Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: Link Building

Chat through link building best practices and outreach techniques.


  • 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

  • If I run an OSE report and check the 'top links' tab, I find that 95% of the links are internal pages on the same root domain. Can I deduce from this that my link profile sucks, and is in need of serious improvement? Thanks.

    | -Al-
    0

  • I recently discovered a cool SEO tool. I didn't write it down, save it, bookmark, etc... And now I can't remember the name of the tool for the life of me, but I'd really like to use it again. I was hoping I could list of the features that I remember, and one of you Mozzers know what I'm talking about. It was a backlink analysis tool. It had a free version, and after you performed so many searches/searched so many backlinks, you had to pay. From what I remember it was a fairly nominal fee with the most popular package in around $25. The reason that I liked it so much was you could take an OSE csv file, dump it in there, and it would sort all of the links by link type, i.e, footer, comment, directory, etc... Then it would put it all into a nice pie chart for you and show you the % of the total links that each link type made up. It would also analyze the anchor text and would show you every anchor text used, and the % of the total each one made up.

    | stevefidelity
    0

  • It seems that linked in is doing some type of redirect on their links, that block them from passing value to the connected site. Is there anyway to get link value out of public LinkedIn profiles, or did they shut that down?

    | VanadiumInteractive
    0

  • Getting .edu links seems to be the Holy Grail for many SEOs and link builder. I understand how difficult it can be to get a link from a .edu domain that happens to cover topics in your industry. What I am wondering is, has there been any studies/tests to determine if .edu links are more powerful that a link from a trusted/relavant .com? All things being equal (DA, PA, etc.), is the .edu better? What if the .com has slightly better metrics, is the .edu still better for SEO? I haven't been able to find any expert blog posts about the added value.

    | inhouseseo
    1

  • Looking at my competitors backlink profiles they all seem to have lots or reciprocal links and banner exchanges etc... I thought that only one way links really had any value. The reciprocal links they do have appear to be pretty spammy but the sites are still ranking well? Should I be adopting reciprocal links and banner exchanges. I know these strategies worked years ago but surely not in 2012?

    | SamCUK
    0

  • I own multiple websites in the same niche but all are targeting a different sub-niche and different keywords. Is it a good idea to interlink all my websites? Could there be some negative effects?

    | sbrault74
    0

  • I have lots of unique article and ready for spreading but want to know which one is more effecting in SERP. Currently i am adding articles to Ezine and Hubpages, please let me know your suggestion ?

    | mamuti
    0

  • If anyone doesn't think that spam sabotage is possible, here is proof. In February we received a suspicious spammy link notice and penalty from Google. We did several things to try and fix the problem including getting old links from not very relevant sites removed and submitted, and were denied, reconsideration twice. On the advice of Billy here on the forum, we went through the bottom end of our inbound links through OSE and found about forty domains that had linked to us and were purely trash sites full of link spam. We filed another reconsideration request listing every one of these sites along with dates we tried to contact the site owner (almost always impossible) to delete links to our site and two weeks later we received a note back that the manual penalty had been lifted. My question now is, from your experience, how long does it take to notice a recovery from this penalty? This experience also has me concerned that site sabotage is actually pretty simple when you can plant garbage links from 40 sites, many of which are the same with different urls, and get someone penalized on Google.

    | IanTheScot
    0

  • Hi guys, Just an open discussion. I don't want to be told to use directories or just 'guest blog'.. What is the best method you are currently using? A lot of my competitors are using older techniques for quick wins but we're wary to do that due to the long term consequences... Thanks

    | tomcraig86
    0

  • I'm wondering how much added benefit there is to gaining multiple links from the same domain? For example when looking at a competitor in open site explorer I see they have 239 linking domains but 5,066 links. How much additional benefit are they getting over just having 239 links from 239 domains? Also how many links is an optimal number from a domain in that case before there become no more point seeking links from that domain? 5? 10? Thanks

    | performagen
    1

  • I have a very strong affiliate network. Currently all my affiliate links go to a subdomain with a 301 redirect to my site. I have somewhat of a linking profile besides affiliates, but it is not as strong as the affiliate site. Are my affiliates enhancing my linking profile and helping me? Or Does it look to Google like I am benefiting from "paid links" and they would prefer I add NOFOLLOW or a 302 to my affiliate links? Thanks for your help!

    | theLotter
    0

  • Dear all After talking with our company's SEO company they have advised that a link builder we employ to post artciles is posting on sites which will have negative page rankings / equity and which Penguin will penalise. These are the sites our link builder is posting on: wordpress.com
    weebly.com
    blogger.com
    livejournal.com
    tumblr.com
    squidoo.com
    blog.com Ouir SEO company have advised we ask our link builder to stop posting articles to these sites as Penguin will penalise us because of it. Do you agree? Thanks Gavin

    | gavinr
    0

  • Hi there, i know inbound links are what hold the main value in terms of link building but if i have an inbound link from a big company such as ITV or BBC and they have put an article on their site linking back to mine, would it be beneficial if i made a comment on my site and then link back to their article or will this not really help? Sorry as you can tell im very new to seo! thanks anthony

    | anthonybriant
    0

  • Recently, we created a new website for a client, and put it on a new domain.  We put a 301 redirect site-wide on the old site.  The 301 is working correctly, and any visit to the old site is now going to the new one.  So, from a functionality standpoint, we're looking good. However, looking at the domain authority of the sites, it doesn't seem that the old links are passing value to the new site.  The old site had 43 linking root domains, and a domain authority of 30, compared to the new site with 16 linking root domains and an authority of 22.  If I understand correctly, the links should be viewed as pointing to the new site and passing link juice to the new one, correct?  Is there a reason why this may be happening that I should be looking into?  Any thoughts or advice on this one would be appreciated.  Thanks guys!

    | DeliaAssociates
    0

  • The domain is keyword heavy think along the lines of "mountainbikes.com" and they are ranking ok for mountain bikes, however on inspection they have a LOT of poor quality back links and a lot of those links are anchor text phrases (and far too much of it!). A lot of people recommend building on brand in situations like this, however how would I go about doing this for a site without a branded domain name? In this case their is a company name but it's not the same as the domain name, would you simply build links using the company name "Uber Bikes" or use the domain www.mountainbikes.com. If the aim is just to build a more varied back link profile then I guess using both would be good? Thanks in advance! 🙂

    | SEOKeith
    0

  • Hi, We have an eCommerce site that has recently been hit for some unnatural linking, resulting in a warning in our Google Webmaster Tools account.  We weren't doing anything particularly underhand (and indeed before Penguin there wasn't a cause for concern) but nevertheless Google has picked up and penalised us. We've instantly removed the worst offending links and requested a resubmission.  If this doesn't result in positive action from Google we're planning on employing the services of an Oracle member on SEOmoz who was kind enough to give us some fantastic free advice in order to go through and remove any further links that may be seen as questionable. Moving forward however I'm a little bit overwhelmed as to exactly what we should be doing in order to create a positive, natural link portfolio.  I understand the emphasis is on ‘natural’ linking but we’ve been online for 8 years and I think it’s fairly safe to say that the number of links we have now is probably representative of about our ‘lot’ when it comes to 100% natural links.  It would be nice to give our portfolio a nice gentle push in the right direction. I’ve checked through SEOmoz and the most up to date link building article they have appears to be http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links - This guide however does seem to suggest some things that are potentially frowned upon now (for example, highly optimised anchor text I understand is now a no-no). Obviously, in days gone by I could look at Open Site Explorer to try to emulate my competitors but, to be honest, most of them have what I would describe as a fairly poor link profile and if I'm going to invest real time in to this I want to make sure I'm heading off in the right direction. Does anybody on here know of a really high quality post penguin link building guide, either on SEOmoz or elsewhere that I can use as some bedtime reading?  Our website is eCommerce in nature so an article tailored towards online selling would be ideal. Thanks for reading! Chris

    | ChrisHolgate
    0

  • Hi there; Can any body direct me towards honest and true link building service. we are in the business of providing audio video services. I prefer individuals. Help will be appreciated.

    | tanveer1
    1

  • Hi - Have started off with a Automotive site - www.mycarhelpline.com based in India 15 months back Have achieved close to daily visitors of 2500+ in numbers Have made do follow links through - Article submission in high pr directories, couple of press releases, high pr forum submission, directory submission with high pr (though yet to get link from yahoo, botw n dmoz) and couple pf backlinks in high other pr sites Need to know - Best way to create backlinks - is article writing the best way to create backlinks - as against paid directories and paid press releases. I Can target 350 articles in high pr article directories for 6 mo - Ezine, Selfgrowth, Articledashboard n others How can i achieve my target of 10,000 daily visitors. What link bulding strategy do i need to adopt - as am finding difficult to explore sites where i can build backlinks except articles There are other Auto sites - heard of getting 40K unique visitors on daily basis Pl suggest . thnx

    | Modi
    0

  • I'm currently working on a project where most of the links are from irrelevant sources referring to the site of the past domain owner.  My question is should I remove as many of these as possible or let them be for now.  My gut tells me for every new link I build that I should attempt to remove some of the old ones but I'm not exactly sure on how to proceed with this situation.  Thanks in advance for any input.

    | brandonschultz
    0

  • I just want to ask your advice or suggestions, my new client site received a link warning from Google regarding unnatural link, as I've checked his site backlinks using Seomoz site explorer there are almost 4000+ backlinks and almost 3/4 of the total links are from forum profile spam and blog comment spam. I know it is impossible to remove all those links totally. I would like to ask your advice if what's the best thing to do? Setting up a brand new site and domain or doing a cleanup. Thanks in advance.

    | seoehelper89
    0

  • Hello, in our site www.mycarhelpline.com - we have just reworked on header and footer links. Have removed lost of unncessary footer links. However, the header links on extreme top right side has some links like - login, register, about us, partner with us  etc. Is is that google will give importance to these links and i rather should move them to footer links of page and should move the most important anchor links on the top header. Pl suggest

    | Modi
    0

  • 1. How important is having the keywords you are targeting on the page? Lets say you rank position 10 for 'Plumbing Services London' but you don't actually use the word 'London' at all in the page copy, what kind of effect could you expect if you added the word in the content? Bit of a silly question really, I know it would have some effect but how important is it really? 2. What kind of effect would adding a blog with lets say 500 words of great content twice a week have on rankings? If you anchor text linked out of the copy would this alone help with ranking or is the reason for adding a blog to just use it as link bait to pull in more links, thus rankings are only effected when the blog starts to gain links?

    | activitysuper
    0

  • E.g. create credible links to your site without to much manual labour?

    | Kflo
    0

  • Hey guys, I am about to start creating a content calendar that I will be using to pitch blogs and news websites with the goal of gaining a link and driving traffic to my site. Do you guys have some bookmarked links that can help me follow a step by step process on how to develop a content calendar? I'm looking at something like what tools to use, how to figure out what's hot in a particular niche, social media topics, etc. Thanks in advance!

    | Workaholic
    0

  • I have followed the suggestion regarding quality inbound linking from reputable sites....ie open directory, yahoo, and only directories recommended by other SEO groups and only with PR's of 4 or higher. After listing, my PR # went down. How do I find the culprit to start reversing this? My fear is I am on a downward slope..Thanks!

    | cschwartzel
    0

  • Hello, in our site www.mycarhelpline.com - we have just reworked on header and footer links. Have removed lost of unncessary footer links. However, the header links on extreme top right side has some links like - login, register, about us, partner with us etc. Is is that google will give importance to these links and i rather should move them to footer links of page and should move the most important anchor links on the top header. Pl suggest

    | Modi
    0

  • Hello, The past 1-2 months I managed to get a website on some high authority news sources. For some reason I still cannot see them with opensiteexplorer, but they are showing up in the Webmaster account? Is there typically a big delay? Thanks1

    | TP_Marketing
    0

  • Hi - we are about to have a product review go live on a site that uses a paywall. Will the link from this still pass SEO value to our site, and should we therefore optimise it? Thanks

    | GBC
    0

  • Hi mozzers, I'm cleaning up our backlink profile and looking up anchortexts in OSE. I downloaded and selected one anchortext. However when I go to the sites OSE found, I can't find the links. I look in the source code and onpage keywords. Is it because of my lack of skills that I can't find the links 🙂 or isn't OSE working properly.

    | StephWeigert
    0

  • I was wondering in this day and age, do you guys think its worth submitted to these directories anymore?

    | PeterM22
    0

  • A friend of mine has asked me to help him out as he seems to have been hit by Negative SEO. His ranks have recently dropped and that seems to coincide with the following email he got. I have changed the web address Small gif for you and you f%$£@£ seo spamers http://www.website.com/website keyword : website now your site go down in google you f$%$£@g bastard !!! urls list ofer 5000 They have then listed him in 5000 blog comments which has seemed to cause his ranks to drop off the radar. I am going to help him out free of charge as he is a good mate, I am seeing conflicting stories on here some saying Negative SEO is a myth, others saying its very real. Anybody got any tips on how to resolve this quickly? Thanks James

    | tempowebdesign
    0

  • Hi, I have two similar websites hosted on the same hosting plan. However, they are on 2 different IP addresses. The last 3 digits differ. Site A: 120.30.30.150 Site B: 120:30.30.151 The problem is that I have significant drops in rankings since the first site A linked to site B. The links were 2000 submitted all at once because of site A's structure. Later, I put no follow attribute in order to tell Google "please don't count those". I keep doing link building for the second website from mostly articles and still see up and downturns which are too big (10-12 positions back). Is it possible that somehow Google still considers links form the first site to the second site as excessive link exchange? I clearly cannot find any other logical reason for these drops. I don't do forum, blog comments spam, I regularly check webmaster tools for messages about unnatural links, I do article posting. I will highly appreciate any opinion on the matter. Thank you in advance Mozzers

    | VasilTasev
    0

  • Okay - anyone else read about the new tool release from Bing especially the disavow tool? Very cool - id love to hear some chatter on what you guys think! Link:
    http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2012/06/27/disavow-links-you-don-t-trust.aspx  Here is to hoping Google will follow suit! Cheers - Kyle

    | kchandler
    0

  • Hi, Some back ground info first: My DA/PA is 42, the competitors who show up in the search engines for the term I am after have DA/PA 55/60. I have been creating anchor text links which target the term im after through guest blogging usually blogs with DA/PA 40+, I did this consistently with a guest post every 3 days for about a month so that's around 10 guest posts. And I also did some brand name blog comments, but these were no-follow and added sig to some forums. This moved me from page 5 to page 1, position 4. I then stopped and over the last 3 weeks it slipped to position 6 then to position 8. The competition doesn't look to actively target this term looking at the data from opensite explorer there main anchor text is there brand names. Why would I be slipping through the results? Not moaning just want to understand why so I can counter it. I was thinking about going for social signals through a blog to help.

    | activitysuper
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, Can you give me some creative Ideas, which type of backlinks can i use for Innerpages, which type to use on the startup and which later..? THanks

    | leadsprofi
    0

  • Where is the best place, from an SEO perspective to have my articles published? 1: My WordPress blog 2: As A guest post on another site. 3: Within the normal pages of my site. Here is my site: www.fvl.co.uk Any help and or advice would be gratefully recieved. Andy

    | First-VehicleLeasing
    0

  • Our site has a lot of content we are able to modify/distribute without too much time so I am planning to syndicate some of this using article distribution. Apart from Ezine articles, are there any other article distribution services I should/could consider using? I do know that I should also be focussing most of my resource on building high-quality links through guest blogs etc! However this seems like a relatively quick win. Thanks in advance

    | GBC
    0

  • Hello fellow Mozzers! I've been brainstorming about getting links for my site and thought of the following scenario, let me know if its a good idea or not. Who we are: an IT consulting firm. There are many tech support forums and groups on the internet including Google, Yahoo and a few other big dogs... I thought it would be a good idea to browse them on daily basis and find questions/topics that haven't been answered or don't have any real clear good answers, or are very popular. Then create an article in the blog on our site describing the same exact problem with a solution. Then would post a response under that question/topic with a link back to the solution that is located on our site. Hoping that this will bring in more traffic, links, and authority... However I also thought about the possibility  of getting spammed, since there are many spam sites that scrape forums and groups for web site addresses, email addresses, phones, etc... So what do you guys think, is it a good idea or should I stay away? Thank you!

    | igor.pinchevskiy
    0

  • Hi there, I am working on a content strategy that includes placing content (i.e. bylined articles, how-to's, guest blogs, etc.) on other web sites and embedding links back to our site.  In some cases we're very limited to what we can do with our bank links (i.e. just a company url), and in other cases we are free to place multiple anchor links within the content. In cases where we have no limitations, what are some best practices for implementing back links?  I understand it's important to link to deep pages (not just our home page), have diverse anchor text, and make the anchor links relevant to the surrounding content. Are there other things I should be thinking about in order to maximize the SEO value of such placements?  For example, is it better to have just one anchor link per placement?  Or should I aim to embed multiple anchor links within a single placement? Any advice would be much appreciated! Sincerely, Debra

    | Cherwell-Software
    0

  • Thanks to sites like SEOmoz and good folks like yourselves I was able to understand enough about SEO to know that the company we outsourced the SEO to were doing at best a sloppy job. I have seen that the link profile of site is totally unnatural in terms of factors such as relevancy and anchor text but also that around 95% of the 800 links are no follow. My question is whether these low quality no follow links causing unnatural anchor text ratios and poor link relevancy would hurt our rankings? I am basically wondering if I have to now go and try to have all those links removed somehow to avoid any problems going forward?

    | Luia
    0

  • From the competitive domain analysis, it looks like our site only has 1 internal link because there is only one more “total link” than “total external links”.  However, I am quite sure that we have many more internal links on our site, including breadcrumbs throughout the product pages.  What am I missing here? One other piece of potentially relevant information is that our URL changed about 6 weeks ago.  Would this change be impacting the number of internal links that we are getting credit for on our site?

    | dentalsupply-seo
    0

  • Hi, Im looking to build as many naked URL backlinks in order to diversify my link profile more, I have alot of anchor text backlinks and I see alot of people getting punished for having alot of anchors texts and not many basic URL links. Any suggestions on how to get alot of these as soon as possible?

    | Prestige-SEO
    0

  • Been working a lot on on-page seo and it mistifies me to observe that when i get A's constantly for search terms for on page but im not on the first 10 pages of Google compared to a competitor on page 1 with on page reports of C, D and even E! So, a lot of hard work "on page" does not equal to a lot of hard work which is obviously link building. my domain and page authority is only 18 and 27 whereas the main competitors are 50's and 60's. Is "link building" or lack of it my main issue? Here is the site http://www.govisitthelakes.com Very new to link building 😞 Anyone know a good place to start? Ive been working through open site explorer and starting to get some of my competitors links. How long to see results from link building to improve domain and page authority? or is it just "how long is a piece of string" and be patient. Thanks Ouji

    | oujipickle
    0

  • When I use opensiteexplorer for my webpage www.novelaspect.com and go under the "linking domains" tab, there is only 1 Twitter link that shows up. However, my competitors have multiple Twitter links. I've posted many many times on Twitter and linked the posts back to our website, but I've always used bitly to shorten the URLs. Is this what's keeping me from getting more backlinks from Twitter (which has a high domain authority!)? I haven't been able to find a straight answer anywhere yet, so I assumed using bitly is ok. Could it also be that opensiteexplorer takes months to register links? I seem to be missing many external links...In fact, the number of external links have dropped by around 10,000 in the past 2 months, and I know I didn't remove any links. Thanks!

    | Novelaspect
    0

  • Hi All I have a pdf that people can download from my site, what I want to know is that when people link to the pdf does the pdf share link power to pages linked to from within the pdf (like a html page would) or is the link power being waisted going to the pdf and should I somehow get the links to a normal page? The pdf is a free downloadable resource to people in the party planning industry and so gets linked to quite a bit by sites telling their readers to get the information we provide. Thanks for your thoughts Sean

    | SKE
    0

  • I have a client who has their blog on a subdomain instead of subfolder. Unfortunately, the eCommerce platform they are using does not allow them to implement a blog in the subfolder. So now we are looking at growing their blog as a means to drive more traffic to the main site. The blog is a mirror of the eCommerce site's navigation with the main content section being a blog rather than products. Will publishing content and building links to the subdomain blog pass authority to the main site?

    | mj775
    0

  • Hi there, I am looking at creating some back links into my website using guest blogging, be it product reviews, competitions or writing the post myself. I had a look at my competitors back link profile, all I can say is that they all look artificial (paid for) the article itself reads well, however when I see something like this: 'If you house got burgled and you never had home insurance in place, you could lose thousands of pounds of household goods' It just looks paid for, the question is if I am placing a guest post on a blog, what is best practice in making the link look more natural? Thank you

    | Paul78
    0

  • Hi Mozers, I am currently looking for the best tool for analyzing bulk urls which are potential link prospects. I would like information on seo quality metrics like rel=nofollow etc. Your advise is much valued. Thanks, Fuad

    | Fuad_YK
    0

  • How is it that Craigslist, and Backpage get a boost from google and take over 1 or more of the page one results in my niche? Ive also seen people ask a yahoo question, and answer with a link to their website? Are these just temporary boosts?

    | TP_Marketing
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.