Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Partner links - is this bad?
-
I have been looking at whys to get natural links, another SEO company said that instead of doing Guest Blog Posts there now adding single links to partner pages on websites which have a follow link. To me this sounds like basically a links page rebadged as a partners page. Is this a dangerous practice? or does this carry some weight with the search engines?
-
The Google quality guidelines say that "excessive" creation of partner pages for the purpose of cross linking is against the guidelines. But, they don't tell us what constitutes excessive.
This is not always a bad idea. Here are some criteria I would use to make this decision:
-Would having a page like this actually be good for your readers/clients to use? Or does it just exist for search engines. For example, if you are a realtor, having a resource page to list local home inspectors, mortgage brokers, etc. is a good idea and being listed on their resource pages is probably ok. But, if that page contained mostly links to realtors in other cities and unrelated businesses like local casinos or payday loans companies or car insurance businesses then you'd start to think that this page was created just for links.
-What is the quality like on the pages that are linking to you? Do they look like they were set up just for links?
-Avoid using exact match anchor text. If your resource page contains links to Realtor in Seattle and Best Home Inspector in New York then that's a sign that it's set up for SEO purposes.
-
Is it relevant to the post? If not, a good site would remove the link.
-
I dont think I would accept it. First, you have no idea of the history behind that domain. Could be that they spam the daylights out of people, or have a questionable backlink strategy. If their domain is compromised or gets in trouble in the future, it could hurt you.
Instead of posting your articles and content on someone else's site and building their page count and relevance, spend the time posting on your own. Get the backlinks you seek by submitting your articles and content to trusted sources, and get people to link to you. This can be time consuming and difficult, but ultimately much more rewarding. (both in pride and seo)
Best case scenerio, if they have a great domain history and its not spammy, I woud still look at the long term goal of building up your own content, on your site.
-
Don't do it. Create original, good content and get people to legitimately link to it because they place such a high value on it.
-
A few which are considered "natural" are perfectly fine if there is "relevance." However excessive link exchanges "you link to me, and I'll link to you" or partner pages for the sake of cross linking in not good and will get you in trouble with the Google Police.
My advice, keep it natural.
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
-
Back link from site with DA of 72 to a website domain. Clicking on the link redirects to our website not the attended one.
Hi,
Link Building | Jan 6, 2017, 7:06 AM | JIMBO16
I've ran a back link check and discovered a good back link to a site which then gets redirected back to my company's website. I have a feeling that an old SEO agency has purchased a small website which has a decent link back from a relevant organisation with a high Domain authority and then redirects the domain to our website to get the link juice. What are your thought on this? Is this really bad practise and possibly damaging? Thanks, Jim0 -
Spammy links
Hi Guys, I have a case which seems to occur more often for our customers. The websites of our customers seem to receive tons of backlinks from websites all over the world (China, Russia, Ukrain, etc). It’s spam we never asked for, we didn’t buy any dodgy linkbuilding packages or anything. Do any of you guys have experience with this matter? We try to disavow the links but it takes too much time and we will never manage to disavow 100% of all links. Examples are www.keukensduitsland.nl and www.m2beveiliging.nl Hope anyone has experience and maybe even solutions for this matter. Thanks!
Link Building | Dec 22, 2015, 6:11 AM | Happy-SEO1 -
Internal Linking - Post links vs Side Bar Links behaving differently
Hi, I have a question regarding the internal linking behavior. My website is www.hindimeaning.com which is approx 3 years old. I have approx 450 posts. Now i have a widget on right sidebar "Popular posts". A widget below my posts "Related Posts". And a simple html CSS menu above the posts (I removed menu around 6 month before so currently it will not show.) I crawled my site with moz crawler (same are the result from google crawler as well) and it shows menus links as internal links. While sidebar widget "Popular posts" and "Related Posts" are not showing as internal links. If we talk theoretically what i learn till now is "every link on a page behaves as internal link". Then why the widget links are not showing as internal links. Thanks, Mahesh Kumar
Link Building | Feb 12, 2015, 6:48 AM | chaudhary04890 -
Link Exchange
Hi everyone, I just started working for a client in a new niche. After reviewing the backlink profiles of his competitors I can see that the top sites are using a ton of link exchanges. They are from really spammy sites too. The kind that will link to anyone that provides a link back. Anyone else seeing much of this?
Link Building | Jan 2, 2013, 8:06 AM | SixTwoInteractive0 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | Nov 19, 2018, 8:31 PM | CobraJones950 -
Are Link Exchange A Bad Idea
Hi, i am wondering if link exchanges are a bad idea. I have seen a company called link market where you join and exchange links with other companies and i am just wondering if this is now a bad idea. The last thing i do not want to happen is for google to get angry if i done link exchanges
Link Building | Sep 21, 2012, 10:18 AM | ClaireH-1848860 -
Changing links
Hi guys i wanted you views on changing the anchor text of links. I have quality links coming in but with year terms such as 2012 in there, if i want to change them all to 2013 for example would it be badly seen by Google? I cant say i feel comfortable about doing it but they are my links and are related to our products. Any advice much appreciated.
Link Building | Jul 26, 2012, 12:14 PM | pauledwards0 -
Does the ratio of external nofollow links to external "do follow" links matter in terms of SERPs ranking?
My site has an external link nofollow:dofollow ratio of approximately 1:1 That is, there are about as many nofollow external links as "do follow" external links. I have an impression that the ratio of no-follow to "do follow" links is a factor in the way that our website shows up in SERPs. I have the impression from reading a variety of sources, and from looking at Seomoz, that calculate "trust" factors as if they mattered (in SERPs), that seem to value a relatively low nofollow:dofollow ratio. Am I correct about that? Thanks,
Link Building | Jun 29, 2012, 6:22 PM | tcolling
Tim PS - I don't know whether or not this matters, but our website is at: www.trustworthycare.com - Tim0