Why do the best ranking websites not seem to follow SEO best practice, particularly in terms of link building?

[DazzaH]

I work for an online retailer, which predominantly sells perfume products. In recent months, we have been spending more and more time on SEO, particularly in terms of improving our content, and as part of our strategy we have been working with beauty bloggers in particular (independent reviews, articles etc) to increase the number of links to our website.

Whilst we’ve seen steady improvements, we are concerned that some of the key words/phrases we are targeting still aren’t ranking as high as we would like. Some weeks they will move up a few places, but more often than not, they will then move back down.

We are more frustrated as we are seeing other websites, which are much poorer in terms of quality content, number of products, etc., ranking quite highly for these terms. From analysing these sites, it seems they are achieving their high ranking from having a considerable number of what appear to be poor quality links.

We have been warned countless times to avoid link farms, etc., yet these sites have 100s even 1000s of links coming from suspect sites and it isn’t doing them any harm.

Recently, we noticed a lot of our competitors are receiving links from websites such as LinkPartners. When we checked the website, we could see that whilst it appears to be a fairly SPAMMY website, its domain authority (67) is actually quite high.

Should we base our decision about whether or not to place a link somewhere solely on how high their domain authority is, i.e. would it be more beneficial to us to have a link with what appears to be a link farm if their domain authority is high, than what appears to be a fantastic independent beauty blog with a low domain authority? Or should we avoid these sites whatever the circumstances?

It’s slightly confusing for us as we are being warned about placing links on websites as google is apparently going to penalise us for it, but then we see our rival sites doing well by simply placing links everywhere they can.

[Saijo.George]

You can always inform Google about it : https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1

[DazzaH]

Thanks for your replies, Chris and Amie.

We definitely don’t want to jeopardise the brand in the long-term, hence we’ve done a lot of research into SEO to make sure we are following best practice. I guess we are just a little unsure as to what would be classified as a spammy link and what wouldn’t be given we aren’t seeing other sites being penalised for having numerous links from sites that appear on the surface as fairly dodgy.

For example, are websites which offer free links to be avoided also, or is it primarily the ones that require payment to feature that should be of concern? We’ve come across a few websites which appear to be fairly poor given the fact they simply feature a high number of links and a short amount of info about each site, but they don’t require payment to feature with them, and their Domain Authority is quite high (over 65 in some cases)... We were of the understanding that if a website has a high Domain Authority then Google would see it as a quality site, and subsequently a quality link, but given the perceptions of quality and what we’ve read, we feel like we should avoid them...

On those lines, we are concerned that whilst we are essentially building up organic links from beauty bloggers, who have quality sites and are producing good, detailed features, because their DA is quite low (10s), we aren’t actually going to see much benefit from these in terms of SEO... Would we be better off paying a large amount to get our organisation on a major website and having that one link, than having a 100 links from low-level sites...

Would it would be better for us to trade off our MozTrust (which is quite high currently, consistently in the 5s) to increase our MozRank (currently in the 3s) and bring a bit of parity (i.e. if our MozTrust drops to 4 but our MozRank rises to 4, would we be more likely to see an improvement without causing much damage as they are both still relatively high?)...

Also, how soon after we make changes should we expect to see a reflection in terms of moving up the search engine results page? We’ve made a lot of changes to our Meta titles, descriptions, updated our onsite content, added our own blog posts, as well as having outside beauty bloggers linking to us, but we haven’t seen the big jumps we would have hoped for.

We obviously want to make sure we give it the time to have an impact; but on the other hand, we don’t want to keep heading down a path that isn’t working for too long as it obviously involves a lot of time/resources.

[CommT]

Hi,

You're right, it's a pig to watch a competitor who has done bad linking constantly out-perform you.

However, as Chris says, you need to balance the risk against the reward - if it doesn't matter to you that at some point (dunno when) your site will get hit by an update then, knock yourself out with links. But, if you want to protect your brand and website then you shouldn't copy your competition by following their lead with spammy links.

Instead build links for traffic. Find out how and where your target audience hangs out online and look at ways your domain/products can be put in front of them (which, to be fair, you've started with the reviews etc). Use analytics to determine how well these referral links convert and refine your strategy from that (keep doing what affects the bottom line and drop what doesn't)

There are loads of online opportunities out there that don't rely on first place listings. Yes, these help (I'm an SEO - of course I'd say strong listings help!!!) but they are not the be-all-and-end-all. Build relationships, get in front of your target customers and target the longtail with blogs, PR and other content. Use social media if it's where your target customers are.

Do what you can to improve your site - this is something you control. (BTW, I haven't seen it, I'm NOT suggesting it's in a bad way or anything). Look at your engagement metrics - time on site, bounce, pages/session - get these to improve and you should find your site starts to pick up. It's amazing what can be done just by improving these metrics.

That's how you succeed, and one day (dunno when!) you'll find that because you have a fantastic website (that converts!) and have built up a strong positive reputation you out perform your competition without needing all those spammy links.

Good luck, and don't give up!

Best wishes,

Amelia

[GPainter]

I know the frustration but remember they never stay at the top, it's always good to look at it this way around -

if you were to do as you said and go down the black hat route that's fine you might rank for sometime but at some point you will get hit with a penalty its not an if but a when. When it does happen you will drop off the radar, you will loose money and it will take months to recover and even then one wrong move and your in more trouble.  So can you afford to loose business for a few months for the sake of one month of good business?

I know its easy to talk about good links and watch competitors rank above you but as long as your constantly moving up your on the right path, on top of that your doing out reach with bloggers which is a great way to build your brand and then you might find people looking for you direct.

In short - you have to asset the risk and can you afford to loose, because if you do it will hurt.