I only have 65 extrernal links after 8 months of link building?
-
I am currently employing an SEO consultant who has been carrying out link building for the past 8 months. having signed up to SEOmoz i noticed that i only have 65 external links when my competitors have 13,000+.
My consultant gave me a list of over 300 links he has putting into place but SEOmoz only shows 65.
What I am concerned about is why I have only so few and where the others have gone? And how do i catch up to my competitors and put a proper (better) strategy in place.
-
Check your site into Google Webmaster Tools and you can see exactly what they are counting toward your backlinks
-
Linkscape is limited, and right now a couple of months behind. We'll be releasing a new index sometime next week, and you should see some changes then.
-
A universal challenge: How do I see my links?
Linkscape is, by SEOmoz's own admission, limited. Yes, it's getting consistently bigger all the time, but there are still links they miss because their index is small. If you want a different perspective on where links are coming from, check out SEO Majestic or Raven Tools. Rand has openly said SEO Majestic's index is substantially bigger than Linkscape, but it's also older.
Remember that what all these companies are doing is trying to mimic Google. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but understand that by definition they're sometimes going to get it wrong. Just because SEOmoz or one of these other services hasn't caught some of your links doesn't mean Google has missed them as well.
Try to look carefully at the nature of the links that your consultant has built. If they're predominantly directories or footer links, then I'd question their value, and like you I would be concerned about the quality of the consultant's work. But if there is diversity in the types of links - some blog links, some directories, some press releases, etc. - then it's more likely your consultant is doing good work.
One final thought. I'm a big believer that the very best links are the ones your competitors can't easily duplicate. Earned links from blogging, good PR and good writing can be hard for the competition to neutralize. This is one reason SEO can be so hard.
-
Everyone has to make up his own mind on some things... but with the way that google is acting these days.... spammy links may be worse than no links.
-
Go to opensite explorer and put your domain in, you could filter by do-follow as well.
If you click the results that come up you should be able to find your link on that page, if the website is spammy note it down and maybe make a list say 10. Ask him if he created these links?
You can also look at the anchor text tab and see what kind of anchor text he has been building. This should be a mix of your brand name, targeted keywords and variations.
Or put your domain up here and I or someone else (EGOL is clued up a lot) and we can have a look for you.
-
Thank you for this, I am clear on what you are saying about quality over quantity, but do you think there should be some questions I should be asking my consultant to make sure he s doing the right things?
-
You might find that 13,000+ is not from 13,000 websites, if they managed to get a sitewide link maybe in the footer and that site has 1000 pages that's a 1000 links out of the 13,000.
Also those 13,000 might be rubbish, shed loads of directories with no Auth, if your SEO is doing it right he might have built only 65 links but from 65 high Auth websites.
For example a link from the BBC could be better then 1000 directory submissions.
-
Thanks for this, one thing I would like to add is that another second opinion I have already had, suggested many of the links my consultant had in his report were very spammy and SEOmoz would probably ignore these, do you think this could be a possible reason?
I am concerned me SEO consultant is not doing his job well and I need to go elsewhere?
-
There are a couple of possible reasons....
A) Perhaps the links that your SEO acquired have not been spidered yet. Crawling every page on the web can take a while to find links on obscure pages that might only have one link into them from another obscure page.
B) Perhaps the links that your SEO acquired are on pages that are unspiderable - either because they have no links into them from the greater web or the links into them are not spiderable.
About your concern that your competitor has thousands.... go to their website and see what they have that might attract links... and you can run a link assessment for their site just like you can for your own.
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
-
Difference between External Followed Links and Total External Links?
Hello, could someone please elaborate on what is meant by "External Followed Links" vs. "Total External Links"? Does "External Followed Links" mean the number of links that are generating traffic to the site? Or is there some other way to conceptualize it? Any help would be appreciated! Thank you in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | lincolndigitalgroup1 -
Cross Domain Tracking in GA (without cross domain links)
Hi everyone, Been doing some research about cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics (preferably Universal Analytics where documentation is a bit spare). All of the tutorials focus on the auto-linking and ensuring links to the other site are taken care of. I'm considering a site that may not cross-link like that at all (or it may, but won't be the main avenue). A good example is: www.gap.com
Reporting & Analytics | | ketanmv
www.bananarepublic.com
www.oldnavy.com Now, they do link to the other brands in their navigation but let's pretend that they don't necessarily do that. Gap Corporate may want to roll up all these domains into a single reporting profile because customers can clearly visit any of those sites on their own and buy. It would be nice to know that Visitor X bought 2 items from gap.com and 3 from oldnavy.com... and of course, here were their campaigns, etc. From what I am reading, I am not sure this is really possible. It seems that the cross-domain code is really only best for when my main site links to another domain for checkout or something. But in my example, we are definitely not in control of that kind of behavior. Thoughts? Perhaps I need to recommend they go with subdomains only which Universal GA seems to handle quite fine out of the box. Thank you!0 -
Is Webmaster Tools Useless as a broken Link Detector?
Buongiorno from yes we still have free parking Wetherby UK!
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
Ok when it comes to detecting broken links I'm getting really frustrated with webmaster tools. Now I'm probably going to end up with egg on my face with this one but here is an example of webmaster tools reporting a broken link which i cant find. http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/phantom-broken-links_zpsb74e1246.jpg Having trawled through the code i just cant see the knackered link? Is it a phantom report or is something usefull being detected here? Grazie tanto,
David1 -
Blog Analytics broke for two weeks. How do I account for these hits in my monthly report?
The Analytics on my blog broke for about two weeks before I realized it. I need to come up with some estimated numbers for total pageviews, referrals, direct hits, etc to add to my monthly SEM report. I took the average of the past four 2 week periods to come up with the number of hits. Should I just add this number to the total hits on my site? Or are these hits being counted twice if they went on to the main site? http://www.howlatthemoon.com
Reporting & Analytics | | howlusa0 -
Link being indexed
So I found this link to my website on the huffington post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/13/california-car-insurance-rates-vary-study_n_2122614.html it's at the bottom in the "around the web" section. My question is this article has been around for almost 4 months yet the link does not show up in WMT. I would like to know if the link to http://www.shiftins.com is indexed and passing authority. Thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | jameswalkerson0 -
What tools are people using to analyse clicked links
Hi, What tools do you use/recommend to analyse what/where links are being clicked on a page. I have seen a few mentions about CrazyEgg but are there any free (but good) tools around worth using?
Reporting & Analytics | | NeilD0 -
Internal Links not Showing Up
Hi, I have a wordpress blog at www.learnbonds.com. I am looking through open site explorer and and showing only 9 internal links on my report. I have hundreds of internal links on the site so I am wondering why they are not showing up? Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks Dave
Reporting & Analytics | | fxtrader19790 -
Is Google able to determine duplicate content every day/ month?
A while ago I talked to somebody who used to work for MSN a couple of years ago within their engineering department. We talked about a recent dip we had with one of our sites.We argued this could be caused by the large amount of duplicate content we have on this particular website (+80% of our site). Then he said, quoted: "Google seems only to be able to determine every couple of months instead of every day if the content is actually duplicate content". I clearly don't doubt that duplicate content is a ranking factor. But I would like to know you guys opinions about Google being only able to determine this every couple of X months instead of everyday. Have you seen or heard something similar?
Reporting & Analytics | | Martijn_Scheijbeler0