    | veezer
    0

  • Hello, I am working with a company that their domain name is the same as the head term. For example, if I was going for the head term coffee, and my site was coffee.com. This is specifically in the medical space, and i'm competing directly with Web MD and The Mayo Clinic, my advantage on the term is the EMD. We have a legitimate site with thousands of pages of relevant content, and I am starting a guest blogging campaign on relevant health sites. My real challenge is when I go for anchor text links should I ideally go for [head term] or [headterm.com] as the anchor text. Thanks in advance for your insights Zach

    | Zachary_Russell
    0

  • The site, (http://www.bartenderbarcodesoftware.com/) sells barcode software.  They also provide free printer drivers on their site.  During a recent domain change (before I started helping them), they began looking at their inbound links and found quite a few external sites linking to these download files.  However, when someone clicks on the link on one of these sites (i.e. http://vvs-motor.com.ua/barcode-printer-drivers) it immediately begins downloading the file (i.e. http://www.seagullscientific.com/downloads/drivers/archive/7.2/7.2.4/Unimark_7.2.4.exe) without taking the visitor to the site. The owner would greatly prefer this traffic to engage with the site and is considering 301 redirecting those download links to an actual webpage. Question:  Would this look suspicious to Google?  Would this have a positive or negative effect on SEO? The last factor to consider is that many of these sites will likely just recreate the list based on the new links at some future point. Thanks for any help!

    | motosantiago
    0

  • Hi everyone, I just started working for a client in a new niche. After reviewing the backlink profiles of his competitors I can see that the top sites are using a ton of link exchanges. They are from really spammy sites too. The kind that will link to anyone that provides a link back. Anyone else seeing much of this?

    | SixTwoInteractive
    0

  • I'm dabbling with link building in a non link-happy industry, traffic safety (IE Traffic cones, barricades, safety vests, etc...). We currently are doing #RCS in terms of giveaways for college students as well as discounts in a wider EDU Outreach campaign as well as legitimate guest posting. I have started to use Link Prospector, and got a list of links/resources pages that we can get info from. I found some great links through here, including ways to get links from higher-profile .gov domains, but was wondering if it is worth it to go after the high(er) quality links/resources pages. By higher quality, I usually set a floor of a DA 25-30 and have a limited amount of external links per page. These would be for branded keywords (IE the company name/domain) and not exact match anchor text. I'd really like to see how other SEOs feel about this. Thanks Zachary Russell President, ProTech Internet Group

    | Zachary_Russell
    1

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