Worth changing existing link profile to make it more natural?
-
Hi Guys,
I am picking up responbility for the SEO work for a company and I need some advice please.
The current link stratgy involves a lot of single backlinks from the home page of variious sites. There is also a very big proprtion of the anchor text which is for the exact keyword and also finally there is very little deep linking.
The result of this strategy is some 1st page ranking, but it has required a lot more links than some of the competitors with more natural link structure,
Question is this.... is it worth contacting the webmasters of the existing links and asking then to move some of the links onto subpages and ammending the link tex to be move natural.
Or alternaitvely, I could concenrate on adding some new article links, with a variety of keywords, which would be subdomain links.
The problem with the 2nd approuch is that I can't easily add enough article links to balance out fully the effect of thecurrent problem. However, I'm nto sure if changing the position and the anchor text of the current linking could affect the current main site ranking...
Can you see my problem? Any advice would be gratefully received.
Cheers, Ed.
-
1. If you do want to re-balance, switch the links to use some obscure long-tail anchor text and see if you move up for that term. This is an easy way to find out if they are actually passing juice. Drop the ones that aren't.
2. Build out and balance your link profile. If you can't beat your competitors with less than 20% exact anchor text, then you need to increase your overall link profile.
-
Fair enough, I do appreciate your thoughts
-
I think you are digging in po.
-
Hi,
I understand the point you are making but, in fact, the current links do have a lot of value, even though they may a number of paid links. The reason I say this is the sites ranks on google 1st page for a number of competitive search terms.
This is why I am thinking of an approuch which tries to consolidate the value from those links rather than writing them off. I'm thinking if I can balance out the existing links with other deeper links etc, I might be able to secure more value from them.
If I can, it would be a good basis for gaining value from the new links I hope to obtain in the future.
Has anyone had this situation and tried a similar approach?
Cheers, Ed.
-
...the question is what is the best course of action to try to retain as much value as possible from the existing links.
To me, those links would not have any value. I would not feel better about them if they were moved from the homepage to a deeper page on the same site.
I know that you are not asking what to do for new links... but if this site was mine I would forget about the current links and look to what can be done in the future.
-
I think that some of the links will have been devalued which is why more backlinks have been required than for some of the competitors. The question though isn't what do for new links; the question is what is the best course of action to try to retain as much value as possible from the existing links. I can look to adjust the position and type of the existing links to be more natural looking, or I can try to balance up the linking appearance with something like more deep link articles etc.
Any suggestions gratefully received
Ed.
-
It sounds like a lot of the existing links are not natural and probably paid. My bet is that they have been devalued. If this was my site we would stop "building links" and start "earning" them.
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
-
Can anyone please explain the real difference between backlinks, 301 links, and redirect links?which one is better to rank a website? i am looking for the help for one of my website
Can anyone please explain the real difference between backlinks, 301 links, and redirect links? which one is better to rank a website? I am looking for help for one of my website vacuum cleaners
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hshajjajsjsj3880 -
Rankings drastically changing
I monitor our positions for a few keywords but they are very unstable. One day they will be at position 1, 2 or 3 and then all of a sudden not even on Google. We use an IP redirect to guide users to the correct site and I suspect this may be a cause. Could anybody shed some light? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanRowlands0 -
Link building
ok mozers i have a few questions. I am starting a new seo campaign and i want to target traffic for "how to make money on autopilot" Question 1. when it comes to link building i have seen some articles saying that i should not send all of my links to my landing page at once but to send links to my backlinks then index then using tiered link building. Is this a must or not? will i get penalized if i build 20 targeted links to my landing page in 1 day, lets say 20, pr7-9 domains? or should i tier it out and link maybe 5 pr9 domains to my landing page, then link 10 pr5 domains to each of those 5 pr9 domains and maybe link 20-pr1 domains to each of those tiered 2 pr5 domains? eq: Tier 1 = 5 PR-9 Tier 2 = 50 PR-5 Tier 3 = 1,000 PR-1 Question 2. Is their a certain amount of backlinks i need to use in order to out do my competitor? or does it just matter on the metrics of my backlinks? and when it comes to indexing these links do i need to index just the 5 pr9 links? or do i need to index all of them? or should i just index the landing page through google webmasters tools and hope it indexes all connecting pages? will doing any of these get my landing page indexed faster in order to rank faster? Question 3. Types of link building. Ok i am targeting guest blogs, wordpress sites, etc to put a link on. Should i focus on smm 'social media marketing' as well? or can i just focus on the traditional seo tactics first? Question 4. Keyword research. ok so my blog post is 'how to make money on autpilot' and from my keyword suggestion tools it picked up a list of keywords suggestions to target. Competition ranges from low to high, search volume ranges from 10 to 1900 visitors per month, after organizing the most relevant keywords to add to my campaign should i target each of the these keywords by creating a link building campaign for each one and target it to my landing page or use it as my 2nd or 3rd tier? those are the questions i really have for now. Here is my blog post http://www.vemomedia.com/how-to-make-money-on-autopilot/ Please feel me in on what i am needing to do in order to get some ranking and on how to run a link building campaign the correct way. Thanx in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djgbshows1 -
How Do You Do Link Building??
I am starting to use the Moz pro tools like optimizing on page SEO for keywords and looking for opportunities. I know link building is a huge part for getting rankings on keywords in google search. Where do I start and how do I do the link building process for specific keywords I can rank for?? Thank you in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickerparadise1 -
Are Links from Homepage safe?
I have the option of getting a link from 2 websites home pages. My site is a financial service website. I want to know if it is safe to do so. The first site is a hotel site, so their content has no relation to my site And the second is a Google News website about finances They have offered me a section in the sidebar to have a sentence or 2 about my site with a link. Can you tell me would these be safe to get? I don't want to be hit by any penalty
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Flow of internal link equity
I've recently come across this: A site changes the URL of one internal page to something more search friendly, and 301's the old to the new as you would expect. They don't change the link on the homepage in the navigation. Instead they keep it to the old URL so they go through the 301 to get to the page even though it's internal. They say if they change the URL it will reset the internal flow of link equity to that page. I've not come across this before and so am not sure what to think. I mean I can see what they're saying but I would have though that it being internal would mean it's different and that the flow to internal pages would just kind of resume as-was quite soon afterwards. Any views?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveOllington0 -
Google, Links and Javascript
So today I was taking a look at http://www.seomoz.org/top500 page and saw that the AddThis page is currently at the position 19. I think the main reason for that is because their plugin create, through javascript, linkbacks to their page where their share buttons reside. So any page with AddThis installed would easily have 4/5 linbacks to their site, creating that huge amount of linkbacks they have. Ok, that pretty much shows that Google doesn´t care if the link is created in the HTML (on the backend) or through Javascript (frontend). But heres the catch. If someones create a free plugin for wordpress/drupal or any other huge cms platform out there with a feature that linkbacks to the page of the creator of the plugin (thats pretty common, I know) but instead of inserting the link in the plugin source code they put it somewhere else, wich then is loaded with a javascript code (exactly how AddThis works). This would allow the owner of the plugin to change the link showed at anytime he wants. The main reason for that would be, dont know, an URL address update for his blog or businness or something. However that could easily be used to link to whatever tha hell the owner of the plugin wants to. What your thoughts about this, I think this could be easily classified as White or Black hat depending on what the owners do. However, would google think the same way about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bemcapaz0 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0