I can get hundreds of natural links from real estate agent sites, but should I?
-
I have a website that generate leads for real estate agents nationwide. I have an auto email that sends out the referral agreement and in the email I ask them to place a link to our website on their site somewhere to be a part of the program. I can get as many as 10-15 links in a few hours in every major city in the U.S. Most realtor websites have websites that are new, or haven't posted blogs and have a Moz domain score of 1 and trust score of 1.
I have been thinking of only selecting websites with descent Moz rankings instead of having all agents link to me, even ones with a low moz score. Is it a bad idea to get a bunch of links from legitimate websites that have low Moz scores?
-
The first thing I would ask is how you define "legitimate"?
If these "legitimate" sites are websites for actual businesses in your industry then the answer to your question is no. It is not a bad idea to get a bunch of links from legitimate websites that have low Moz scores.
Moz scores only reveal certain aspects of what makes a good linking site. One aspect moz metrics do not measure is relevance. A relevant site in your industry with low Moz metrics linking to your site can possibly do more benefit to your website for SEO purposes than a non-relevant site, unrelated to your industry, with high Moz metrics.
Another consideration to take into account is a site may have low Moz metrics this year but grow to have high Moz metrics in future years. For most realtor websites that are new as you have mentioned, this is likely going to be the case. Getting a link on the site will grow in benefit as the site gains authority and trust with time. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with getting a suitable link on a site with low Moz metrics and there could be great upside future rewards.
The potential problem I'm seeing with your strategy though is that there is a strong possibility that the sites that put a link up to your site for the free program will not keep the link on the site for the long-term, especially when the link doesn't make sense on the site and possibly look spammy. Considerations to have the link applied with suitable contextual text that make sense for the linking site will both be more fitting for them and also beneficial for the SEO of your site.
-
As long as the links are marked nofollow you don't have to worry about being penalized for unnatural link building. To stay in line with Google's webmaster guidelines you should make that a part of your strategy. If you're getting hundreds of dofollow links in a matter of days, Google is going to know those are unnatural whether they have a high DA or not.
Google has stated in the past that they may pass value through a nofollow link, so don't consider it a dead end for SEO efforts. I would consider any link from a legitimate website to be of value, regardless of what their moz score is. Remember that any score from moz or any other third party is an approximate measurement of Google's algorithm and does not guarantee anything. There may be something valuable to your website on other sites with a low DA.
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 site got hacked and now i have 1000s of 404 pages and backlinks. Should i transfer my site to a new domain name and start again?
My site was hacked and I had 1000s of pages that should not exist created and has had 1000s of backlinks put in. Now i have the same pages and backlinks redirecting to 404 pages. Is this why my site crashed out of google and my SEO fixes since have made no progress to my problem?
Industry News | | KeithWarbyUK0 -
Are there any noob sites that might enlighten me to how everyone earns income here?
I know...very odd beginner question so let me elaborate. I have always worked in the corporate grind. I quit and opened up a couple of small (fairly unsuccessful) businesses since 2007. I enjoyed the SEO parts of building the business but just couldn't get them to stick. (local service businesses) I have fallen into some lead gen business with my old customers and I am trying to build that now. How are the majority of the SEO people earning income here? Are most selling their SEO services to other small businesses? Are most earning ad type income here? (how does that work?) I am quickly being forced back into the corporate grind again and would really prefer to learn and taylor my SEO efforts into staying self employed if possible. Would anyone be able to direct me to sites that might explain how entrepreneurs are earning income around here? A little 'Career Counseling' of sorts? (haha) I sincerely would appreciate some enlightenment. 🙂
Industry News | | MontyTheLab2 -
How can I transform my knowledge into products?
Hi Mozers, Since 7 years, I've learned a lot about SEO, analytics, local, PPC,... from sources like Moz, Distilled, Market Motive,... and I'm using tools like Moz Analytics, Majestic, SEMrush, Wordstream,... but I've some difficulties to transform my knowlegde into products/services that I could sell as an freelance consultant. Audits is an example of easy product that I could sell but have you another examples of "easy" products that I could developp as an freelance consultant? Thank you for your help. Jonathan
Industry News | | JonathanLeplang0 -
KEYWORDS: How can I find keywords to target now that the majority of searches have been hidden from keyword planner?
Hello Community, I am not an expert and I need some advice. So thank you for your time 🙂 I read that Google is not showing the same amount of search volume data it was showing before (like up until 2-3 weeks ago, after the NSA scandal) and that now it's changed the way we should look at which keyword groups to target since we dont know anymore how many people actually searched for these terms. Say I want to start a new site around the topic "french chocolate" (just joking, but say I want to). How do I find out today which is the most searched term in that keyword group/cluster? I mean this in terms of volume of searches. Please help, I need some guidance on how to approach my content developmente strategy from now on, I always heavily relied on keywords and that got me awesome results in less than a year! Thank you again for your time Best
Industry News | | Andrew_IT0 -
How do I predict quality of inbound link before using Disavow links tool?
I am working on Ecommerce website and getting issues with bad inbound links. I am quite excited to use Disavow links tools for clean up bad inbound links and sustain my performance on Google. We have 1,70,000+ inbound links from 1000+ unique root domains. But, I have found maximum root domains with low quality content and structure. Honestly, I don't want to capture inbound links from such websites who are not active with website and publishing. I am quite excited to use Disavow links tool. But, How do I predict quality of inbound links or root domains before using it? Is there any specific criteria to grade quality of inbound links?
Industry News | | CommercePundit0 -
Is it getting harder to sell SEO services?
Is it just me, or is it getting harder to sell SEO services? SEO costs more now and takes longer to achieve results There seem to be more good SEO agencies out there (gone are the days where the primary competition was offshore outsourcers and web design agencies) It seems that the number of agencies is growing faster than the number of companies buying services As online competition heats up, it takes more and more budget to really "win" in a market, but so few companies are willing to invest enough Any others notice similar trends? What will the future look like?
Industry News | | AdamThompson0 -
How do i get a description in my google local listing
My site is listed in the serps at number one but where google used to list the name of my site with the meta description below it, now Google lists my site title with my address to the right side and below it says Google+page instead of listing my meta description which had my key search phrase in it and also a call to action to see my video on my site. My click through was much better with the meta description below it and the call to action. is there any way i can get the description back under my title in the serps? Maybe by deleting my Google + page? Thanks in advance, Ron
Industry News | | Ron100 -
Is a canonical to itself a link juice leak
Duane Forrester from Bing said that you should not have a canonical pointing back to the same page as it confuses Bingbot,
Industry News | | AlanMosley
“A lot of websites have rel=canonicals in place as placeholders within their page code. Its best to leave them blank rather than point them at themselves. Pointing a rel=canonical at the page it is installed in essentially tells us “this page is a copy of itself. Please pass any value from itself to itself.” No need for that.” He also stated that a canonical is much like a 301 except that it does not physically move the user to the canonical page. This leads me to think that having such a tag may leak link juice. “Please pass any value from itself to itself”
Google has stated that GoogleBot can handle such a tag, but this still does not mean that it is not leaking link juice.0