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
-
My backlinks are not showing
I have been building lots of backlinks to my website but when I decided to check them I saw just two. Please am I doing something wrong?
Link Building | | Briefwatch0 -
Backlinks from missing sites
While combing though spammy backlinks, I'm finding a lot of supposedly "active" links that lead to 404 errors, pages that contain no html, domains for sale, and sites that all have a uniform design which I can't tell if they're web host default pages, or pages using a spammy third-party link aggregator (or both).
Link Building | | rickmic
For example: http://easyreveal.us/ So, do I disavow missing sites? Lost sites? Is there a drawback to disavowing sites that have been removed? Any help would be appreciated.0 -
Are long URLs bad for SEO?
Hi, I would like to know how bad is the long URLs that I have on my website. At the moment we have 543 long urls and I was wondering how big is the impact in my SEO. Thank you
Link Building | | Blind_Foundation3 -
Backlink Profile Cleanup
I have downloaded the domains that link to my website (550 domains) and I am going through the low quality (low DA) sites to ask them to remove their links to my website or I will disavow them. I have noticed alot of blogspot.in and blogspot.nl (SEE ATTACHED) Should I ask them for removal or disavow these? tJO50fQb
Link Building | | PartyStore0 -
Which Backlinks to Disavow?
I am a site owner just getting to learn more about managing things myself after outsourcing SEO to a firm a year back (they stopped all activities about 8 months back). The question I have is about disavowing the low quality links. After collecting all the data from many sites on the basis of this helpful posting - (http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal), I am now left with around 2,800 back-links. I discovered most of the bad ones using ahrefs and majestic (and Google webmaster did not show many of the bad links). In fact, in the very first place, I realized that there was a spam problem when I saw the anchor cloud on ahrefs which showed many unrelated anchors for my site. I have three questions: **First, **Many URL's are actually from websites which have nothing to do with my line of business and I can sure spot them. What I get confused with is this - I can not say that these sites are downright spam. Some of them look to be good sites for example - a coffee machine vendor (with full business details and a fairly decent looking business), a Nike sports shoes mart etc. But they have nothing to do with my business. So my first question is - What is spam really? Would a back link from a high ranking website in the travel industry be considered spam from the point of view of someone who runs a website for medical equipment, specially if the back-link is from an unrelated anchor text like - "3 nights travel package" (which has nothing to do with medical business). I think I should disavow all the low quality back links with an erroneous anchor but Id like some views on this. Second, I see that in the disavow file, one could either upload a whole domain or a specific URL (could somebody please confirm this). I have some sites which have 8-12 (more in some cases) back links to my site. In most cases these sites are either really bad quality or have nothing to do with my business. I am tempted to disavow the entire domain for such sites instead of going by the URL's. Any views? Third, this is what I'd really like some help with. In case I delete the very pages (on my site) to which these back links point, should I still disavow the pointing domain? Finally: I have not created most of these backlinks. In fact, over the last 2-3 months we have started creating links from good sites in my industry. Most of the anchor cloud is good for me on ahrefs but there are these bad ones to which my question relates. I have not got any manual penalty from Google, though my traffic I think took a hit in the first week of October 2013.
Link Building | | sanar0 -
Is there a difference between .com backlinks and .co.uk?
(We are a UK based business) I am currently looking for sites for guest posting opportunities and I am not sure whether I should prioritize .co.uk sites or go for .com sites. Does it matter? Is more weight given to .co.uk sites if you are based in the UK?
Link Building | | JamesG0750 -
BackLinks Less than other software
Why Domains BackLinks to my sites are less than link in google webmaster tools or in the other software? In google web master tools i find 323 domains backlink, in other online software the number of domain links is similar. There are great problem when i must download the backlink to upload in other seo software for different analysis, example buzzstream Thank You.
Link Building | | agasystem0 -
Backlinks from HTTPS adresses
I did a search of the Q&A and didn't see a direct answer to this, so here it goes! Is a backlink from an HTTPS address valued the same as an HTTP? Thanks!
Link Building | | endlesspools0