Backlinks! Right or wrong way?
-
Ever since the Penguin changes there is so much information online about the right way and wrong way to gather high PR good backlinks.
I am starting to notice a number of websites that have over taken me in the serps that display NO BACKLINKS no media interaction but have a PR of 3 and are displaying on page 1 and 2 for major keywords?
SEO is so confusing post penguin, How are we supposed to know whats wrong and right,??
One expert tells me one thing, another says another?
I have been told backlinking is useless now, I have bought numerous books on post penguin SEO and they also contradict each other.
Does anyone actually have an idea of how to go about getting ranked well now adays, or is every one guessing like me.. Trial and error..
websites offering services OLD SCHOOL SEO link building etc?
If SEO is dead how can these businesses still be focusing on 1000's of directory links etc.
I have targets of around 150 backlinks a month and to get good quality post penguin links I am stuck? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
thanks elissa
-
Yes its very hard for me because my site is probate, so not a very happy subject,
Thanks everyone some very helpful info off you all.
One thing thats curious is I am seeing sites that dont have any backlinks taking over me in the rankings
for example http://www.purelyprobate.co.uk/ they have a site similar to ours and they have a page rank above ours (we lost rank after getting hit by the penguin update)
they have no real linkage,mind boggling when everyone states that linking is the way to go.
Elissa
-
Hi Elissa,
Just checking... the competitors that are outranking you, might they have a local presence in the area your searches relate to?
If there is a local element to the products/services you are promoting then there is a plethora of reasons why a competitor could outrank you...
And, with most search now being "local" this could very well be an argument.
David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors (2012), that aggregates data from several experts within the industry, only ranks "Quality/Authority of inbound links to Domain" in 14th position.
Hope this helps a little?
-
In addition to RN1978's comment, which I would agree with 100%, always have your mozbar ready to go and run an open site explorer report on every thematically relevant site you come across. Investigate the top links in each report to see it's also a link you can obtain.
Building authority is an endless process and you'll get better at it the longer you're at it. The more business-like your approach to it the better off you'll be. That means be knowledgeable, be persistent, and be creative.
-
You have to create content that people will link to. There is no such thing as boring either. I manage social media and SEO for nuts and bolts companies, so i understand what you mean but you have to find your market and build the links there.
Also, why would a guest post be any less boring than posting on your own blog (re your advice on this post)?
edit.. added this link about borings companies creating great content.
Also check out what Ladders online are doing on Google plus.
-
Sorry Jo, I completely disagree that 'the links should come naturally'. If you have a boring, functional product that doesn't lend itself to social media, or even if your content is just something that users won't naturally link to, you're stuck.
Elissa - one of the best ways I've found is to put in time to researching the bloggers in your space, crafting unique pitch emails for each one, writing some great content for them and providing a decent guest post, or asking them to include a link in one of their posts that relates to your page.
Blogger Linkup/My Blog Guest etc won't generally serve up decent quality sites any more you need to do this research manually, but you should be able to get some good links out of it!
-
Increasing page rank by gaining back links is still how its done. However, post penguin many link farms, rings, exchanges, paid sites, or anything that is un-natural is not going to give you any credit and some cases such as spamming may hurt you.
It actually is much closer to how I think the world wide web should work. That is, if I as a webmaster find your site beneficial to my users I will link to you, in turn you get some credit for having link worthy content. This system was so abuse-able that it became an SEO strategy to gather links from anywhere. Google, just took a swipe at putting things right.
Now, follow links are harder to get, and social media is starting to play a larger metric on how worth while a site appears to be.
Hope that helps.
-
SEO companies still focussing on this stuff are either scamming people, or just so out of date and it will catch up with them.
Backlinks are still very worthwhile, but they must be earned naturally. Any backlink that can be bought is not natural.
SEO post penguin is actually REALLY straightforward! Implementing it is blody hard, but the theory is straightforward.
Really, all you have to do is create good quality content, relevant to your business on a regular basis. You also need to socialise this, be social on your social networks, publicise your content through your social means, earn backlinks by people coming across your content and deciding to link to it
Ultimately Google wants to know that your site is good quality (and it measures that by deemed good quality sites naturally linking to it because they think it is good). Social signals, tweet, number of facebook likes, google plus ones, other kinds of shares, people talking about your site etc.
Don't focus on 'SEO'. Focus on building a great website, a great brand and getting the word out and the links should come naturally.
Obviously all the on page and technical seo, ste speed etc best practises still apply.
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
-
When with Google+ bio area backlinks get devalued if we have everybody link to our site
Hello, As you know, Google+ bios, if they have a link in them are dofollow. I'm doing a link building campaign, and we already linked one of our Google+ pages to our home page and top 2 articles. My question is, to get links, can we have family and friends add links in their bios too for a total of 6 links to the home page (6 people) and some links to our articles? Or will Google devalue them because we are family and friends? How many is too many? Thanks.
Social Media | | BobGW0 -
Would Too Many Scoop.it Backlinks Hurt Our Website?
Hi, We noticed in our Google Webmaster Tool that we have received a total of 10,162 links (still increasing) from Scoop.it over a period of less than 2 months from January. All these links are linking to our home page, and it is topping the list of "Who links the most" under our "Traffic > Links to Your site" in our Google Webmaster. Our second domain that links the most to us only has 1,831 links to our domain. According to our marketing service company who posted our brief bookmark content on Scoop.it: "That just has to do with the page structure of that site. If multiple scoop.it users promote your URL, the link will appear multiple times on each user's page. Plus, it's a curated site, so the link will be recommended to other users. Scoop.it has an Alexa of <1000 so it's a very popular site. If Facebook was fully indexed by Google (and other search engines and crawlers had full access), you'd see a similar situation. There's currently no way to exclude specific social sites, sorry for the bad news. The high # of links from scoop.it are totally normal (and natural for that domain), it's just because of all their internal linking. Google seems to LOVE scoop.it (60M+ pages indexed), so I wouldn't worry." However, we still don't feel comfortable with the explanation because it appear so very unusual and clearly appear to be 'Unnatural' to us as we concern. I wonder if anyone knows if this would get us into trouble with Google? More seriously, get us deindexed due to 'Unnatural' backlinks in short period of time, from one single domain? Can anybody advise us what could we do with the current situation? Highly appreciate your advise, and many thanks! Enam
Social Media | | enam9370 -
What is the most effective way to keep spam out of twitter
When using twitter for business how to we prevent phishing and spamming issues, or at least minimize them
Social Media | | BrianScott0 -
Do you need legal rights to pictures in Facebook posts
When I add an image to a Facebook post (for a FanPage) does it need to be something I own or have credited, or can I use whatever images I like? Is this something that is at all monitored? Thanks!
Social Media | | theLotter0 -
Best Way to Build up Likes
Hello, What's the best ways to build up "Likes" on Facebook. A friend of mine wanted to buy likes and I'd like to give him an alternative. We're in the personal development training industry. We have a nice website 110 Likes No twitter or Google+ large number of past customers. The strategies have to be very non-abrasive as our fan base really cares a lot about us. In other words, it's not the kind of audience you can send mass messages to or do anything that would seem like sales or advertising. Thanks!
Social Media | | BobGW0 -
Ways to get the most out of your content/blog posts?
I've been working on posting more content on my blog and now I need a workflow to help me get more exposure on my posts. Currently this is what I'm doing: 1- Write Post 2- Add it to my favorites in Stumbled Upon 3- Post it to Facebook 4- Pin it in Pinterest I would love some more ideas. My goal at this point is to gain greater web exposure. I would love to be they type of blog others actively follow.
Social Media | | continuumphoto0 -
Best way to set up a directory / list site?
I have a domain called DownSyndromeBlogs.com There is nothing there now, but what I want to do is create a directory type site where I list lots of different blogs about Down syndrome (my son was born with Down syndrome, so it's a passion of mine.) Is there a good way to use that domain other than just a simple directory? Is it worth it to do some sort of "all top" like site? Maybe listing the RSS of each blog and pulling in a spinet of info? Or have people rank and view them? My purpose for buying the domain was two fold: 1. To give people searching for blogs about Down syndrome a good list of where to find them, and 2. To help direct people back to our site about Down syndrome, NoahsDad.com Another thing I was thinking about was somehow asking people to submit their site to DownsyndromeBlogs.com and perhaps ask for their email address or other contact info (since the people wanting to put their blog on the list would be the same people I would want to know about my main blog - NoahsDad.com) Or maybe there is another thing I'm missing all together..like making that some sort of 'social network' or buddy press for people wanting to blog about Down syndrome..but there are already many other sties out there like that. One thing I was curious about is SEO...if it's not a blog, and i"m not constantly putting up new and fresh content, will anyone ever be able to find the site via google search? (If that makes sense.) If I just do a directory page the page will be some what static and only updated when I add a new url. I'm open to any feedback / suggestions/ advice. Thanks.
Social Media | | NoahsDad0 -
Do facebook shares pass share juice the same way links pass link juice?
If i have a page on my domain say PAGE-A and let's say it's located at: http://www.mydomain.com/something/page-a and this page has quite a lot of page authority from many many inbound links. It is my understanding that if i "sculpt" the internal links on PAGE-A to point at only my primary targets, let's call the PAGE-B, PAGE-C, and PAGE-D; then those pages would gain some benefit from this link juice flowing through. Consider a similar situation where i have a page, say PAGE-F located at: http://www.mydomain.com/anotherpage/page-F and page-F gets 150 facebook shares. would the links on page-F pass this benefit on in any way? Or is only the direct target of the facebook share gaining benefit from this facebook sharing? Furthermore, lets consider a scenario where there are 30 or 40 similar pages like PAGE-F all with links out to my primary targets. Would these primary targets gain anything as these 30 or 40 pages gained facebook shares? Repeat above question, replace 'facebook' with 'twitter'. repeat again for 'google+' ?
Social Media | | adriandg0