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
-
How can I redirect incoming links from an old version of my site ending in .ctlg and .ivnu?
My original site was published in 2001 using "version 2" software from Ivenue, the hosting company that I signed up with at that time. The site's structure was built in such a way that the primary category pages ended in the extension .ivnu. Product or item pages on the shopping cart side ended in the extension .ctlg. My site's name was and is [Lamplight Feather, Inc.](<a class="webkit-html-attribute-value webkit-html-external-link" href="http://www.tonyhill.net/" target="_blank">http://www.tonyhill.net/</a>). We built our business between 2001 and 2011 and by the last three years (2009 - 2011) of using their version two were averaging a million dollars per year in gross sales. We decided to "upgrade" to Ivenue's "version 3" in 2011 to take advantage of some more modern options and because their newer software created web pages ending in .html which we thought more desirable. We made the switch in late 2011. But it was a disaster. Traffic and sales dropped precipitously. For the past two years (2012-2013) our annual gross sales average dropped to $400,000. (Two other factors were involved beside losing the many incoming links and link juice we had built up over the years: Panda came in that fall and my little niche market (decorative feathers) was flooded with competitors.) However as I try to rebuild our traffic and business little by little, I am stumped as to how to redirect the many incoming links that went to our first site's .ivnu and .ctlg pages. I have constructed redirects for some of our current but changed .html pages like this and put them in the file cabinet and they work: For (example): http://www.tonyhill.net/feathers_c384589.html then But trying the same thing for (example) http://www.tonyhill.net/craftfeathers.ivnu still returns a 404. Is there something I am missing. Ivenue is useless in this matter by the way. Their "technicians" are no help. I plan to be migrating my site once again to a new hosting company and hope to solve this problem before then. Thanks for the attention, Tony Hill This is an example from Google Webmaster of the type of links that show up as 404's that I would like to redirect: | URL: | http://www.tonyhill.net/productCat96521.ctlg | | | Error details | Linked from | | <colgroup><col></colgroup>
Reporting & Analytics | | featherman
| http://www.tonyhill.net/productCat43986.ctlg |
| http://forum.muppetcentral.com/showthread.php?t=21416&page=2 |
| http://www.cosplay.com/showthread.php?p=3832751 |
| http://forum.muppetcentral.com/showthread.php?t=21416&page=2&highlight=fur |
| http://www.muppetcentral.com/forum/threads/puppeteers-resources-links.19330/page-2 |
| http://www.muppetcentral.com/forum/threads/how-do-you-like-my-puppets.18549/page-2 | | | | |0 -
What is the difference between External Followed Links, Total External Links and Total Links?
What is the difference between Total External Links and Total Links? Below is my metric and 3 competitors. | External Followed Links | 12 | 43 | 227 | 5 |
Reporting & Analytics | | seohlp44
| Total External Links | 19 | 51 | 296 | 11 |
| Total Links | 2,990 | 704 | 15,234 | 12,518 |0 -
Is it possible to link two Analytics accounts to one AdWords account
Hi Is it possible to link two Analytics accounts that I have admin access to to the one AdWords account in my MCC. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | BeattieGroup0 -
Why is my Technorati link no longer showing?
Hi, i had a Technorati link as my lop link showing in SEOmoz. its no longer showing. I verified that the blog is still listed with them. Does anyone know why that link is not in the campaign...or showing up in site explorer? Thanks, Kevin
Reporting & Analytics | | yandl0 -
Find 404 Broken Links
We are looking for tools to help us repair broken backlinks, those with 404 error. We have used the Open Site Explorer tool to create a CSV file from our client's URL. We read the "Fixing Crawl Diagnostic Issues", but don't see how to "find the 404ed URL", nor do we see a "referral column" to scroll to. What steps should we take to locate the broken 404 linkages? What steps can we take to streamline repairs?
Reporting & Analytics | | jamie_netsitemarketing.com0 -
How to track link building? What metrics?
I'm an SEO newbie (my main roles are front-end designer and content manager).
Reporting & Analytics | | RSGregC
I've been managing our company's effort to generate links. In the past, trying to develop relationships has gone nowhere. As a result, we're currently mostly creating good content ourselves and posting it on Web2.0 sites (weebly, etc.) and linking back to our site, and then using UAW (unique article wizard) to create a second tier of links to those links. We've been doing this for a while, and our traffic from SEO is going up - but we don't really know how to track our work. Can you please
a) give your opinion about our approach, and
b) tell me which metrics we should be using, and which tools for these metrics? Thank you so much
Greg0 -
How to locate a back link
GWT says that a large popular site with DA 70 has a link to one of our recently published pages. Is it possible to find the location of that link using GWT? I don't think the SEOmoz tools can find it, perhaps because our page is too new. Best,
Reporting & Analytics | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
Spider 404 errors linked to purchased domain
Hi, My client purchased a domain which based on the seller "promising lots of traffic". Subsequent investigation showed it was a scam and that the seller had been creative in Photoshop with some GA reports. Nevertheless, my client had redirected the acquired domain to their primary domain (via the domain registrar). From the period on which the acquired domain was redirected to the point when we removed the redirect, the web log files had a high volume of spider/bot 404 errors relating to an online pharmaacy - viagra, pills etc. The account does not seem to have been hacked. No additional files are present and the rest of the logs seem normal. As soon as the redirect was removed the spider 404 errors stopped. Aside from the advice about acquiring domains promising traffic which I've already discussed with my client, does anybody have any ideas about how a redirect could cause the 404 errors? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | bjalc20110