Link building - still effective ?
-
Hi, I know 70-80% of the links on Google have no-follow keyword. What I need to know is if link building by using guest posting and a combination of no-follow links through social media is still effective ? What would you suggest in terms of link building. I have read all the articles on moz and everything, but I need a personal touch on this matter.
Thanks,
Andrei -
Hey guys,
Thanks a lot for the valuable insight. It's definitely going to help me. I also had the impression that linking back to high quality domains by creating unique and valuable content is a great way of improving the SEO.
-
This can be very frustrating. I watched one of our competitors sling shot to to out rank us on many of the terms we were competing on. We had them here at Moz as a tracked competitor and when Panda / Penguin updates hit they tanked. That was satisfying
Just keep on doing things right, Google has the money as really is trying to stop these sorts of tactics.
-
Don is spot on here. Content and Link Building are the top of the SEO priority list. I strongly encourage you to do more research and ignore anyone who tells you that blog posts and any other form of content back linking is out dated. There are so many ways to build links, and the most important thing to remember is that they need to be organic and to quality sites.
Just because someone is ranking well and they appear to have really spammy links doesn't mean that 1. they aren't going down the road of punishment and 2. their link profile is why they are ranking well. There are 200 ranking factors, and about 17% of them are link related.
To touch on social media. It is growing in importance everyday. Social signals are extremely important and anyone who advises against social marketing is way outside of the best practice loop. Be very careful.
You don't want to build no follow links, they carry absolutely 0 link juice If you are building them in places where you will get referral traffic from them, then by all means, build away. Link building was originally devised as a way to drive traffic. It lost it's purpose because it became so manipulated, and now, with the help of penguin, it is starting to get back to its roots. Links have always been the highways and byways bringing traffic to your site, and if your links are driving traffic, they are doing their job. Whether it is from social, blogs or forums.
-
i want to say here that I have a competitor website who is ranking VERY well for spammy low ranking backlinks and he seems to continue to evade any penalties. Its very frustrating for those of us who try to adhere to preferred standards.
-
Hi Andrei,
Link building is important. How you go about it may have been evolved since you last looked at the subject.
When you break it down Link Building was and still is all about building associations on the web to your site. Evaluating a link, the Anchor Text on the link, how many other links are on the referring page, how popular the referring page is, and now if the referring page is part of a spam network determines exactly how valuable that association is.
Knowing that you can also surmise that if you get a link on a popular site it will have much more value than that of a low value site. The trick is how do you actually get that link? The answer really depends on the site.
Guest blogging gained popularity because anybody could write an article and generate a link to their own site or content. Now blogs are a little less forgiving about giving out links and many will nofollow all user generated links. However, you can still find your quality content linked by website authors with follow links. This in a sense is how it always should have worked.
The original vision of web authority remains; the web masters give credit with follow links to things they feel are relevant. In turn search engines recognize this and give more authority to the pages and domains. This method of ranking was well before Social Media even was a blip on the screen. Today the search engine factor in so many other things like social signals, viral content, ad-blocks, user engagement and much more. But the fact is that the underlying vision is still intact. The associations you build via links are important signals to your site.
My basic recommendation on link building is as follows. Know your market. Know where your customers are engaging their peers, and establish yourself as an authority at those spots. Create unique creative content on your site. When appropriate drop links to your content. As an authority on the subject you will find your audience more receptive and may find your links being picked up in other spots all on their own.
Rand hosted a whiteboard Friday about Content and SEO on 10/24/2014. I encourage everyone to read Jeff Ferguson's comment (first) about this white board. It is very informative and provides a different take on how and where link building is going.
Good luck,
Don
-
I would tend to stay away from these techniques, aim to build your links through quality content creation that people genuinely want to link to.
Guest blogging shouldn't really be used as an SEO technique.
If however you are guest blogging to increase your brand awareness, increase your community etc. This would be fine
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
-
Is a page with links to all posts okay?
Hi folks. Instead of an archive page template in my theme (I have my reasons), I am thinking of simply typing the post title as and when I publish a post, and linking to the post from there. Any SEO issues that you can think of? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16165422281340 -
Internal links to landing pages
Hi, we are in the process of building a new website and we have 12 different locations and for theses 12 locations we have landing pages with unique copy on the following: 1. Marketing...2 SEO....3. PPC....4. Web Design Therefor there are 48 landing pages. The marketing pages are the most important ones to us in terms of traffic and priority. My question is: 1. Should we put a dropdown of the are pages in the main header under locations that link to the area marketing pages? 2. What is the best way to link all the sub pages such as London Web Design? Should these links just be coming off the London marketing page? or should we have a sitemap in the footer that lists every page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
ECommerce website with link to manufactures site for ordering - Should these links be follow or no follow?
Dear Mozzers, I have a couple of questions regarding link juice and whether I should have do follow or no follow links ? We have an affiliate eCommerce website and on our product pages we have a "Order online " button which will go our subdomain on the manufactures site in order for the user to complete the online ordering process So it's - www.ourcompany.co.uk - "Order Online Button" - www.manufactuer.ourcompany.co.uk Should this " Order online Button" be a Follow or No Follow link ? I ask this as currently from looking at Majestic seo , these "order online " buttons on my product pages seems to be Follow links so am I losing potential link juice by sending it externally ? Am I correct in assuming by changing it to be no follows, I would increase the link juice going elsewhere internally? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
How to make Link Building for the E-Commerce sites?
Hello everyone, I just ask one question: How to make Link Building for the E-Commerce sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | backlinkmag0 -
Links in body text
From a purely SEO /link juice perspective, is there any benefit to linking from body text to a page that is in a pervasive primary navigation? The primary nav puts a link at the top of the HTML. With the tests done by members of this site, the "first link counts" rule negates the link juice value of a link in the body text if there is already a link in the nav. Now I've also seen the data on using hash tags to get a second or third link, but ignoring that, it would seem that links in the body text to pages in the nav have zero effect. This brings me to another question - block level navigation. If anchor text links pass more juice than links in the top navigation, why would you put your most coveted target pages in the top nav? You would be better off building links in the content, which would create a poor user experience. To me, the theory that anchor text links in the body pass more juice than links in the primary nav doesn't make any sense. Can someone please explain this to me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Cross linking between categories
Is it useful for SEO to cross link between TOP level categories, let's say I have a Home page and then 2 sub categories, one about green widgets one about red widgets
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Should i create a link from the green widget to the red widget or should I leave those are separate silos ? I know that within a silo i need to cross link ( from green widget 1 to green widget 2 etc... ) but how about about from the main category to the other main category ?0 -
Does having multiple links to the same page influence the Link juice this page is able to pass
Say you have a page and it has 4 outgoing links to the same internal page. In the original Pagerank algo if these links were links to an page outside your own domain, this would mean that the linkjuice this page is able to pass would be devided by 4. The thing is i'm not sure if this is also the case when the outgoing link, is linking to a page on your own domain. I would say that outgoing links (whatever the destination) will use some of your link juice, so it would be better to have 1 outgoing link instead of 4 to the same destination, the the destination will profit more form that link. What are you're thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TjeerdvZ0 -
Effects on SEO with CDN
Should we be concerned about any adverse consequences to our site's SEO value when moving the site's assets (javascript files and css files) to a CDN (Akamai)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Volusion.com0