Links from Blogs and Forums
-
Hello Everyone,
We are a small, local business in a city in Canada. We just got a new website and I am responsible for basically all of it, including the SEO.
I was researching the back-links from our top-ranking competitor (another small, local business in our city). Here is their ranking:
- PA 40, with 441 Links from 111 RDs
- DA 30, with 6,864 Links from 116 RDs
Here is the second-highest guy:
- PA 29, with 101 Links from 10 RDs
- DA 15, with 1,682 Links from 11 RDs
As you can see, the top-ranking competitor's PA & DA are just about double his closest competitor. (Don't ask where we currently stand!)
But, on closer examination, most of the links from our top-ranking competitor come from a local blog, where our competitor's ad appears in an advertisement on the sidebar. Each time they make a post, which is just about every day, our competitor gets a link.
They also have a lot of links from a forum on a rock band's website. The original post was something about finding music, but the responses all have links to unrelated websites.
This seems really, really slimy to me.
What's going on?
-
The total number of links is almost always going to be higher than the RDs. This is because the domain is counted once (hence "unique") whereas there are often many links coming from that domain. Consider your own site - your own site will provide links (these are called internal links) and you will have hundreds or thousands of links from your own site. If you have a homepage link on the menu bar, that is creating one link on each page of your site.
So the number of links is not very helpful to look at alone. It may be useful to look at the ratio of total links to RDs, but that's a separate issue. The more useful metric is RDs. If I were you, I would pursue links from different sites so that you can build a portfolio of more RDs.
It's not unusual to have 10-15 RDs for a new domain. After 1 month I would be surprised, but seeing that after a few months would be normal.
-
Thanks for your reply. And thanks for the encouragement - I need it!
May I ask another question?
Both #1 and #2 have a HUGE number of links.
I find this odd, especially since #2 has only had their new (and presumably "optimized") website for about 1 month.
How did he get so many links in such a short time? (And why would he want so many from so few RDs?)
-
The blog link you mentioned will provide diminishing returns as the initial link you get from a domain is the most helpful and each subsequent link from the same domain is worth less and less.
The forum does indeed sound sketchy if there are links to unrelated sites. You are in a good position because your competitors link profile doesn't look great.
I also look at the proportion of DA and PA to number of RDs. The lower the ratio (more RDs) the worse the link profile is. For instance a site that has a DA of 30 with 15 unique domains has a great ratio. A site with DA 30 and 500 RDs has a much worse link profile.
This particular site is not impressive.
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
-
Person using expired domain and its links to drive traffic
Hi, I know about people using expired domains to drive juice to their primary site but what about people using AN expired domain as their primary site (totally changing that site into a trashy affiliate-marketing vehicle)? The site I'm looking at is thegunzone.com. It has, according to Semrush, almost 38K links. It used to be a legit 17-year-old firearms hobby site, and this is what it originally looked like: http://web.archive.org/web/20120213184627/http://thegunzone.com:80/ Here is its last page before it closed and the domain purchased by the affiliate marketer: http://web.archive.org/web/20170315084035/http://www.thegunzone.com/ It closed around February of 2017, and some affiliate marketer bought it and all its backlinks. However, all those backlinks, which were previously to various articles, are now directed back to those articles (which don't exist anymore) but the homepage, including Wikipedia links. Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_rifling At the bottom, in the 7th Reference, there's a link to an article called " "Learning About Shooting . . ." but if you click on the original link, it just goes to thegunzone.com homepage. Again, the site's totally different. And there are just thousands of such backlinks to former articles that don't exist anymore but are redirected to this schlocky site's homepage (and it's passing its juice through too). My question is this: this cannot be kosher with Google backlinking policies, right? Is this prevalent on the internet? Why hasn't thegunzone.com been found out and its rankings penalized yet? And how do I report him? I see tons of other sites using this basic strategy too on search results with various hunting keywords. (Disclosure: I do own a hunting/firearms blog, but I don't do any backlinking at all.) Any help would be sincerely appreciated.
Affiliate Marketing | | HandyWoman1 -
Guilty of keyword cannibalization. What's the best way to fix it without losing link juice?
Hi guys, I'm new here but I already spent hours reading the forums. I didn't post before because I didn't feel the need to, but today it's different. I don't want to take fixing steps that are not optimal for my website situation. So here's the problem : I am working on an affiliate website that is growing day after day and is already profitable. It is not by any mean a thin affiliate site. It's a french language website with product reviews on it. Right now there is 1 main page (hero page) per review in which I describe the products, put affiliate links, present useful information, etc. These pages have a good word count and I am targeting 1-2 main keywords on them which I consider a good practice. Couple of months ago I decided to add a product page for each one (normally it's 5 products per review) so I added 5 more page per review, targeting product names as new keywords. Problem is that : Product names are very similar to the main keywords (keyword cannibalization problem) There is very little added information on the product page when you compare it to the hero page (too thin) A lot of information is repeated on each of the product pages. I think this is bad. So I decided to keep only the hero pages to keep more link juice, avoid keyword cannibalization, improve page authority and get more content on one single page (only information that was not repeated have been added to hero page). I removed ALL THE LINKS to product pages (from the hero page). So now for my questions : Is it better to keep the product pages in my sitemap or to delete them right away? Is it better to let the product pages die by themselves over time or to 301 redirect all the product pages to hero page to keep link juice? The next question is a bit more complicated. Hope you guys understand what I mean. Considering that product pages are now gone, this will for sure weaken my bounce rate % because only hero page with good/deep information will be accessible to visitors (there is not a lot of internal links in each review, except to other, RELATED reviews). Is setting up goals in google analytics + telling google that it should consider a click on an affiliate link as a NEW PAGE VIEW (like it would act for a click on a link of a product on my own domain) will help for SERPs and SEO?? Or it will just help ME to see a lower bounce rate and setting goals? In other words, is tracking these links and let google see them as new pages clicks will help for the page rankings or not? Because from what I am understanding, a good bounce rate helps for rankings. If the changes made to avoid keyword cannibalization work, when could I potentially see the effects/benefits in the SERPs and trafic?
Affiliate Marketing | | benoit_20181 -
Before I request hundreds of links for "nofollow" I want to verify I'm doing the right thing
Happy Thanksgiving Mozers, In my efforts to get rid of a Google penalty, I've come to the conclusion that all the travel agents who link to our site with a unique code, are technically affiliates because they get commission. Therefore we need to get all of them to switch their links to "rel=nofollow". I'm worried this shift will cost us in search rankings, especially since none of our competitors require nofollow tags. So before I actually begin requiring the switch, I wanted to just double check that I'm not misinterpreting Google. Our travel agents are paid commission on every sale (whether their customers click the link from their website to ours, or calls in and gives us that agent's code. So even though our travel agents aren't technically part of an "affiliate program" run through CJ or anything, they are in Google's eyes affiliates of my company. Therefore their links with their personal codes all need to be nofollow. Am I correct on this? I can't find anywhere where Google goes into great depth explaining various types of affiliates.
Affiliate Marketing | | Patrick_G0 -
Issues with centrally hosting your own affiliate links?
Can anyone see any issues centralising affiliate links across a network? Example - many of us would use some kind of redirect from our sites like abc.com/go/afflink1
Affiliate Marketing | | RaceMedia
bcd.com/go/afflink1 using either htaccess, php or javascript to redirect to the affiliate site But as your network of site grows - to change a link involves visiting 40 sites to change each of the files in the "go" folders. Would there be any net effect from using an otherwise vacant domain to host the links - so they only need to be changed in one place? Example
abc/go/afflink1 links to afflinks.com/1 which then redirects to affiliate site
bcd/go/afflink1 links to afflinks.com/1 which then redirects to affiliate site So all your links across the network for afflink1 would point to your afflinks.com/1 Any changes only require changes to one file afflinks.com/1 Assuming there is nothing else on afflinks.com - would there be any issues? Assume all links no followed and afflinks.com noindex. AND.... our redirects have been in place for some years using javascript,php or .htaccess. What is the current best practice for redirecting affiliate links?0 -
Links exchange - Penguin update potential ??
Hi Everyone, If site A and site B exchange links in the past, it used to be kind of voided. So it is a practicve that we had pretty uch put on the side. But with the new penguin update, do you guys think that if 2 web sites are contacting each other to share a link in the interest of the user that it might be a new best practice to implement? Example, Car site contact car suspension site to exchange a link on relevant content such as blog articles or specific content on a page. What are your thoughts about that ? I am curious to know if anyone is wondering abouot that... Thanks, Alex
Affiliate Marketing | | webit400 -
Affiliate code in urls? affiliate link landing pages?
Is it considered a good or bad practice to have the affiliate code present in your affiliate link url's ? (as opposed to disguising them with something like phpbay) Does the general public not scour the hover-over url's of links they click? Also, is there any way of keeping customers on site when they click affiliate links? (via frames or something more modern) Or is that frowned upon by advertisers?
Affiliate Marketing | | Mozzin0 -
How much link juice passes through urls with affiliate id's?
hi we can get a valuable link with the desired anchor text from a news site. the destination url would be something like www.site.com/product. but in order to track conversions, our sales team would like to add an affiliate id to the url, so that it would look like this: www.site.com/product?sess_affiliate=ta how much link juice would a link to this affiliate url pass? would we be shooting our wad by linking to the ?sess-URL instead of the original URL?
Affiliate Marketing | | zeepartner0 -
Affilate links - Google Panda 2.1
With the recent update from Google Panda would links from affiliate Coupon Sites now have an negative impact in Organic Rankings or site value? A reason for this question is because many Coupon Sites usually have poor content and a poor quality score. Thanks
Affiliate Marketing | | Tonyd230