SEO agency makes "hard to believe" claims
-
Hi
I operate in a highly competitive niche of "sell house fast" in UK.
Sites that are in top 1-3 tend to have thousands of links. Some of these are spammy type links. These sites have Domain Authority too.
My site has good content http://propertysaviour.co.uk and is listed with around 12 well known directories. I have been building back-links manually over the last 3-4 months.
The SEO agency we are looking to work with are claiming they can get my website to first page with above keyword.
How would you go about this strategy? What questions would you ask SEO agency?
What elements can do I myself? By the way, I am good at producing content!
-
There are companies that can get rankings that quickly in competitive verticals. But to do so they'll need to use techniques that are not within Google's guidelines such as using private blog networks or injecting links via hacking other people's sites.
If this is a site that you can walk away from should it get penalized, then hiring them might make sense. I'd want to ask how they are getting links and to make sure that they are not doing anything illegal or anything that involves hacking other websites. Getting links from a private blog network (if that's what they are doing) is not illegal or immoral, but if Google catches on and the site gets penalized then you may never be able to recover it.
If this is a site that you plan to keep for the long run, then it makes more sense to hire an agency that will improve your search presence gradually. Good SEO usually takes a lot of time.
I have been building back-links manually over the last 3-4 months.
Be careful. I'm seeing links that Google will likely see as unnatural such as:
http://www.linkaddurl.com/Arts___Humanities/Performing_Arts/Business/Real_Estate/?p=6
http://cqycxzfwzx.com/sell-my-house-fast-for-cash-your-request-fulfilled/
You're in a competitive space. I am betting that those sites above you with spammy links will drop out of site the next time Penguin hits. If they don't then it's because they're using private blog networks that Google hasn't been able to detect algorithmically and they're prime targets for a manual penalty.
My advice for hiring an SEO company would be to ask them exactly what they will do for your site. Are they going to improve your on page SEO? If so, how? Are they able to get you links? If so, how? If they tell you that the process is proprietary then it's probably not above board. If they give you marketing speak like, "We'll leverage your blah blah blah and produce stellar content marketing blah blah blah" without actually giving you a concrete idea of what they'll do then that's not good. I'd also ask for references. If they hide behind an NDA that's not good. Good SEO companies will have people lined up to give them a reference.
-
It's still as easy as it ever was to build spammy links. But it's just not what you should be doing to build a long-term high traffic site.
-
The SEO agency we are looking to work with are claiming they can get my website to first page with above keyword.
Walk away. No-one can make these claims without doing something a bit dodgy. Generally these sorts of claims turn into results that are short-lived and after a few more months, Google has caught up with what they are doing and you end up with a penalty.
Link building is not as easy as it once was. Now you need to have a reason for someone to want to link to you - if you want good links that is. A good linkable asset can make a real difference, so you need to start thinking outside the box a little bit on what you can do to help make you stand out a little.
-Andy
-
Sam
Thank you. I can do the link building. What I am not so good at is finding good sources of manual link building. Is there any recommendations?
I have used the Web Explorer tool as seen my competitors spammy links being built. I do not want to go down that route.
Would love to get your opinion on this. What tools do you use for finding good links?
-
In all likelihood they're telling the truth.
Shock? Perhaps, but here's another truth in the following 12 months you'll get slapped so hard your site will be in a worse position than today!
Sam
P.S. Talking from experience as I once used one of these agencies!
-
Thank you for your input.
The SEO agency is claiming that in 2-3 months, I should be ranking in top 1-5 positions.
How do I increase domain authority and page rank for my website. The websites I'm up against have tens of thousands of links (mostly spammy)!
I have seen guide to building backlinks.
Help!
-
I dont have a huge amount to add to this, other than in my experiance a lot of agencies tend to be 2 or 3 years behind in general practises, especially the smaller ones.
"The times of looking to rank numero uno for one term are long gone." is completely correct though, so be very careful about messing up other key words etc.
-
The times of looking to rank numero uno for one term are long gone. What sounds like your existing strategy of having good content is the way to go. The risk with an agency that would even focus up on one term and promise number one is that they are going to inadvertently wreck your link profile.
If I were you, I would read the beginner's guide to link building https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building and continue to make good content. Don't allow an agency to manipulate the hell out of your profile for the sake of one term.
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
-
If I use links intag instead of "ahref" tag can Google read links inside div tag?
Hi All, Need a suggestion on it. For buttons, I am using links in tag instead of "ahref". Do you know that can Google read links inside "div" tag? Does it pass rank juice? It will be great if you can provide any reference if possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pujan.bikroy0 -
Disallowed "Search" results with robots.txt and Sessions dropped
Hi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin
I've started working on our website and I've found millions of "Search" URL's which I don't think should be getting crawled & indexed (e.g. .../search/?q=brown&prefn1=brand&prefv1=C.P. COMPANY|AERIN|NIKE|Vintage Playing Cards|BIALETTI|EMMA PAKE|QUILTS OF DENMARK|JOHN ATKINSON|STANCE|ISABEL MARANT ÉTOILE|AMIRI|CLOON KEEN|SAMSONITE|MCQ|DANSE LENTE|GAYNOR|EZCARAY|ARGOSY|BIANCA|CRAFTHOUSE|ETON). I tried to disallow them on the Robots.txt file, but our Sessions dropped about 10% and our Average Position on Search Console dropped 4-5 positions over 1 week. Looks like over 50 Million URL's have been blocked, and all of them look like all of them are like the example above and aren't getting any traffic to the site. I've allowed them again, and we're starting to recover. We've been fixing problems with getting the site crawled properly (Sitemaps weren't added correctly, products blocked from spiders on Categories pages, canonical pages being blocked from Crawlers in robots.txt) and I'm thinking Google were doing us a favour and using these pages to crawl the product pages as it was the best/only way of accessing them. Should I be blocking these "Search" URL's, or is there a better way about going about it??? I can't see any value from these pages except Google using them to crawl the site.0 -
SEO question
Hi there! I'm the SEO manager for 5 Star Loans. I have 2 city pages running. We are running our business in 2 locations: Berkeley, CA & San Jose, CA. For those offices we've created 2 google listings with separate gmail accounts. Berkeley (http://5starloans.com/berkeley/) ranks well in Berkeley in Gmaps and it shows on first page in organic results. However the second city page San Jose (http://5starloans.com/san-jose/) doesn't show in the Gmaps local pack results and also doesn't rank well in organic results. Both of them have authentic backlinks and reviews. It has been a year already and it's high time we knew the problem 🙂 any comment would be helpful. thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moonalev0 -
Linking to other peoples you tube videos related to our "How to do " articles on our website. Is there Best practices ?
Hi All, We are currently writing some "How to do" articles on our tool hire website and as there is alot of DIY related you tube videos out there, we thought It would be good to link to some of these at the bottom of our articles. From an SEO perspective, is there any do's and don'ts with regards how we should implement this. We are unable to do our videos so linking to others would be our preferred option. Does anyone know if this would give an SEO ranking benefit even though it's an outbound link to someone's video etc. thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
How to structure links on a "Card" for maximum crawler-friendliness
My question is how to best structure the links on a "Card" while maintaining usability for touchscreens. I've attached a simple wireframe, but the "card" is a format you see a lot now on the web: it's about a "topic" and contains an image for the topic and some text. When you click the card it links to a page about the "topic". My question is how to best structure the card's html so google can most easily read it. I have two options: a) Make the elements of the card 2 separate links, one for the image and one for the text. Google would read this as follows. //image
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich
[](/target URL) //text
<a href=' target="" url'="">Topic</a href='> b) Make the entire "Card" a link which would cause Google to read it as follows: <a></a> <a>Bunch of div elements that includes anchor text and alt-image attributes above along with a fair amount of additional text.</a> <a></a> Holding UX aside, which of these options is better purely from a Google crawling perspective? Does doing (b) confuse the bot about what the target page is about? If one is clearly better, is it a dramatic difference? Thanks! PwcPRZK0 -
Yoast Seo Plugin
When I view html code of our website, I see this from yoast plugin this. I guess there is really something wrong, especially the page 2? Why so many meta? When ask the support team of the plugin, the developer said me that it is caused by the theme. <html xmlns="<a class="attribute-value">http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml</a>" lang="<a class="attribute-value">en-US</a>"><head><meta http-equiv="<a class="attribute-value">Content-Type</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">text/html; charset=UTF-8</a>" /><meta name="<a class="attribute-value">google-site-verification</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">hRZ9ZRlCURkbiJA5Ewf6VJlSfGZipdXnumAKlHcrHaQ</a>" /><title>Villas Diani | Kenya Luxury Beach Holidaystitle><link rel="<a class="attribute-value">stylesheet</a>" href="[http://villasdiani.com/wp-content/themes/decorum/style.css](view-source:http://villasdiani.com/wp-content/themes/decorum/style.css)" type="<a class="attribute-value">text/css</a>" media="<a class="attribute-value">screen</a>" /><link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" type="<a class="attribute-value">application/rss+xml</a>" title="<a class="attribute-value">RSS Feed</a>" href="[http://villasdiani.com/feed/](view-source:http://villasdiani.com/feed/)" /><link rel="<a class="attribute-value">pingback</a>" href="[http://villasdiani.com/xmlrpc.php](view-source:http://villasdiani.com/xmlrpc.php)" /><meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Indian Ocean Villas in Kenya, Diani Beach Resort. Find Diani beach Accommodation and Information for Luxury Beach Holidays in Kenya</a>"/><link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://villasdiani.com/](view-source:http://villasdiani.com/)" /><link rel="<a class="attribute-value">next</a>" href="[http://villasdiani.com/page/2/](view-source:http://villasdiani.com/page/2/)" /><link rel="<a class="attribute-value">author</a>" href="[https://plus.google.com/u/0/108558298587711226912/posts](view-source:https://plus.google.com/u/0/108558298587711226912/posts)"/><link rel="<a class="attribute-value">publisher</a>" href="[https://plus.google.com/u/0/108558298587711226912/posts](view-source:https://plus.google.com/u/0/108558298587711226912/posts)"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:locale</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">en_US</a>"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:type</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">website</a>"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:title</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Villas Diani | Kenya Luxury Beach Holidays</a>"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Kenya Diani Beach Villas, Luxury Villa Rentals</a>"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:url</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">http://villasdiani.com/</a>"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:site_name</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Villas Diani | Kenya Luxury Beach Holidays</a>"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">article:publisher</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.facebook.com/VillasDianiBeach</a>"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:image</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">http://villasdiani.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/alfajiri-cliff-villa-diani-kenya.jpg</a>"/>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca10 -
The same "About" page on multiple WordPress microsites
Hello there, I have over 10 WordPress websites that all have the same "About" page because the same company. I have concerns that this will adversely affect my sites and i'm looking for the best way to deal with this. I was either going to remove the "About" page with Google Webmaster Tools and robots.txt or use the canonical meta tag on that page. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SpaMedica0 -
Google SERPs do not display "cached"
When I am signed in with Google and searching sites, the snippets do not display the "cached" link. Not good since I am trying to see when a particular page was crawled. If I login to another server that I never use to browse and search from there the "cache" link does show up. Assumption: google knows who I am on my machine and is "helping" me.......but is there an easy way to turn this help off?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eyauuk0