Is back linking still effective?
-
I know after the Panda update it seems that back linking is a no no but its hard to believe that its not still effective. What about paid links? Are there any trusted sites out there? Thoughts?
-
You are not kidding, that post from pointblank is amazing, so many ideas I had no idea I could do thanks
-
It depends on your industry / niche - for example if you're in the web design industry, a site like sixrevisions or designfloat would be ideal.
To help you with your linkbuilding, here's a phenomenal post by Jon Cooper:
http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
That should give you more than enough tactics to start getting some decent, trusted links.
Hope that helps you Cesar
-
Here is another idea that I have come up with that I have not seen come up in discussion. In google chrome you can connect with your gmail account so all your bookmarks can be across all your computers. Any thought on google reading these bookmarks as well and a positive to your site. I have a "bookmark us" on my site for some time and after looking at that I started to wonder if google would be using that as well.
-
What are some of these trusted back linking sites?
-
Thanks John.
-
Thanks Nicola, glad I could help : )
It is scary to avoid using anchor text links - but bear in mind you can always include your keyphrase around a brand name link, I think there's some merit to this as Google will use surrounding text in the absence of anchor text.
-
Now that you have explained it in more detail I would say I agree with you. I'm currently working on a site and I am getting some links with specific anchor text such as [portrait photographer] or even [London Portrait Photographer] as I don't think that is unreasonable or out of the ordinary from what a "normal" person would do, I'm also getting some links with solely their brand name: probably 50:50
But most of the links my client already has are of their brand name (which makes my job a little more complicated as the brand name doesn't say what they do as a business, neither does their domain name) so if I couldn't use ANY anchor text I would be nervous.
But your explanation and reasoning seems sound to me! thumbs up
-
Hey Nicola,
For me it's about keeping the backlink profile looking natural - if your backlink profile is made up of more than 50% direct match anchor text (as in your target keyphrase) and it matches your title and H1, I would imagine you'd see an over-optimisation penalty. I think Google is getting much smarter at figuring out what links are there to manipulate rankings, and direct match anchor text links are a pretty strong signal of that. Sure they help you rank in the short term, but over do it and you'll almost certainly be punished for it. I don't think people ever (or very rarely) use your target keyphrase anchor text naturally, they're far more likely to use your brand name. So by using your brand name for links, you're still increasing your overall domain authority and gaining the benefit of strong links, whilst at the same time keeping your backlink profile looking natural and strengthening your site against future updates.
Not only this, but it's been fairly well established that Google prefers to rank brands, and brand name links are a strong brand signal, along with high quality content and robust about us and contact pages.
We only use brand name links for our client along with high quality on-site content and well optimised sites, and we've got them ranking for some exceptionally competitive keyphrases. Whereas I know lots of other SEO's who use lots of direct match anchor text links and while they were ranking very well, the majority of them suffered quite badly after the over-optimisation penalties and the Penguin update, as well as receiving GWT warnings.
Perhaps suggesting to ONLY use brand name anchor text links is a little much, but I would certainly use them more than I ever would direct match keyphrase anchor text. I also use random linking phrases such as 'read more', 'click here' or the overall subject of the content I'm linking to, again to keep the backlink profiles looking natural.
Hope that explains what I was saying a little bit : )
-
John
Why have you suggested to only use "brand name as the anchor text"?
I don't understand that?
-
I'm not sure what you mean here, backlinking isn't a no-no, you just need to be more careful about where you're getting your links from and the anchor text you use. Personally I'd stay away from paid links, but there are a huge number of trusted sites out there.
Aim for high quality links from sites that are in your industry or niche, use Domain Authority to gauge the power and trust of a site and make sure you're varying your anchor text (in fact, just use your brand name as the anchor text). Use content to get your links too wherever possible - get an infographic designed, produce a useful tool, or write an in-depth, well researched article to try and gain links. You can either use your content to guest blog on high quality, relevant sites, or publish it on your own site and promote via social media and other avenues to encourage natural linking to your site.
Here's a post I wrote on creating content that might help:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/indepth-guide-to-content-creation-with-infographic
and this is an excellent article on link-building for those new to it:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building
Hope that helps!
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
-
Linking Between Sites
Hi everyone, Hope you are all doing well. If a company owns several different websites that are supposed to be different brands but are part of the same niche/sector is it OK to link between them? Or would this be seen as violation? Thanks
Link Building | | National-Homebuyers0 -
What is a natural link?
Hi everyone, I'm trying to better understand what is meant by a natural link and would appreciate any assistance. Doing some competitor link analysis I've noticed a web developer who has created a directory for all its customers. This is not a directory in the traditional sense of being of use to an end user, but to my untrained eyes, it looks like an internal directory used solely for the purpose of link building. For all I know this might be perfectly good practice in the industry, but as a beginner, I'm attempting to get an understanding of things. My question is, what precisely is meant by a natural link? If the above scenario is all ok, whereby there are businesses in the same field of work, but ultimately could be in any given location, on a directory, are they natural links? Do these kind of directories that don't service an end user, exist if the common feature between them is say location only, or an seo agency only? Appreciate I could be completely out of kilter on this, but it seems the benefit on SERPs is pretty significant for something that seems pretty "unnatural" to me? Any guidance would be appreciated...tom
Link Building | | T-J-I1 -
Indirect Link Earning via dofollow Links In News Articles
Hello, MOZ SEO Gurus. I've been trying to think some deep thoughts on safe, effective link earning for news publishing sites, and wanted to run this up the flagpole and see if you salute. Our site is a biotech news service -- we pump out copious amounts of news content each day, which works well for driving traffic. That being said, we also want to rank some optimized landing pages as well. Take, for example, this page, which we'd like to rank for "secondary progressive MS" and related keywords: http://bionews-tx.com/secondary-progressive-ms/ Now, as far as I'm concerned, shopping this page around to MS influencers isn't easy. I can go to Foundational websites, blogs, etc., and say, "hey, we have this info page on SPMS, and I thought that you might find it helpful/want to link to it." But chances are, the MS influencers already have their own proprietary content on SPMS, and there isn't much value to linking to it. Therefore, I think that we'll get few link earning conversions on the effort. However, what if I take our Secondary Progressive MS landing page, and I link to it in a corresponding article about SPMS research, as I did here: http://bionews-tx.com/news/2014/01/30/secondary-progressive-ms-natalizumab-clinical-trial/ Then, I go to the drug developer who is at the center of this story and say to them, "hey, we recently covered your drug in the news, and I thought you might want to link to it." Then, we get a link from an MS drug developer to the news article, which in turn has a prominent anchor text, dofollow internal link to the landing page for SPMS. If the link from the drug developer is dofollow, then we flow page rank juice from the drug developer page to our news page to our landing page. To me, it's much easier to earn safe links this way than to try and shop the landing page itself. That being said, if we get a dofollow link on the news piece, we only get a diminished portion of page rank going to the landing page. Is this strategy viable? Is the indirect flow of page rank from a linking site to a news article to a landing page even worth it? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!
Link Building | | bionewstx2 -
Back linking to t foreign sites
One of our major competitors seems to be linking to an Asian speaking website that has a blog/product review formant. I was wondering how they are achieving this. Are there any non English /Asian sites worth submitting to and what is the best way to go about this if English is the only language you speak! And of course is it worth while doing this from an SEO perspective.
Link Building | | Hardley10 -
Link Pharming
My company has been using an SEO company for a while and have built up our pagerank to a 6. However, we have noticed that they're involved in link pharming - they're buildng extra websites and linking to our site on them. We are not happy with this as we know it will only be a matter of time before Penguin hits us. The contract with the SEO company is coming up for renewal soon and we're thinking of cancelling it. However, we are not sure if the company will delete all our backlinks, which will probably decrease our PageRank too. Has anyone here ever had a similar experience? What did the SEO company do when you cancelled the contract? Does anyone here work for an SEO company and what do you do when someone cancels your service?
Link Building | | AAttias0 -
Finding links online that already exist as link juice based on search results
I'm curious about this, I can't find anything on the net that talks about it. I wrote an article about it on squidoo and have had no responses so I am thinking this is very rare subject. The question is I have done some backlink research with my competitors with linkdetective.com and found many links (even follow ones) related to sites that provide search results. Here are a link about what I am talking about as an example, I have found many more besides this one. http://search.lphant.com/es/webResults.html?q=free%20scrabble%20dictionary&hl=en&page=1&src=hmp_es&ref=1 My site appears in those results. When looking at the source there is no "nofollow". I found this page because linkdetective.com had this link listed pointing to my competitor. Are these valid backlinks? What I have been doing is adding these links to http://www.google.com/addurl so that Google knows about them. Is there something I am missing or are these valid?
Link Building | | cbielich0 -
Forum links
If you are building links in forums how can you decide which forums to post to? Of course you can have a look at averall traffic in Alexa or mozrank but is there anything else you can look at?
Link Building | | sesertin0