Page and Domain Authority and other bits
-
Hi,
I am in the process of finding blogs to have a few articles published with a couple of links in each. Articles will all be unique and relevant to the link I drop in and relevant in someway to the reader
However I have a few questions.
My site is a designer menswear site, so I have picked fashion and sports sites first and foremost to have the articles published.
Now, I have a guy who owns about 30 different websites. 2 of them are sports based and about 10 are fashion based. Around $10-$15 an article.
I have ran them all through the Open Site Explorer Tool and picked out the best ranked ones.
Now my problem is, how do I know if its a good site to not only list an article on, but to pay for it as well.
The sites page ranks are around the 30-45 range, the domains are around the 35-45 range. What is a good range to have? I know the higher the better but is 30-45 good enough to pay for? (I don't mind paying the $10 each (£7 my money) for each one)
Also as he is quoted me in dollars, I assume there all USA based, so majority of users are USA based. Well I am UK based and only ship to the UK. Will this matter as much if I am trying to gain backlinks? Obviously a UK based site, would be ideal, but is it a case of getting more external links on the web for Google to find, as long as they are relevant to the user?
Any help would be great.
Thanks
Will
-
I always though guest replies would be ignored by Google, is this the case?
Guest replies are definitely not ignored by Google. Sometimes you can perform a search for a term and the result will lead you to an article where the search term is only located in the user generated comment section of the page.
Our competitor sells clothing but has a reply on a CSS site? Would this be worth doing like this or is it a waste of time?
I would suggest working to obtain as broad of a link profile as possible. I like being linked to from credible off-topic sites such as a CSS or graphic design sites for two reasons. First, if it is a follow'd link it offers at least some value and serves to broaden the site's link profile. Additionally if my client's site looks so good it is being mentioned on web design sites, I know the overall design is good. Of course there is the corner case where you are being called out for bad design, but I'll let that topic go
In short, receiving mentions or links from design and other off topic sites is nice, but should not be a focus for your link building efforts unless your site is related to those topics.
-
Cheers. Very interesting.
What would you advice be on sites like this: http://sixrevisions.com/css/30-exceptional-css-navigation-techniques/
One of our competitors have a link on this site, it is a PA of 69 and a DA of 88.
I always though guest replies would be ignored by Google, is this the case?
Our competitor sells clothing but has a reply on a CSS site?
Would this be worth doing like this or is it a waste of time?
If you look for the comment from Aphrodite, that links to their site.
Cheers
Will
-
What other methods do you suggest?
A couple suggestions:
-
publish the content on your site then promote it. You can use social media, commenting on active blogs, forums and other means to promote your content. You would then get full credit for the article and build your own site's user base.
-
publish the content on sites which accept articles without charge.
You also need to understand how easy it is for those sites to completely manipulate their stats. Traffic stats are very easy to manipulate, as are DA and PA. You need to evaluate the site's real value yourself.
I looked at the first site http://urban-gear.com and I would definitely devalue that site (i.e. consider it's true DA as lower) based on it's link profile. When using OSE to view a site's link profile I recommend using the following four filters: Followed + 301, only external, pages on this subdomain, group by domain. Using those settings I see the following:
-
The site's strongest link is from weiderprohomegym.info, but that link is actually gone as the site's domain registration expired.
-
The second link is from feeds.feedburner.com/nerdlike and appears to have been deleted as well. I cannot locate the link.
-
The third link is nofollow'd but the fourth link is real and I can verify it. The PA is 48 on the page, which is a big drop down from the 67 PA of the first site.
When you remove a site's top links, if the site does not have a very deep profile there can be a big drop in measurements such as DA/PA. Unless this site has earned new, strong links it's rankings will drop noticeably.
I looked further and cannot find support for the quality of the other inbound links. The 4th/5th/6th linked sites offer social media and user comments but NONE of those articles have even a single user comment. Two of the articles have ONE tweet (which may have been by the author) and no other social signals. Not a single Like or +1.
I can't dedicate the time to investigate the other sites, but I found exactly what I expected. The first site's visible link profile is very weak and does not even support it's low DA.
With respect to the USA links, if you have a UK site targeted to UK readers then the US links will be foreign and not offer the same value as links from the UK. If your site is e-commerce and you do not offer prices in USD then the link value will not be the same as other UK links.
-
-
Now my problem is, how do I know if its a good site to not only list an article on, but to pay for it as well.
Without looking at the site I can tell they are NOT good sites on which to list an article. Why? Because good sites don't charge you for permission to publish your content.
There can be exceptions such as a PR site who charge to distribute your article to particular news fronts. Otherwise you simply should never pay to publish content in this manner. It is black hat SEO and Google may already be aware of the site. If Google is aware, they will devalue the links so even if you see PA 10 & DA 10, you are actually getting 0 from the site. If they are not presently aware the site is selling links, they can become aware of the issue at any time in which case you will pay for the links now and later the links will be devalued and you will wonder why your rankings have dropped. When you have 1000 links you wont be able to tell which links have been devalued with a reasonable amount of effort.
Even if you were going to actually pay for a link, the DA of that site is way too low for consideration in my opinion. Try other methods to get your content noticed.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Solved How to reduce the spam score for my domain?
My domain longfeifei.com is for a regular company website and someone sent a lot of external links on different low-quality websites on the internet. Now the score is very high about 75%. If I disavow the unusual links from google search console. Is it possible to reduce the spam score? Is MOZ associated with GOOGLE Data? Thanks,
Moz Pro | | niaokun6838072 -
Domain Autorithy index release Date?
Hello. I would ike to know if there is a calendar to check for domain autority index to be released. Im getting new backlinks and I would like to see the effects. Thanks for your time. Regards.
Moz Pro | | ebest.cl0 -
Duplicate pages coming from links from the login page - what should we do about them?
This is a follow on to an earlier question which was well answered by Dirk Ceuppens regarding abnormal crawl issues. We are seeing that the issues relating to Duplicate Pages are coming from links from the login page which shows information about where the user was redirected from. For example, if the visitor is not logged on and wishes to wish-list an item, they will be redirected to the login page, with the item code and intended action in the url; which can then continue on to the desired page once logged on. The MOZ crawler is seeing these pages as having Duplicated Content whilst they are all the same apart from a piece of information in the URL. Should we be blocking these duplications? Are they a risk to us? What should we be doing? Many thanks, Sarah
Moz Pro | | Mutatio_Digital0 -
Page authority questions?
I've been analyzing some IT communities ...in order to check how relevant is the page authority vs PageRank. I found one main site which is organized by "communities'..and every community is a sub-domain. The root domain has an authority of 90/100 which it should be great......so the sub-domains "inherit" part of this authority.... Until here everything seems to be perfect. However, I went deeper and I picked one of these communities. Analyzing the "Linking Root Domain" I discovered it only has only 5 root domains pointing to its home page. Those 5 Root Domains have generated more than 134k links. That doesn't seem to be "natural". Checking those 5 Root Domains I discovered that they have been registered by the same Root Domain site. Ex: Main domain: Domain.com Community1.domain.com Community2.domain.com.... Linking Root Domains: DomainXY.com DomainABC.com DomainRST.com DomainFGH.com DomainOPQ.com It seems to me that it is easy to cheat the authority domain score. Just creating others sites developing the same topic and generating back links to your main domain
Moz Pro | | SherWeb0 -
All My Metrics Improved from Last Month but Domain Authority Decreased
Hi SEOMoz community! My site's Domain Authority has decreased from 43 to 41 since last month. I cannot figure out why. ALL my metrics (Domain MozRank, Domain MozTrust, External Followed Links, etc. have increased. See attached image. Is Domain Authority a ranking system based on your peers? Can someone better explain the Domain Authority algorithm? Thanks for any help you can offer. mozrank.png
Moz Pro | | Travis-W0 -
How can I find out why my Domain authority has gone down?
I need to find out why the domain authority has dropped 6 points in the last 6 months - any ideas where to start looking?
Moz Pro | | RedC0 -
Freaked out over domain authority ranking drop.
Should I be freaked out that website's domain authority dropped 4 points? Is it normal for websites to fluctuate a couple of points or have I really screwed something up?
Moz Pro | | bewoldt0 -
New site on page check
hello wonderful Mozzers, I am building a new site and was wondering if any of you knew any latest " thorough" ON Page Check Lists? I want to make sure I build the site right, and do every bit of on page and new site seo right. I have access to the SEOMOZ guides as well. Have a fab day guys, Best, Vijay
Moz Pro | | vijayvasu0