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Category: Link Building

Chat through link building best practices and outreach techniques.


  • Hi all It seems Google has stepped up the "hunt" for overly SEOed websites. What about having backlinks from SEOMOZ, would that signal to Google that you are involved in SEO and therefor it might hurt your site? Anyone? Thanks in advance Fredrik Ardmar

    | Resultify
    0

  • So I was hit with Panda and Penguin. Since then I have been trying to figure out what is it that Google is seeing as "low content" on my site along with links. Concerning low content I am a dictionary based site and I have over 200,000 pages which link to sepecific definitions to words like /dictionary/word/a and so on. Most of these pages if not all have a bounce rate of 100% and very little to no traffic. I used to link every word in my database in my site which is where Google got the links from to begin with. Since then I have removed those links with no impact to my rankings, but Google still has them indexed. I am thinking about deindexing all of them from Google. So all my pages with /dictionary/word/[word here] would be removed. Just wanted to get some opinions on that. Maybe a good idea? Also what would be the preferred method to deindex them. Robots.txt? noindex tag?

    | cbielich
    0

  • When using Open Site Explorer my site is winning in many categories but lacking in others as compared to competitors. I intend to improve on this but am a little confused by the extremely low number of "internal followed links" and "internal links" at just 4. My competitors have much more than that. Does this mean links to the root domain? Total internal links? I have many internal links so I'm having a hard time figuring this one out. What four internal links are getting noticed? I just went through and changed all the links that went to index.html to link to the root domain at www.njlimocarservice.com as I just found a Q&A that indicates this was better. So as of Wed at 5:45 PM all my links to the homepage went to index.html and not the root which is no longer the case. Not sure if this matters. At the same time I also just put a 301 from index.html to redirect to www.njlimocarservice.com. Any help appreciated! h9QuF.png

    | kabledesigns
    0

  • Just over a year ago, I've bought 4 link building packages from SEO Link Wheelers. From what I see now, most of their website network has been penalized / banned and now it's hurting my websites. I've tried to contact them but they won't reply. I'd be willing to pay to have them remove the links but they simply won't answer. And I haven't been rude or impolite at all in my communications with them. I've tried calling them to but to no avail. I know where most of the bad links are, thanks to linkresearchtools.com Now I gotta get rid of that crap. Any suggestions?

    | sbrault74
    0

  • I've got many unnatural backlinks that have the NOFOLLOW tag. How much should I worry about those links? Could Google penalize my website for these links?

    | sbrault74
    0

  • While I was searching for bad links to one of my website, I realized that there were lots of backlinks from trackbacks on various blogs. Most of these trackback links are definitely spammy as they are not relevant with the blog topics and they use exact anchor text. The thing is that I am 300% sure that it has nothing to do with any SEO campaign services I've bought in the past. They link back to pages I've never optimized at all. So could I be the victim of a negative SEO campaign? What do you think?

    | sbrault74
    0

  • Hello, One of my competitors has a large amount of sites/blogs, similar to the attachment/screenshot. Is it possible that they own these are are using them to boost their rankings? Thanks! ICZTX.jpg

    | TP_Marketing
    0

  • I want to build a niche directory based on a one service area and wondered if anyone has any experience of the best out of the box directory software to use? I would want to have free listings and paid for listing. The CMS would need to be SEO friendly Thanks in advance

    | highwayfive
    0

  • Checking Google Webmaster it looks like my links dropped in half? Yet I have been ranking very well the past 2-3 days? Is there any explanation for this? I have been doing Pr's, Blogs, manual link building, and concentrating on the social side of it as well, facebook, twitter, google+ can that have anything to do with better rankings? or is it still considered a minor part? Thanks!

    | TP_Marketing
    0

  • One of our competitors has built a little blog network, and I'm wondering if it's worth it for us to imitate it. Here's how they have it set up: They have domain.com, their e-commerce site, and blog.domain.com. They also have a half-dozen EMD blogs set up that all link to each other and to the e-commerce site, each one supplying content related to one niche of their busines (e.g. kitchenwidgets.com, widgetsforkids.com, etc.). It seems they've been doing this since December 2011. In my opinion, the content on these EMD blogs is pretty low value. Sure enough, they have basically no inbound links from outside the blog network, and it's not getting shared socially. I'm having a hard time imagining a lot of long-tail searches that would bring in qualified shoppers, since they basically just write up 300-word long descriptions of photos. Based on SEMrush data, it doesn't look like this approach is hurting them -- they didn't take a Penguin dive in April, for example. But how likely is it that this approach is helping them enough to justify the time they must spend writing (probably ~30-60m a day)? It would be trivial for the algo to determine that these are not natural links and completely devalue them. Would it not be better to consolidate that time into 2.5-5hrs a week spent researching and writing a valuable, link-worthy, long-tail-rich post for the main blog and then promoting it in hopes of attracting natural links?

    | CMC-SD
    0

  • basically I have realised i have more page authority and links going to www.onestopmuscle.co.uk instead of onestopmuscle.co.uk. I use wordpress and have no clue how to make sure onestopmuscle.co.uk redirects to www. version. anyone have any ideas? I don't want to mess about with files or i'll most likely make the blog into a disaster.

    | FLEAR
    0

  • Hello, If I put out too many press releases/blog entries out can google penalize the site? Also other than wordpress or blogger are there any other free blogs that are worth while?  Can hosting on the main site help also? I was thinking of hosting on the main site but I wasnt sure If I needed to buy a new domain name, or just host it as XXXXXX.com/blog Thank you!

    | TP_Marketing
    0

  • Hi there, Recently one client after building his campaign and ranking his site refused to pay... But now is to late for me because I already build all the links and is impossible to remove them. How I can protect my self from this kind of situations? Thank you in advance

    | nyanainc
    0

  • I have recently bought an exact match.net for a keyword with no hyphens (on the fence about hyphens, read so many different views on here). From looking around it seems that not all solicited links that I am interested in use anchor text, but more significantly exact match domain would be like automatic anchor text when anyone from the general population posts a link to your site. I sell print books and am thinking of keeping the non-keyword domain in them so they are easy to say and type, while using the exact match domain for everything else online which the non-keyword domain would 301 redirect to.  I don't do any programming and will use cPanel on my webhost to do the 301 redirect, I already have one 301 to go to the www subdomain so that would make two 301's. This might sound quite straight forward to many here but it's fairly new to me and I've not seen cPanel mentioned here yet, so was wondering if I am going about it the right way.

    | Zoolander
    0

  • Hello, I recently submitted our main url to BOTW and Yahoo directory, Typically how long does it take for google to index these? Thanks!

    | TP_Marketing
    0

  • In this Whiteboard Friday video, Rand says there is a danger in offering products for blogs to give away, simply requesting a link to your product or website in exchange for the giveaway. Could someone elaborate on what the danger is? Is this also the case with offering products for review?

    | esztanyo
    0

  • Hi All, I am relatively new to the world of SEO but it is vital to our business that we improve in this area.  I believe our site architecture is good although we have a new site coming in the next few weeks which is effectively a re-skinning of the existing one that makes the user experience more relevant. What I would like to know is how much a link building program shoudl cost from an SEO provider and how they quantify what they charge - is there some kind of indicative cost per link or is it just "give us some money and we will do our best?" We have started writing daily articles on our news site and our natural listings are already pretty good.  What I am looking to achieve is top three status for the London area (where we work) accross a broad range of keywords.  I know this is what everyone wants but we are already front page and top 3 for many keywords and the back link building would appear to be where we are weaker compared to some of our competitors. Thanks James   www.morganpryce.co.uk

    | Jcoveyduck
    0

  • Hi, So you launch a blog on your website, fill it with lots of great content and update weekly with more great content. From what I know your looking to gain 2 things! 1. Users linking back to your blog and 2. Sharing the content on social networks. Building up social lists on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc so when you do post something new you have a hub of users to help push your post by sharing it on social networks which should also help to generate more backlinks. Is this the main purpose of a blog for SEO? Would anything else apart from the above effect the SEO for the site? Maybe the freshness of content also has a positive impact! Also if your blog is picking up lots of links, for this example lets say 100 links a month and the rest of the site outside of the blog is picking up 10 a month will the blogs power of picking up links effect the rest of the sites rankings, would you need to anchor text link out of the posts in the blog to make the most out of it? Cheers

    | activitysuper
    0

  • Hoping for some guidance here. I am trying to place anywhere on page 1 in google organic search for my targeted term "Philadelphia wedding photographers." My blog posts rank very well for their own keywords/long-tails, but I'm having trouble ranking my homepage for my main aforementioned keyword. The frustrating part is that my SEOmoz domain/page authority should easily place me near the top of page 1, but instead I'm at the top of page 3 (down from page 2 last week). Bartlett Pair Photography Potential issues that I am aware of: #1 backlink anchor text is non-branded (branded is 2nd highest..I am working to fix this over time) Homepage itself is bare content due to nature of photography niche (though, my title tag and header focus on keyword and brand). I'm sure everyone will recommend that I increase homepage content, but virtually all competitors have a similar lack of homepage content so I don't understand how I rank so low given my page/domain authority. I've received 1 unnatural link notice from Google on March 22, 2012, but this is the only time, and really had no visible impact on my traffic. I have no local listing. I will remedy this in about 2 months when I have a physical location. Regardless, organic (non-local) listings are important to me because my physical location is 30 minutes outside city center. Is there a specific way that my website and Facebook page need to be connected in order to receive social graph juice? Currently, my website has some social plugins to like/share/tweet my content...and my FB page has a link to my website in the About section. (They also both use the same brand name). Most of my social activity (likes/shares) is directly on my Facebook fan page, and not on my website. Thank you in advance for any advice you may have! I'm hoping that someone is able to point out a strategy other than 1) more (branded) backlinks and 2) more homepage content!

    | bartlettpair-328742
    0

  • There are still a few things that I need clarifications for link building. I have joined many forums and I am following some big website (Seomoz / search engine watch / search engine land) and such for ideas about link building. There are  various different suggestions among them for example about Create a blog, Profile links, Article directories,Web 2.0 submission,Press release submission, Infographic submissions,Company directory submissions,Video submissions,Niche specific directories,Logo/Graphic/Web design directories,Free web directories,Non-English directories,RSS directories,Guest posting,Games Submission's and social bookmarking, Blog commenting, Forum posting.Q&A,Wiki Links,Local listings,Getting trackbacks. one would say to use it the other would say not to, can you please guide as to what is the right way to follow these suggestions. Also nofollow backlinks have any effect on the SERP? Thanks.

    | KLLC
    1

  • Recently we have been getting higher organic traffic number than usual? Some of them are keywords that I have not been working on? How is this possible? When Google gives you a bump is it gradually? Most of them long tail words. If our backlink/content building is slowly beginning to work would this explain it? I did submit my site to BOTW and Yahoo, not sure if this could also be why we are getting a boost? Thank You

    | TP_Marketing
    0

  • Last week I noticed a substantial drop in "Links to Your Site" in Google Webmaster Tools on several of my websites. Upon further investigation the reduced links were from our sister sites. It appears that Google has reduced the number of links they are counting from links in our headers and footers from these sites to our main websites. It is not affecting our rankings or traffic. Is Google doing some clean up with what they are showing in webmaster tools for links from related, owned sites? Any cause for concern?

    | tdawson09
    0

  • How useful are you finding blog commenting to be regarding link building?  I was having a discussion with someone about this today, and I thought some input from the Moz community may be helpful. How helpful do you find blog commenting to be in link building? Do you have any evidence of effectiveness/ineffectiveness? Is it something you still currently do (for link building)? Any input is appreciated.  Thanks guys!

    | DeliaAssociates
    0

  • I wanted to get the community thoughts on the specific question of: How many high quality directory submission back links per day is too many for a new website with zero back links ? or is there never too many when it comes to high domain authority back links ?

    | DerekDenholm
    0

  • Community, Has anyone here implemented rich snippets for clients/own properties and can advise how long it took for them to appear in Google Thanks

    | tomypro
    0

  • Hello fellow Mozzers! I'm still new to the SEO game and have been doing lots of reading and research about SEO. From what I've learned nowadays it all comes down to great content and links that come from it. I have to admit I'm a visual learner, I need to see it to understand and learn better. I was hoping that someone can provide some examples of GREAT Content (whether its a blog post, page, article, etc...) I know EGOL is one of the most valuabe SEOMoz users and by reading his forum responses he always advises to write great content to build links... Hoping EGOL and other SEOMoz users would be so kind to share an example or two of what they think is great content. One more question (related). Since all the Google updates this year in regards to links and content, I've read numerous times on this Q&A forum that great content gets links, and that submitting articles to directories or buying links doesn't work anymore or at least not something that a whitehat SEO should implement for a long term strategy, does that mean that if you publish great content on your site that is informative, unique and valuable it will get you links without submitting to directories or buying links? Is it really that simple? Thank you in advance! Igor

    | igor.pinchevskiy
    0

  • Is  a resource linking page a good way to build backlinks? Do I need to ask permission of the site I am linking? & If do build a resource page do I have to keep in mind keyword density rule, not to stuff too many links on page?  I see one of my competitors using a "resource page" and linking to some high athority sites, (which I know they have not asked permission) b/c they are big name site, NFL, NHL, ESPN etc. Any suggestions much appreciated! Thank you!!!

    | TP_Marketing
    0

  • Experts frequently mention that one of the best way to build the link is to guest blog with some authoritative blogs in your niche after Penguin, Panda and other animals invaded SEO landscape. At the same time everyone agrees that "Content is the king" and if you have unique and useful content, people would link to you without any extra efforts on your part. Do you see any contradiction in those statements? I spent my time, my resource, my genius writing up very good posts. As a matter of fact all my post are good (IMHO), but I can churn out only 2 or 3 masterpieces per month. Should I share my content willingly as a guest post to other websites who are not my local direct competitor of course, but nonetheless are in my niche, thus adding to their authority on the subject? I will get a link out of it. Would I get a significant traffic? I doubt that. At least from my limited experience. Or should I strengthen my own site striving to be such authority in my niche? But without strong external link profile  Google shall frown upon me and my site. Personally I inclined more to save most of the content for my own blog. What do you gals and guys think?

    | SirMax
    0

  • I've been doing a lot of research lately on link building & I've read a lot about having a diverse amount of links. Social links, Blog links, comment links, footer links, No follow links, Directory links as well as links with Anchor text URL match, brand match, partial brand match, non-descriptive, and with keywords. But there is a lot of talk of removing those links that look like a site that's built just for link building purposes.... but Directories are basically built for link building are they not? I'm wondering if anyone can tell me if they feel links from the following directories would be bad links. (Non-Paid) http://www.yoganza.com http://www.wkool.com http://www.wee-directory.com http://www.voicelet.com www.hotfrog.ca http://www.webdirectorieslist.com http://multiplelistingboard.com http://mozdirectory.net http://freedirectorypr.info Industry specific below: http://bestautolinks .com http://automotivedome.com http://automobilebuzz.com http://craigsautolinks.com Thanks so much for the help!

    | DCochrane
    0

  • I know that it is best to diversify your inbound link profile, but I would like to know the best practices for a domain as a whole as opposed to the domains component pages. If I have a good link source (say  for example Squidoo)  that can provide links to a website's home page AND a few of its lower tier pages, are all these links of more or less equal value (for seo purposes) to each of the link targets,  or does Google simply use a "one source domain, one counted link" approach? Thanks Bill

    | veezer
    0

  • Guys, I have an interesting dilemma that the team here is discussing and wanted your input here is the situation: 1. We had our home page rank for a key word 4-5 on google for the past 2 years. 2. About 5 weeks ago, the home page and a sub page began ranking on top 10 for the same term. 3. Today, the sub-page a "What is page" ranks 3-5 on google and the home page is dropped somewhere like 22 or so now ** I believe I should begin redirecting that anchor text to the sub page, and maybe even some or all of our internal anchor texts to this page... Any recommendations?  The home page is optimized to help get conversions, so we hate to 'give up' on that term, but any one run into this? What did you do? Thanks Community SEOMOZ! for any input...

    | redfishking
    0

  • Hi, When a blog owner posts my article with a no-follow tag applied to the anchor text link pointing out I kind of get the feeling as soon as Google indexes this article with that tag applied its game over and that article is now dead, even if the blog owner changes it back to follow after Google has found it. I do a lot of guest blogging and it seems as though when Google first crawls the new content for the first time and follows the link something extra passes through. For example: I guest posted on a blog and the article was 'follow', I sore a increase in rankings for about 3 weeks, then the article got flagged in My Blog Guest that it had been changed and I noticed a no-follow tag had been applied. Ranking dropped back down by the time I had contacted the blog owner and asked him to change it, which he did and still it is follow but I never sore rankings come back, it was like soon as Google had seen the article link was 'nofollow' changing it back made no difference. I could be completely wrong as this is just guessing but its almost like when a link is tampered with it indicates its not a natural link.

    | activitysuper
    0

  • http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1999/01/17484 how do you get a link from an article like this where the author writes for a high domain authority site and just ends up listing a lot of links to different companies?

    | JohnWalker
    0

  • Hi, I have the following problem regarding guest blogging. When sending out the pitch one can utilise the client's email so it appears coming from the business/client itself rather than an SEO agency. However the problem that I am facing is what author bio to use. Is it good to sign the posts as the internal SEO agency copywriters, as the client or I have found some suggesting to create a fake persona. If the client or client staff as the author bio is not a solution what is the best way? I hope my question is not confusing but this would really help me out. Thanks in advance Kind Regards, Conrad

    | conrad88
    0

  • Hello, we are trying to work with http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ but it does not work both in chrome and IE, what seem to be the problem? thanks, Sam.

    | bwrecycling
    0

  • Guest blogging seems to be one of the few legit linking methods left these days. My problem is that I work for a company in the gaming industry niche. All of the blogs directly connected are either spam, competitors or affiliates. I have been doing some guest blogging with connected articles on non-related blogs such as "financial advice if you win big" or a recent news story for a general blog. However, these sites are not connected and I cannot get the more quality general sites interested in these topics. Any advice for me?

    | theLotter
    0

  • Hi, I'm using Site Explorer to research my website but the stats don't have up! Page Specific - External Followed Links: 11
    Sub Domain - External Followed Links: 40
    Root Domain - External Followed Links: 40 Total links: 1,733
    Total links on webmaster tools: 781 How does this add up? Why am I getting varied results.. And what is the difference between Page, Sub and Root when I only tested www.mysite.com? Any help would be great! Shaun

    | Hughescov
    0

  • As the Penguin update continues to change the way sites do SEO, many have moved towards guest posting as a "white hat" means of getting links from legitimate related sites. Now, admittedly, the content that is being posted via guest blogging seems to be much higher than the crap that was being posted on article directories and such. You also don't get the duplicate content like you did with the spun articles and mass submissions. But, guest blogging is becoming as ubiquitous as the paid blog links (i.e payperpost, etc.). I for one, have used guest posting, although I am not 100% sold on the results. It seems that with the increase of guest blog networks, these links are becoming as easy to get as the article directory links. Doesn't that lessen the SEO value of the links? And here the question that is always pestering: If you have quality content, why would you ever place it on someone else's site? This is the meat of the discussion: Shouldn't guest blogging be limited to unique opportunities (i.e a VERY established guest blogger in your niche)? Or is it okay to post content on as many related legitimate blogs as you can? Thoughts...ideas....

    | inhouseseo
    0

  • I have some coughunnatural linkscough on a blogger.com blog which isn't mine (it was done by an SEO company). I just can't remember which company did it. The blog is inactive and is a one-page blog. Any suggestion to get this link down or reach the author / owner of the blog? Thank you!

    | sbrault74
    0

  • Hi, I would like to ask you about a really specific case: hosting company web badges. I'm working for a web hosting company, and in order to increase the number of incoming links we were considering providing web badges to our customers, so they could link back to us. Some customers would be glad to show they host their website with us placing one web badge in their website, but after the last penguin update I'm not sure if it's still a good idea. As the company is hosting several thousand websites it could be a really good opportunity to get some back links, but I would like to hear your suggestions. Shall we use "nofollow" on the links? (But that way we would be missing all the link juice that we could get) Would it be better to just show the web badge on the home page of each domain and keep the dofollow attribute? Are there some terms that we should use or avoid in the links? Maybe "Hosted at <company name="">" would be a good anchor text, or shall we just use the company name? </company> So, I would love to hear your advice about doing or not doing it. Or any advice about how to do it properly in order to get the desired result. Thanks! 🙂 Xavier.

    | xtrill
    0

  • I was thinking of paying money to be in the Yahoo directory, is it worth it?

    | photoseo1
    0

  • Hi! My company used to receive dozens of qualified leads from paid listings in directories that were relevant to our services. Lately, these leads have dropped dramatically. For those of you who use directories as a lead source (rather than simply for link building), have you noticed anything similar? How are you coping with this? In your opinion, will lead-generating directories become a thing of the past?

    | ClarityVentures
    0

  • I have a website that had been hit quite hard by the Google Penguin update, losing about 75% of its traffic. The website dropped to positions 300 - 400 for it's most significant keywords. The website had some unnatural links but not that much, maybe about 10 to 20 unnatural links and I've had them all removed about a month ago by the SEO company (submitcomfort.com). Another issue with this website is that it was hacked in early 2012 and hackers used a writeable directory to store porn stuff (my website has absolutely nothing to do with porn!). That said, the website acquired lots of backlinks from porn and warez websites. But today I noticed that impressions are now up by 23% and clicks are up by 54% according to Google Webmaster Tools and it's now ranking in positions 30 to 50 for it's main keywords. So my question is: was that a penalty that's just been lift off? How can it come back from the dead like this? I'm investigating before reinvesting time and money in this website because I'm not sure if this is temporary. Thank you

    | sbrault74
    0

  • Hello! Ive been analyzing  my competitors backlinks and see a large number of their google display ads shows as (alt text).  I do have a google adwords account but stayed away from it in the past opting to use the search network only to keep cost down.  Do the images count as a backlink if I can see them in the Seomoz tool? Thank You!!

    | TP_Marketing
    0

  • Hi, could google's crawler recognize the following example as a link and will be crawl the url? any experience? ty for your help

    | censeo
    0

  • If your domain name is a exact match keyword and you have a really high percentage of your links with the anchor text of that keyword, are you at high risk of getting penalized by Penguin or does Google's algorithm adjust for this. For example if your site name was AuethenticBaseballJerseys.com and people usually linked to your site at "Authentic Baseball Jerseys". Thanks!

    | ProjectLabs
    0

  • I heard an SEO talk about the concept of "activating" a link - meaning that if an external link to your site exists, but google doesn't detect that it has gotten any actual clicks, they will significantly discount or ignore the value of the link. Obviously between Chrome, toolbars, and GA, google does have a lot of ways to detect whether a link has gotten clicks.  What is the SEOmoz take on this issue?

    | kbrake
    0

  • I had a general question, will I be penalized for using one anchor text  108 times? I did some reading and I read that Google will be less likely to penalize you if it is your brand name instead of like "make money fast" or another spammy type of anchor text? The anchor text that I used was our website name thanks.

    | ilyaelbert
    0

  • My site shows no internal followed links in OSE, but each page on my site has internal links, including to the domain itself - jonnyt.me. Any idea why this might be and how I could fix it?

    | jontarbuck
    0

  • I have affiliate websites that are harming for one of 2 reasons: 1. They are on adult websites (and I don't want to be in a bad neighborhood) or 2. They are using a Frameset (so their content appears identical to mine and I am getting "credit" for all their junk links) I cannot get these websites to remove our links so I have blocked their IPs on our production firewall. Is this an effective method or should I do something else with these links?

    | theLotter
    0

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