Are links from directories good or bad?
-
I've done a lot of competitive link analysis lately and found that a lot of my competitors links for a certain keyword are coming from low quality directory sites and they're outranking my site.
This leads me to my question which may or may not have an answer(I at least hope it fuels a good discussion)...
Are links from directory sites good or bad for SEO?
-
Thank you Marie for the insight! I think you've led me to a better understanding of this!
-
Thank you Marie for the insight! I think you've led me to a better understanding of this!
-
Interesting! I have a few thoughts.
A recent unnatural links recovery client of mine got their warning mostly because of directory links. The quality guidelines, under "link schemes" tells us to avoid "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links". The question is, however, what is "low quality"? If you feel that you are ranking because of links from directories created just for SEO purposes I would guess that this ranking will eventually die and could even be penalized.
I have a theory that Google created the disavow tool to help them find all of the low quality pages and devalue them, or even worse, penalize sites that have used them. My thought is that if a large number of sites choose to disavow www.exampledirectory.com then Google takes a look at that site and determines whether it is a site made just to boost the PR of other sites. If so, then they likely deindex it. A few months ago Google deindexed a pile of directories, but there are LOTS of them out there that, in my opinion will soon be gone.
Personally, I wouldn't risk a client's site on this tactic unless they had full knowledge of the potential risk involved.
-
Marie,
I completely agree with you for long term SEO purposes. But contrary to this, I performed a test where I worked with a highly competitive keyword creating links exclusively from link directories and the word currently ranks #1 on Google and Bing. (It's a keyword for a type of vacuum parts that outranks all of our competitors and the manufacturer's website!)
So does this mean that contrary to what experts say and what Google has told us, link directories can be effective for link building?
Also I might add that this keyword has been ranking number 1 for 8 months now.
-
When I'm deciding on submitting to directories I ask myself one of the questions from the quality guidelines: would I be doing this if search engines didn't exist?
I submit my sites to local directories that make sense for the site and could drive traffic. I completely avoid directories that are made for SEO purposes.
I'm also careful not to overdo it. Anything done in excess can cause Google to look on your linkbuilding with suspicion. I also avoid using keyword anchor text and prefer to link from directories using my url.
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
-
Embedded links/badges
Hi there Just picking up on something Rand said in his blog analysing his predictions for 2014. Rand predicted that Google will publicly acknowledge algorithmic updates targeting...embeddable infographics/badges as manipulative linking practices While this hasn't exactly materialised yet, it has got me thinking. We have a fair few partners linking to us through an embedded badge. This was done to build the brand, but the positives here wouldn't be worth being penalised in search. Does anyone have any further evidence of websites penalised for doing this, or any views on whether removing those badges should be a priority for us? Many thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HireSpace0 -
Would it be a good idea to duplicate a website?
Hello, here is the situation: let's say we have a website www.company1.com which is 1 of 3 main online stores catering to a specific market. In an attempt to capture a larger market share, we are considering opening a second website, say www.company2.com. Both these websites have a different URL, but offer the same products for sale to the same clientele. With this second website, the theory is instead of operating 1 of 3 stores, we now operate 2 of 4. We see 2 ways of doing this: we launch www.company2.com as a copy of www.company1.com. we launch www.company2.com as a completely different website. The problem I see with either of these approaches is duplicate content. I think the duplicate content issue would be even more or a problem with the first approach where the entire site is mostly a duplicate. With the second approach, I think the duplicate content issue can be worked around by having completely different product pages and overall website structure. Do you think either of these approaches could result in penalties by the search engines? Furthermore, we all know that higher ranking/increased traffic can be achieved though high quality unique content, social media presence, on-going link-building and so on. Now assuming we have a fixed amount of manpower to provide for these tasks; do you think we have better odds of increasing our overall traffic by sharing the manpower on 2 websites, or putting it all behind a single one? Thanks for your help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | yacpro130 -
Removing Poison Links w/o Disavow
Okay so I've been working at resolving former black-hat SEO tactics for this domain for many many months. Finally our main keyword is falling down the rankings like crazy no matter how many relevant, quality links I bring to the domain. So I'm ready to take action today. There is one inner-page which is titled exactly as the keyword we are trying to match. Let's call it "inner-page.html" This page has nothing but poison links with exact match anchor phrases pointing at it. The good links I've built are all pointed at the domain itself. So what I want to do is change the url of this page and let all of the current poison links 404. I don't trust the disavow tool and feel like this will be a better option. So I'm going to change the page's url to "inner_page.html" or in otherwords, simply changed to an underscore instead of a hyphen. How effective do you think this will be as far as 404ing the bad links and does anybody out there have experience using this method? And of course, as always, I'll keep you all posted on what happens with this. Should be an interesting experiment at least. One thing I'm worried about is the traffic sources. We seem to have a ton of direct traffic coming to that page. I don't really understand where or why this is taking place... Anybody have any insight into direct traffic sources to inner-pages? There's no reason for current clients to visit and potentials shouldn't be returning so often... I don't know what the deal is there but "direct" is like our number 2 or 3 traffic source. Am I shooting myself in the foot here? Here we go!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jesse-landry0 -
What are some of the worst links that you have come across?
I'm talking the least relevant and incredibly spammy. We've all done site audits and stumbled across some ridiculous ones. The funnier the better. I'm compiling a list of hilarious links that sites have gotten. Any input would be great!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KevinBloom0 -
Do sitewide links from other sites hurt SEO?
A friend of mine has a pagerank 3 website that links to all my pages on my site on every page of his site. The anchor text of all these links are the title of each page that it links to. Does this hurt SEO? I can have him change to the links to whatever i want, so if it does hurt, what should i change the anchor text to if needed? Thanks mozzers! Ron
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ron100 -
Is Best of the Web a good directory to pay to be listed on?
We are currently paying to have a listing in the directory Best of the Web. Should I be paying to renew our listing in this directory?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | djlittman0 -
Finding and Removing bad backlinks
Ok here goes. Over the past 2 years our traffic and rankings have slowly declined, most importantly, for keywords that we ranked #1 and #2 at for years. With the new Penguin updates this year, we never saw a huge drop but a constant slow loss. My boss has tasked me with cleaning up our bad links and reshaping our link profile so that it is cleaner and more natural. I currently have access to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, SEOMoz, and Link Builder. 1)What is the best program or process for identifying bad backlinks? What exactly am I looking for? Too many links from one domain? Links from Low PR or low “Trust URL” sites? I have gotten conflicting information reading about all this on the net, with some saying that too many good links(high PR) can be unnatural without some lower level PR links, so I just want to make sure that I am not asking for links to be removed that we need to create or maintain our link profile. 2)What is the best program or process for viewing our link profile and what exactly am I looking for? What constitutes a healthy link profile after the new google algorithm updates? What is the best way to change it? 3)Where do I start with this task? Remove spammy links first or figure out or profile first and then go after bad links? 4)We have some backlinks that are to our old .aspx that we moved to our new platform 2 years ago, there are quite a few (1000+). Some of these pages were redirected and some the redirects were broken at some point. Is there any residual juice in these backlinks still? Should we fix the broken redirects, or does it do nothing? My boss says the redirects wont do anything now that google no longer indexes the old pages but other people have said differently. Whats the deal should we still fix the redirects even though the pages are no longer indexed? I really appreciate any advice as basically if we cant get our site and sales turned around, my job is at stake. Our site is www.k9electronics.com if you want to take a look. We just moved hosts so there are some redirect issues and other things going on we know about.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | k9byron0 -
Can I be penalized for offering incentives for links and social followers?
A competitor of mine is using contest/loyalty software like ContestBurner or PunchTab to generate social followers and links. This has been very successful, and over the past several months his rankings have improved. Does anyone know if Google is "OK" with this type of program? I'm trying to decide if I should start one myself.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dfeemster1