High domain authority for shady link directories
-
Hi there,
First of, I'm new to the moz community and I love it already! So much to learn and to do for getting better and better at SEO. Really helpful!
Okay, my question. If I analyze (top 5) sites with the open site explorer some of them have a link profile consisting just of link directories. How come they rank so high with just link directories backing them up?
The directories often are just ongoing lists of links without any form of content. But the authorities of the directories (page and domain) are often between 40-60 or even above! How come they get such high authority? And do I have to use them for my linking profile or will it hurt me?
On moz I learned not to use those directories because it's quality > quantity these days. But it almost seems as if this is not true because only half of the top positions in my keyword-market actually make use of more then just link directories.
I must say that I operate in the Dutch markets so maybe different rules apply in the Netherlands?
Thanks in advance and kind regards,
Luuk van Dongen
-
Great to know! Thanks Dr. Pete
-
It's important to keep in mind that DA and PA are measures of the strength of a link profile and, to some degree, a site's/page's raw ranking ability. Our authority metrics don't have built in spam-detection, though, and they aren't always aware of sites that Google may have devalued. Spam analysis has been in the works for quite a while now, and it's a complicated problem (as Google has proven). We're hoping to improve DA/PA in this regard over time, but for now there are going to be some situations where a site doesn't really have the ranking power that it's DA suggests. If your gut feeling is that the bulk of the site's links come from bad directories and low-quality sources, you may very well be correct.
-
You also have to consider whether the company has disavowed these directories. If the website has had SEO done on it for many years then there is a good chance that directories formed a major part of their strategy, however, with the disavow tool in play now, those directories may well have been disavowed recently and they will still show up on their linking profile in OSE. Just a thought for you to consider.
It is true that some local and niche directories are still beneficial even in today's SEO market so don't discount a directory straight away without looking into it further.
-
No by content rich links I mean links from good informative sites/blogs instead of sites with no content or little articles about a strange variety of topics that don't relate to each other.
I will try using majestic SEO and Ahrefs. Thanks for the help!
-
That may be so. The way you say "content rich links" comes out sounding like "spammy back links" and Moz does try to keep its crawl focused on higher quality links. Again, as Matt said, Ahrefs and Majestic are good additional sources for back link research.
-
So actually you're saying that possibly only the really good link directories are indexed my moz and the more content-rich links are not shown in the open site explorer? If so, do you have any idea how to retrieve those other links?
-
In addition to what Matt said, some directories are very good resources for links and some niches have more than a few well curated directories that are worthwhile. Don't dispel all directories straight off.
-
One thing to remember is that Moz only catalogs a VERY small portion of links pointing to a site (compare to Ahrefs or Majestic and THEY only catalog a small portion of the internet.)
So you may be looking at 5-10% of a site's actual profile. It's hard to say what else they have, what is really ranking a site, etc.
http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/experiments/backlink-checker-tools/
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
-
Spanish word as English domain name
hi anyine any issues with using Spanish, and other non English words, as domain names when trying to rank in Google uk. We launched a number of websites a while back but finding it hard to get much traction in Google uk. We are getting a reasonable number of impressions but cannot seem to get very high in the rankings. All the names are foreign words for their service. Our homeware website, for example, uses the basque word for furniture as its name. other than potential branding issues of having domains people might struggle to spell, is there any serp issues we would face with these names. thanks
International SEO | | Arropa0 -
For a website in portuguese what would you use? pt.domain.com, br.domain.com or domain.com.br
Hello We are a company with a website in several languages, one of them is portuguese. Our market is 2 times bigger in Brazil than in Portugal, but obviously Brazil has more potential in the future. In domain.com we have our main site in English. What would you use? pt.domain.com, br.domain.com or domain.com.br? In the first case, it means just portuguese, in the second Brazil but it is not geolocalized, and in the third, you are almost ignoring Portugal users... Duplicating content, doesn't seem to make sense... The content is basically international, so it is just the language that matters. Any help will be very much appreciated.
International SEO | | forex-websites0 -
Which hreflang tag to use for .eu domain
Hi there, We're trying to solve a problem with one of our domains, we have a .eu CCTLD and we're trying to implement hreflang tags. On our US and UK sites, we use "en-us" and "en-gb", but it's not clear how to approach this european problem, as there is not a "en-eu" tag. The site is in English, but serves several European countries speaking different languages. What's the best hreflang code to use in this situation? Any help much appreciated, Thanks!
International SEO | | dennis.globalsign0 -
How is the effect of an abbreviated domain?
Hi, i am looking to register a domain name for an island in the english/spanish spoken part of America. The names for xxxxisland.com are already registered but xxxxisla.com is free. Does it has any effect on my SEO when i use a shorter version of island respectively the spanish name for island? Thanks
International SEO | | reisefm0 -
Does the location of my Domain Registrar affect SEO?
Does the location of my Domain Registrar affect SEO? For example, if my hosting company is in the U.S., but the domain registrar is overseas. Also, is it better to have both services be met by one company?
International SEO | | greenfoxone0 -
Alexa Rank and Linking from Article sites.
We are creating unique content and submitting our articles to article sites. I have some questions about the best way to go about this. 1. We are being very careful to create unique content for each submission - so we are not submitting the same article to multiple sites. Each submission is unique, so 1 article per 1 article directory. 2. When I did my research about these article sites at Alexa.com, I noticed that a lot of the article sites are ranking very well globally, but that a lot of them are #1 in Alexa for India. They are still ranked for other countries with very top ranking, for example, they may 9,000 Alexa rank in India and then 18,000 in the U.S. which is still very high. 3. We are trying to reach U.S. customers mostly, so I am wondering if we are still getting value by linking to these sites who have global reach (even though they are ranked best for India). I would think that this is very beneficial still, but I didn't want to get the wrong kind of traffic by getting links from sites that are primarily getting their traffic from India, even though they are also getting tons of traffic from the U.S. - I am assuming this is OK because a 18,000 or 19,000 Alexa Rank in the U.S. is still excellent and I will benefit by this. But I wanted to be sure. Feedback?
International SEO | | applesofgold0 -
Multilingual site - separate domain or all under the same umbrella
this has been asked before with not clear winner. I am trying to sum up pros and cons of doing a multilingual site and sharing the same domain for all languages or breaking it into dedicated subdomains e.g. as an example lets assume we are talking about a french property portal with an english version as well. Assume most of the current incoming links and traffic is from France. A) www.french-name.fr/fr/pageX for the french version www.english-name.com/en/pageX for the english version B) www.french-name.fr/fr/ for the french name (as is) www.french-name.fr/en for the english version the client currently follows approach A but is thinking to move towards B we see the following pros and cons for B take advantage of the french-name.fr domain strength and incoming links scalable: can add more languages without registering and building SE position for each one individually potential issues with duplicate content as we are not able to geotarget differenly on web master tools of google potential dilution of each page's strength as we will now have much more pages under the same domain (double the pages basically) - is this a valid concern? usability/marketing concerns as the name of the site is not in english (but then people looking for a house in France would be at least not completely alien to it) what are your thoughts on this? thanks in advance
International SEO | | seo-cat0 -
The best SEO practice for a .hk domain
We are currently working on a project which involves 3 separate .com domains in relation to a UK company selling/renting residential, commercial and investment properties within the UK. We are now working on producing a .hk site for the overseas customers. Can anyone advise what the best practice is for a .hk domain and where best to start? Should the domain be hosted in that geographical location for example? We are relatively new to this so any advise would be greatly appreciated.
International SEO | | SoundinTheory0