Should you guest post on a site with no quality links?
-
Suppose a site is related to your industry and has a relatively good domain authority of 49. However when you look at their link profile it is mostly directories and they don't seem to have any natural links from quality sites. Would you still take the link if they offered to publish your guest post?
-
It's not just about getting links to boost your rankings. Think about the potential referral traffic too. A great blog post on a site relevant to your niche can send you well qualified traffic that converts well. At the end of the day, it's not traffic the site needs - it's business. Also think about your positioning - If you visit a bunch of sites about fly fishing and see guest posts from the same person on just about every site you visit, you're going to think that they are more likely to be an authority on the subject. Just make sure the articles are good! Don't just cobble together a low value blog post just to get the link. Think about your positioning, think about the particular audience of the site and create something worth reading. If you've been offered a guest post then it's not unreasonable to ask a couple of questions about the site's visitors. What kind of thing are they looking for and how many readers of the blog are there? Even if you just get your name/brand in front of your customers, that can be a good thing. If you were given the opportunity to talk to a group of potential customers - how big would the group need to be to make it worth your while?
-
Three good answers.
As you know, it is hard to get quality links, so they have experienced the same problem as everyone else. If the directory links are relevant, and there are no egregious ones, it isn't likely to do you harm.
In addition, you can't see all of the links the site has, so you don't know if there are better links or worse links also.
With a DA of 49, it can't be too bad, so if it is in your industry and you already checked out the other content and you didn't find any bad outgoing links, then it looks like a good opportunity.
-
Sure would.
1. Nothing lives or dies by a single link (spam or not).
2. If you have a link profile that doesn't elicit the red flag, those few links from spam-ish sites with descent authority seem to help out in my experience.
3. It's in your industry, so even a cookie-cutter 'directory' has it's place when it is highly relevant. It's still an effective way to build links no matter what the fear-mongering SEOs say
-
If they have good content, unique and not spammy looking content, I will take the link. I would also look at the kind of sites they are linking to and as long as it's all good, closely related and there's no junk in there, it's a good link in my eyes.
I would also make sure that majority of my links are not coming from guest blog posts, that's what I would worry about more. Just making sure the link profile is as natural as possible. And don't always do anchor text links only.
I hope that helps.
-
Directories are not that bad if they are related to the site, I would look deeper into the link profile, to me it sounds like a decent site if their is numerous quality content and they also have a decent amount of traffic and keywords driving traffic to the site I say go for it.
-
Absolutely I would. If your entire link profile was made up of these sites that would be a different situation. But if it has a high DA/PA, and it's in a related niche, then I definitely would.
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
-
Quality Links From Web Directory Usefull ??
Hello, Am Planning to Buy Few links from directories. Really Is it safe ? Or Guest Posting is good for Link Building??
Link Building | | wiralgroup1 -
Do links from such sites as TripAdvisor give any weight or support for SEO
And what about other sites like quora or other niche forums/blogs where one might leave answers, with a link to their profile, which has a link back to the owner's website? _Cindy
Link Building | | cceebar1 -
Do links from between common sites you run count as "bad" links?
Hi everyone,
Link Building | | AMA-DataSet
Iv recently been asked to review a group of sites. There are 3 sites, each of these sites has a link to the other two sites within the footer or the navigation.
These site are about a similar topic each provides a different perceptive or aims at a specific section of the industry so its not like the links are to irreverent sites. However because the links are in a global section they are repeated thousands of times on each site and count for a large proportion of the link profile to each site, I don't think this is good practise and I want to remove them or at least add a no-follow but my client insists they are relevant to each other and doesn't not want the links removing. What would be best in this situation? remove them? no-follow them? or leave them? Thank you in advance,
Liam0 -
Total Links vs Google Webmaster Site Links
I am interested why the numbers between SEOmoz and Google are so different. In SEOmoz we only show 17,000ish links from 190ish domains. In Google, we show 200,000+ links from 370 domains. Why is there such a dramatic difference?
Link Building | | webspecdesign0 -
Is guest posting still a good idea?
Lately the changes in Google all revolve around reducing the power of "self made links". We've seen blog networks devalued and low quality directories devalued. We've also seen people penalized for unnatural patterns of anchor text. With all of this in mind, I'm wondering how much time I should be putting in to guest posting. It seems to me like the safest focus should be on creating great content and then promoting that content. But it's so much easier to spend a few minutes writing an article for someone else and getting an anchor texted link back to mine. To most, guest posting is still considered white hat. But really, when you look at it, you are providing a webmaster content in return for a link back to your site. But it is definitely not a natural vote for your website. It is really just a self made link. If I were Google, I think it would be quite easy to find ways to determine what is a guest post that was created simply to get a link back to a site. And then I would devalue the links from those posts. What do you think? Do you still do much guest posting?
Link Building | | MarieHaynes1 -
Helpful or Hurtfull / Distributor Links to Our site on every product page?
We have a distributor site with a page rank of 3 on its home page, and 0-1'ish on its product pages. While our manufacturing site is PR 4 getting close to 5... We are thinking about adding a link from our distributors product pages to our manufacturing appropriate material information page. This would be about 10k links spread out among 7 materials. We want to add these links to help our distributor sites customers, but we don't want to hurt our manufacturing site in the process. I personally don't know of any problem this would cause, but our manufacturing site is so important I need to verify adding this many links wouldn't hurt us. Your thoughts and knowledge is appreciated.
Link Building | | donford0 -
What is the best way to transfer a sites link juice.
We have been building a new website for one of our clients which he wants it to replace an existing website which will be taken down shortly. The existing site has a reasonable amount of inbound links and we would like to redirect that link juice to the new website, can anyone tell me what the best way to do this would be. Thanks Fraser
Link Building | | fraserhannah0 -
First 100 links for every new site?
Is there a rule of thumb I am unaware of or a place that others start to get links for every new site they create, something like the "first 100 links for every new site" regardless of content? I know you always start building links around what the content of your site is about, but does anyone have a rule of thumb that you always start with links from certain sites regardless of the site content. For example for a local company: Google Places, Bing Local, Linkedin, Facebook, Localeze etc. etc. I just want to make sure I am taking quality first steps for every site I start and was wondering if anyone could give me some good rules of thumb or resources.
Link Building | | photoseo10