A lot of backlinks from outside of niche – bad?
-
We have received a lot of backlinks over the years by users putting links on their websites to their home pages on our site, eg:
our.domain/user1
our.domain/user2
…
our.domain/user100000
There are 10’s of thousands of these backlinks, all natural, but many of them come from blogs that are completely outside of our niche. Only a small percentage of our backlinks 1% to 5% could actually be coming from pages related to our niche, the other 95%+ could be users just linking to their home pages.
Could this really hurt us..? We have 1000’s of backlinks related to our niche, yet we’ve noticed that some competitors with less than 50 backlinks can outrank us for certain keywords..
Also related, we’ve noticed these user links popping up on a lot of spammy sites, directories, etc. We didn’t create them but we’re disavowing them now to be safe. So this could also be hitting our rankings.
-
Hi David,
Sounds like you're on the right track there which is great, though it's often better to fix the problem rather than mask it with de-indexing. Even something like giving people an opportunity to write a bio about themselves could be a great way to get some unique content on these otherwise-empty pages as a quick example.
I have seen a correlation between bounce rate and rankings. This doesn't necessarily mean causation of course but whether it's because of that bounce rate or the reason__s people are bouncing less, the ranking result is going to be the same
Moz also covered this topic back in August too.
-
Thanks Chris, that's an excellent insight..
We've actually started to deindex all the 'thin' pages, but it will unfortunately take months for Google to recrawl all. And I think a restructuring is in order as you say. We're busy putting a 'learning' section together (similar to moz but much smaller), so we're going to feature this more prominently too.
I think you're correct about interaction. We receive a lot of organic traffic to these thin pages and people bounce quite quickly. We used to value this traffic, but now I think it just hurts us because of quick bounces. So we're addressing this now with deindexing, better titles and descriptions, and on-page elements to improve interaction.
Two years ago we never had these thin user pages indexed and our main landing pages dominated the rankings.
Have you seen any correlations recently between bounce rate and rankings slip...?
-
Thanks Paddy, great response, that clarifies things for me..
I don't think we've picked up any penalties because the majority of links look fine, they're just off-topic. But as a risk mitigation we've started to clear out the users and disavow the domains that look bad. It's unlikely we're receiving any real link juice from these spammy sites anyway..
-
Ok, that does make things a little different. Having genuinely organic links like this isn't really going to be a dangerous thing in this context. Since they really are legitimate, there will be a decent spread of anchor text, placement etc and you've already got thousands of relevant links as well.
Think of it like social media - Facebook and Twitter rank just fine for a number of things and they have billions of links from all over the Internet. My guess is that the current ranking issues are more related to onsite elements and perhaps the way users are interacting with your site.
There are quite a few pages that are very thin and thousands that offer 0 unique content.
The home page does a pretty good job of giving me the basics but if I were going to sign up, I'd want a little more information so perhaps this would be a good place to start. Create a page detailing each of those home page sections and how they're helpful to me.
If you do go down this route, make sure they're put somewhere handy in the nav. You don't want your important pages to be buried 5 clicks deep in the nav; push them as close to the top level as practical.
There are a number of other onsite elements that could be improved too, like H1s (most just say "What is twiends") and image alt text as some basic examples.
I hope that helps!
-
Hi David,
In terms of whether these links could hurt you, I'd be more concerned about the quality of the links than the topic. If the majority of links pointing at these user generated pages are low quality, then that would be of concern and you may want to disavow the ones that are very low quality such as the spammy sites / directories etc that you've found. You may even want to go as far as removing pages where the people who set them up are clearly spamming the pages hoping to get them to rank for some reason.
The fact they come from websites that are off-topic is a slight concern but they shouldn't "hurt" you as long as they are genuinely natural and it doesn't look like manipulation. If you're also generating links to other areas of the site that are on topic, then I wouldn't worry too much.
I hope that helps!
Paddy
-
Hi Peter,
Thanks for the response to David's question. I just wanted to clarify, I don't think David is referring to the topic of these pages or the links from these pages out to other websites. I believe he is referring to links from external websites pointing inwards towards these user generated pages. Therefore, Panda isn't something that should come into consideration.
Cheers.
Paddy
-
Hi, yes exactly..
Our site provides each user with a profile page that shows their latest tweets, photos, etc. So a lot of users like to list it as a home page in various places. eg:
-
Hi Dave,
I'm not 100% sure I understand the issue here. Do you mean users set up a profile on your website then link to that profile from their site? Kind of like if I put a link on our site to my Moz profile?
-
Hi Peter, thanks for the response, that looks like a good doc, I'll read through it now..
Please note, I don't have any way to remove the backlinks to our site or make them nofollow. They exist on 10,000 other websites.. The only thing I can do is disavow them, but this is not what the disavow tool is designed for..
Did you perhaps misread what I was asking..?
Many thanks
Dave
-
This is discussed many times. And answer is YES. You can see here what Josh Bachynski says:
http://themoralconcept.net/pandalist.html
Look on #5 in section Low quality factors.That's why you can see here or in blog sections moderators often remove links to sites. Because some people just make comment to get a link to their site. You should do this too. Or make them "nofollow" at least.
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
-
How to recover from the bad links?
Hello, I am the administrator of abarkavanco.com. My site DA drop down 16 to 13. How can I recover the Bad links for increasing DA? Thanks all
Link Building | | BillySeal0 -
Backlinks 101, one or multiple?
Analyzing a competitor backlink profile I noticed they have the habit of adding multiple links to the guest post/advertorial they get, one link to their site, plus some links to authority site like wikipedia and institutional websites. Is there anyone with some data, testing, and so on, supporting this? I can see their SERP positioning is very good, but they spent a lot of money on quite expensive links, so I don't know if it's the DA of the linking domains or the multiple links making the difference. Anyone has an idea?
Link Building | | max.favilli0 -
Should I worry about backlinks like this?
So I am going through my backlink profile and of course those random backlinks popup from spammy type sites like this which are useless. Should I worry about links that come from sites like these? http://ppfinder.com/camy/shelvy
Link Building | | cbielich0 -
Backlinks from newpapers that requires subscription
Don't know if this has been answered in another post, but what happens to backlinks that requires users to subscribe and/or pay to view the content with the backlink on it?
Link Building | | helgeolaussen
Some newspaper sites has subscription requirement to view certain content.
Does the backlink drop in value? Or is there any negative effect from this?0 -
Do you need a place to ditch bad links?
This is not a question as such, more a gift 🙂 I have registered a domain name to ditch bad links. For example, let's pretend I have a page on my site: www.mydomain.com/viagra and have never done any good SEO to promote this page, just a load of spammy directory links. The page used to rank for Viagra but then Google took manual action and I lost my ranking. Booo! Now the page is of no use to me until I get all these links removed and the manual action revoked. Even then, I'll be starting from scratch re-building good links to the page. Here's another option, simply re-direct the url to badlinksbin.com and say goodbye to all those spammy links. This bypasses the lengthy link removal process. Warning: I wouldn't recommend using this method if you have some good links in the mix, unless you can contact the site owners and get the links changed. And, don't forget to change the name of the url first so the Viagra page still exists on your site. As I've already set this up, I thought no harm sharing it and letting you guys use it too. I hope it helps some people.
Link Building | | Matt_Wilson0 -
If possible, please help me analyse my backlink profile
Ok i have been reading and reading on seo, and been using ahrefs tool to really understand the problem my site is having. if possible some help would be great please so some of the issues and questions. My website is ppp.net.nz and i have been using ahrefs to analyse. 1 - for both backlinks and domains, there has been a significant loss. what does this mean. are they the bad ones, temporary ones? shoudl i be glad im loosing stuff since they might be the ones i dont want? over the last few days it has been leveling out so is that a good sign? 2 - looking at achors text, the majority is for hawkes bay weddig photography. i know this is not right and i need to work on this to make more anchor text about ppp.net.nz, picture perfect photography, etc. is that right? 3- staying with anchor text, i noticed i have lots of anchor texts with terms that are not completely related to mine. this is very worrying. does that mean other people are linking to my site, or has someone hacked into my account, or someone is doing this to hurt my profile? my website is a WP site. i assume it is imperative that i remove all these bad backlinks, even though they are smaller amount. but then they do add up to quite a big chunk. 4- staying with point 3, i checked the backlinks and i do get around 6-10 a days with weird text. i assume backlinks mean links to are going to places and linking back to me? but can this also mean other people just linking to me directly? if so, can this be done via the comments in Wordpress? 5- i have asked people to do SEO for me before, and being ignorant back then, i was happy to see lots of backlinks but i understand now they would hurt me. Now for me to remove them, i know i have to contact the webmasters. But can I contact the person that I hired and get them to remove from our end, instead of from the webmasters' end? Thank you for your help. i try to read and analyse as much as i can. and im glad i found these problems. However, some sound advice would be great please as I honestly dont know how to trust SEO companies. Binh
Link Building | | btrinh0 -
How many backlinks on start up?
How many backlinks would you say is too many on a start up site. Assume about 300 visitors driven to the site via adwords.
Link Building | | JML11790 -
Duplicate content how bad is it?
I have a magento webshop and some of products have more than one link. E.g. wolverine apprentice it has these two links http://www.urbanclothing.dk/maerker-1/wolverine/wolverine-apprentice-6-tan-mens.html and http://www.urbanclothing.dk/wolverine-apprentice-6-tan-mens.html Is that going to ruin my chances on ranking high on Google? If yes what should I do about it ? And was does Linking Root Domains and Page Authority mean? I fount it under the keyword ranking section.
Link Building | | UCDK0