What is your SEO agency doing in terms of link building for clients?
-
- What are you or your SEO agency doing for your client's link building efforts?
- What are you (or the agency) doing yourself, or out-sourcing, or having the client do for link building?
- If a new client needs some serious link building done, what do you prescribe and implement straight off the bat?
- What are your go-to link building tactics for clients?
- What are the link building challenges faced by your agency in 2013/2014?
- What's working for your agency and what's not?
- Does your agency work closely with the client's marketing department to gain link traction? If so, what are collaborating on?
- What else might you be willing to share about your agencies link building practices?
Thanks
-
I'd like to bump this question as well..
I see allot of agency's talking the talk, but when it comes down to actual deliverable's, they still turn to outdated and low value "links" just for the sake of reporting that they have built links. (Blog networks, Social shares, bookmarks and resource pages from their networks of sites etc)
In a nutshell, link building isnt about that anymore. Its about real world marketing, providing value first and getting links second. On one hand, we could put all our eggs into the "New SEO" basket but then we fall short on actual deliverable's that clients have been used to getting. (Links built) with "New SEO" links aren't a guarantee, it all falls around a campaign and in a nutshell is all about Outreach and PR.
I guess its all about educating the client, but at the end of the day, other (Old school) agencies CAN guarantee links and we cant. (Less internal resources, no blog networks all links dependent on outreach and real campaigns)
In response to your questions:
What are you or your SEO agency doing for your client's link building efforts?- Guest Articles (PR / Outreach)
- Niche Directory Submissions (High Authority and Paid)
- Broken Link Building (no guarantees, based on hours spent)
What are you (or the agency) doing yourself, or out-sourcing, or having the client do for link building?
- Feedback on content ideas for the content team in the industry.
- Commonly asked questions from clients.
- Encourage client Reviews on G+
If a new client needs some serious link building done, what do you prescribe and implement straight off the bat?
Only option here is to go old school. (Social Bookmarks, Directory Submissions, Resource page submissions, Paid Links) Alternatively, make it a point that "serious link building" should not be done unless they create something worthy of the amount of links they want/need. (other than internal links, always room for optimization here)
What are your go-to link building tactics for clients?
- Competitor Analysis - Identify Tactics they use, make notes of possible content / campaigns to create to legitimately get the same links
- Niche Directory / Local link building
What are the link building challenges faced by your agency in 2013/2014?
- As described above, main challenge is educating the client on how a Digital Agency SHOULD be working (with Google, not against it by manipulating rankings IE "building" links)
What's working for your agency and what's not?
- Outreach... We need more contacts and mutually beneficial relationships (PR stuff)
Does your agency work closely with the client's marketing department to gain link traction? If so, what are collaborating on?
- When their PR agency creates a campaign, we review and find ways for them to incorporate a link to the site in all online publications were possible.
- When reporters contact them for an angle on a story, we take a look and advise were applicable
What else might you be willing to share about your agencies link building practices?
- Looking at the future, we're trying to set ourselves apart from the average agency. Staying away from Link building and moving towards "link earning". Having the motto were whatever we create, it needs to be link worthy or provide real value to people. If we do this consistently for all clients, the links will come in automatically. This is all in theory obviously but really don't want to be doing old school "link building" if i know the value isn't going to last very long. What's the real alternative??
In summary, I'd love to know what other agencies get up to as well. Do they rely solely on outreach? Do they have their own network of sites to rely on for when its time to report and links haven't yet been built? I guess its about finding that balance, old school and new school. Its a work in progress i guess!!
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
-
Doing URL change losses SEO ranking or not?
Hi Webmasters, I would like to move shipwaves.me to shipwaves.aeHowever, our website is concentrated on middle east countries and moreover, we have though .me is middle east [United Arab Emirates} and later with SEO advice, we have taken .ae.Besides, our confusion is if the website move from Shipwaves.me to the new domain shipwaves.ae this makes our SEO ranking loss or not?some of our keywords has been started showing on various search pages. So, anyone knows about this concern, please let me know.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LayaPaul0 -
Would this be duplicate content or bad SEO?
Hi Guys, We have a blog for our e-commerce store. We have a full-time in-house writer producing content. As part of our process, we do content briefs, and as part of the brief we analyze competing pieces of content existing on the web. Most of the time, the sources are large publications (i.e HGTV, elledecor, apartmenttherapy, Housebeautiful, NY Times, etc.). The analysis is basically a summary/breakdown of the article, and is sometimes 2-3 paragraphs long for longer pieces of content. The competing content analysis is used to create an outline of our article, and incorporates most important details/facts from competing pieces, but not all. Most of our articles run 1500-3000 words. Here are the questions: Would it be considered duplicate content, or bad SEO practice, if we list sources/links we used at the bottom of our blog post, with the summary from our content brief? Could this be beneficial as far as SEO? If we do this, should be nofollow the links, or use regular dofollow links? For example: For your convenience, here are some articles we found helpful, along with brief summaries: <summary>I want to use as much of the content that we have spent time on. TIA</summary>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kekepeche1 -
SEO Tactics - All in the Game?
Hey Mozzers Hoping to get some opinions on SEO at a small business level. We're engaged in SEO for a number of clients which are small businesses (small budgets). We stick to strictly white hat techniques - producing decent content (and promoting it) and link building (as much as is possible without dodgy techniques/paying huge sums). For some clients we seem to have hit a ceiling about with rankings anywhere between roughly position #5 - #15 in Google. In the majority of cases - the higher ranking clients don't appear to be engaged in any kind of content marketing - often have much worse designed websites - and not particularly spectacular link profiles (In other words they're not hugely competitive - apart from sometimes on the AdWords front - but that's another story) The only difference seems to be links on agency link farms - you know the kind? Agency buys expired domains with an existing PR - then just builds simple site with multiple blog posts that link back to their clients sites. (Also links that are simply paid for) Obviously these sites serve no purpose other than links - but I guess it's harder for Google to recognize that than with obvious SEO directories etc?... It seems to me that at this level of SEO for small businesses (limited budgets, limited time) the standard approach for SEO is the "expired domains agency link sites" described above - and simply paying bloggers for links. Are the above techniques considered black hat? Or are they more grey-hat? - Are they risky? - Or is this kind of thing all in the game for SEO at the small business level (by that I mean businesses that don't have the budget to employ a full time SEO and have to rely on engaging agencies for low level - low resource SEO campaigns) Look forward to your always wise council...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Exchange link from sites in same google account
Hi everyone, Anybody have experience when you have some websites which stored in Google Webmaster Tool and they exchange links between sites. So is it good for sites? We are hosted on different server. Thank you so much
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Outranked by link farm
Hello Mozzers, I got a questions about some rankings. Some of my sites always had no. 1 rankings for most of the competitive terms per niche. I recently made the change to a full responsive design for more mobile friendliness. No all of the sudden I see different competitors that are not mobile friendly outranking me for some of my most important keywords but also I see some link farm sites (like: camping.startpagina.nl) outranking me for some terms. I was under the impression that Google doesn't like link farm sites? Also I provide a lot of good unique content on my pages and my competitor does no such thing. Still for some terms he outranks me. I understand that it can't be just 1 thing and that there are a lot of factors playing a rol in the big picture but still, you must understand that this is pretty frustrating. I obey the rules of the search engines and see competitors do no such thing and still being outranked by them. Further details of this matter can be send to you in PM if you need it. Looking forward for your thoughts on this. regards Jarno
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JarnoNijzing0 -
Competitor outranking you with link spam. What would be your next steps?
FYI: I've already searched the forums for previous posts on this topic and although some are helpful, they don't tend to have many responses, so I'm posting this again in the hope of more interaction from the community 😉
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | adamlcasey
So can I please ask the community to tell me what course of action you would take, if this was happening to you? We have been ranking in position 1 for a major keyword in our space for the past 18 months. Today I logged into my Moz account and to keyword rankings to find that we have dropped to 2nd. So I placed the competitors website; who's now in 1st position, into OSE and looked under the "Just Discovered" tab. There are 258 newly discovered links, 95% of which use keywords in the anchor text!
So I reviewed the rankings for all of these other keywords being targeted and sure enough they are now dominating the top 1-3 spots for most of them. (some of which we are also attempting to rank for and have subsequently been pushed down the rankings) Their links are made up of: Forum and blog comments - always using anchor text in the links Article's posted on web 2.0 sites (Squidoo, Pen.io, Tumblr, etc) Profile page links Low quality Press Release sites Classified ad sites Bookmarking sites Article Marketing sites Our competitors sell safety solutions into the B2B market yet the topics of some of the sites where these links appear include: t-shirts sports news online marketing anti aging law christian guitars computers juke boxes Of the articles that I quickly scanned, it was clear they had been spun as they didn't read well/make sense in places. So my conclusion is that they have decided to work with a person (can't bring myself to call them an seo company) who have provided them with a typical automated link building campaign using out dated, poor seo practices that are now classified as link spam. No doubt distributed using an automated link publishing application loaded with the keyword rich anchor text links and published across any site that will take them. As far as I was aware, all of the types of links we're supposed to have be penalised by Google's Penguin & Panda updates and yet it seems they are working for them! So what steps would you take next?0 -
Removing Unnatural Link Penalties
As soon as I began working in my current position at my current company I noticed my predecessor's tendency towards buying link packages from blackhat companies... I knew we were being penalized, and had to prove to him that we needed to halt those campaigns immediately and try our darndest to remove all poison links from the internet. I did convince him and began the process. There was 57% of our backlinks tied to the same anchor phrase with 836 domains linking to the same phrase, same page. Today there are 643 of those links remaining. So I have hit a large number of them, but not nearly enough. So now I am getting messages from Google announcing that our site has been hit with an unnatural link penalty. I haven't really seen the results of this yet in the keywords I am trying to rank for, but fear it will hurt very soon and know that I could be doing better in the meantime. I really don't know what to do next. I've tried the whole "contact the webmasters" technique and maybe have had 1/100 agree to remove our links. They all want money or don't respond.. Do I really need to use this Disavow tool?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jesse-landry
I hear mixed things about it.. Anybody with experience here like to share their stories? Thanks for the moral support!0 -
Spammy Links, SERPs, and Low Competition Keywords
While I've seen a lot of news about Google cleaning up content farms, link farms, and similar spam, I've also seen some companies start ranking very well for niche terms using these same practices. Question: Does Google completely discount links from content farms and similar sites or simply give them low value? Observation: I've seen a company start ranking well (top 3) for several terms when they used be on page 2. When I looked at their links, they are from article farms, directories, do-follow blogs and similar low-vale sources. Relative to others, they have about 10x the volume of links with the precise anchor text they are targeting. I wonder in absence of other information that these spammy links still count for something. Given the low competition for the term, this is enough to boost their rank. Just thoughts some thoughts as we are working on long-tail strategies for some key terms.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jeff-rackaid.com0