How Would You Go About Building a Private Link Network?
-
Assuming you need to build a private link network from scratch, how would you go about doing it? I am not looking for some shady tactic, but rather something that would be white hat, yet will help in our SEO efforts.
Thanks in advance.
-
I wouldn't.. private link networks are becoming more public by the day as Google improves their algo...
Rethink your strategy & look at social media & other types of link building (e.g. create some compelling content)
-
Yep, guest posting is on the whole a pointless exercise for Search purposes, the links that are followed will tend to be poor quality links.
That's why I suggested Guest Blogging which is different and with the right blog, most worthwhile, also for reasons of building up ones' authoritiveness. A good blog post will attract social sharing for example and those social signals and social links are very important.
One important service from agencies should be advising and educating their clients rather than doing all the work for them. Advice for the client on where to guest blog, what to blog about and why is an important part of the agency/client relationship I believe. If the client is unwilling to put any effort in and only throw the bucks at an agency to do it all, then perhaps they are not the best client to work with.
Going back to how viable is it to build up a network of sites for linking purposes? It's time consuming, resource heavy and more often than not will provide very little benefit, those days have gone. So it's viable in that it can be easily done, given the time and resource, though totally non-viable from an expected results perspective.
So education, advice and encouragement can go a long way in helping the client to achieve their goals, so long as the client is up for it
-
Yes I know that I may have to be slightly grey hat for this.
Here is the problem with guest posts. If I build relationship with people (blog owners), then they'd know more about me. They'd know where I work and what I do. The problem comes when doing a guest post for someone else. Most bloggers I know do not allow you to post guest post linking to your clients for the purpose of SEO. There are some that do, but majority of the A listers, don't do that.
So when we have to build link for clients, it's difficult to get links from them unless we have a very good say in how the blog links out. This is best achieved by private link networks.
Of course there are other ways. But my question revolves around this idea. How viable is it to build a network of sites (Domain sites or web 2.0)
-
Hi ConversionChamp
Any private link network created to aid SEO (Rankings) is shady by nature, even if that's not the intention, there is no avoiding the fact that's it's not an ethical practice. Though granted that won't stop many from participating in it.
A far better, more beneficial and sustainable strategy (your white-hat alternative) would be to build up relationships with relevant site owners; do some guest blogging and provide them with content, socially connect with them and distribute your content around their audience, which will lead towards some awesome links. Building up your own contacts to engage with and hopefully get links from without exchanging links that go round & round the network, is the way to go.
Regards
Simon
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
-
Site build in the 80% of canonical URLs - What is the impact on visibility?
Hey Everyone, I represent international wall decorations store where customer can freely choose a pattern to be printed on a given material among a few milions of patterns. Due to extreme large number of potential URL combinations we struggle with too many URL adressess for a months now (search console notifications). So we finally decided to reduce amount of products with canonical tag. Basing on users behavior, our business needs and monthly search volume data we selected 8 most representative out of 40 product categories and made them canonical toward the rest. For example: If we chose 'Canvas prints' as our main product category, then every 'Framed canvas' product URL points rel=canonical tag toward its equivalent URL within 'Canvas prints' category. We applied the same logic to other categories (so "Vinyl wall mural - Wild horses running" URL points rel=canonical tag to "Wall mural - Wild horses running" URL, etc). In terms of Googlebot interpretation, there are really tiny differences between those Product URLs, so merging them with rel=canonical seems like a valid use. But we need to keep those canonicalised URLs for users needs, so we can`t remove them from a store as well as noindex does not seem like an good option. However we`re concerned about our SEO visibility - if we make those changes, our site will consist of ~80% canonical URLs (47,5/60 millions). Regarding your experience, do you have advices how should we handle that issue? Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | _JediMindBender
JMB0 -
Rank Drop Possibly due to links but no warning in GWT
Hello, We've been experiencing rank drop in all major keywords for the past 9 months. I've had different people say different things here at Moz about how backlinks effect rank drop. Brilliant answers, but different opinions. Nothing is showing up in GWT for this site. Here's the backlink breakdown: 72 linking root domains. 20 of those are blogs. These blogs have no backlinks in and of themselves, and were created originally as easy links. Not white hat stuff. Three additional root domains are still paid links in this profile, though all but one was made to look editorial. The one that doesn't look editorial has links sprinkled throughout their website, among other paid links. The rest of the linking root domains (49) are legitimate. Again, nothing shows up in GWT. We had 96 root domains last March but in March of 2013 we cut most of the paid links and half (20) of the blogs. This brought our ranking down immediately by 2 or 3 slots. We've been slipping every since. I would like people to speak from experience and let me know if you think the backlinks could be causing the ranking drop and what to do about it. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Domain authority - Low quality links
I have a question I hope people can help me on. it is my intention for my next project to focus on domain authority, and a small number of high quality links. I have a couple of scenarios I would appreciate some advice on: 1. Can lower quality links lower domain authority? 2. Would you avoid links from low quality sites no matter what \ what domain authority levels should you avoid links from. 3. Should I be looking at link profiles of the sites I get links from. Does it matter if a site I get a link from has 1000's of spammy links (i.e. something to look out for when doing guest blogging). 4. Should I avoid directories no matter what, or is high pr \ domain authority directories ok to use, if I end up on a page of other relevant directory submissions related to my niche. Essentially, my aim is to have high quality links, but equally, there are some decent sites on the fringes that I will need to consider (based on a competitors link profile I researches).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jonathan19790 -
How to stop links from sites that have plagurized my blogs
I have been hit hard by Penguin 2.0. My webmaster explains that I have many links to my articles (a medical website with quality content) from "bad sites." These sites publish my articles with my name and link to my site and it appears I have posted my articles on their site although I have not posted them-theses sites have copied and pasted my articles. Is there a way to prevent sites from posting my content on their site with links to my site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wianno1681 -
Disavow - Broken links
I have a client who dealt with an SEO that created not great links for their site. http://www.golfamigos.co.uk/ When I drilled down in opensiteexplorer there are quite a few links where the sites do not exist anymore - so I thought I could test out Disavow out on them .. maybe just about 6 - then we are building good quality links to try and tackle this problem with a more positive approach. I just wondered what the consensus was?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lauratagdigital0 -
Spammy Links (from .ru) pointing to my domain! How to deal with it?
Hi all, We run an e-commerce store - I am just looking at the apache logs and I am finding a lot of spammy links that have been referrers to our pages - when I check the links, I cannot find our URL in an HREF on their page so I presume they may be using some country based cloaking? These are the domains that are targeting specific pages on our site:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs2010
http://3xru.ru/
http://saldoconsult.ru/
http://euro-casino.ru/casino/
http://delaymoney.maroderi.ru/
http://intimhot.ru/ How to deal with this? Our site is about cookware and they seem to be pointing these links to very specific products and categories. Never seen anything like this before, help would be appreciated. Thanks, B0 -
Being penalized for unnatural links, determining the issue, and fixing the problem. What to do?
Hi all, A client has been penalised, having received the message in Google Webmasters last week, along with two more yesterday. It seems the penalty is for something specific: “As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole“. This is the first time I've had to deal with this so I'll be a bit layman about it The penalty, firstly, seems to be for the old domain, from which there is a re-direct to the current one. This redirect has been in place since Feb 2012 (no link building has been done for the old domain since then). In Webmasters, I have the old and new domains set up separately and the messages are only coming for the old (but affecting the new, obviously). I need to determine if it’s the old or new URL I’m being hit for, or would that even matter? Some questionable links I can see in WM: There is an affiliate for whom WM is showing 154,000 links (all followed) from their individual products listings to the client’s site (as a related product) but they’re linking to the new domain if that matters. Could this affiliate be an issue? There is also Updowner, which has added 2000+ links unbeknownst to me but apparently they are discounted by Google. I see a ton of recent directory submissions - right up until last week - that I am not responsible for. Could that be intentional spam targeting? I did also use a 3<sup>rd</sup> party link building company for Feb, March and April who ‘manually’ submitted the new domain to directories and social bookmarking sites. Could this be issue? For what kind of time-scale are penalties usually imposed - how far back (or how recently) are they penalising for? Ranking were going really well until this happened last Thursday. Will directories with non-followed links effect us negatively - one such one has over 2000 links. What is the most conclusive way to determine which are the poor, penalty-incurring links pointing to us? I know I now have to contact all the dodgy directories the site is now listed on to get links removed, but any and all advice on how to rectify this, along with determining what had gone wrong, will be most appreciated. Cheers, David
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Strange link backs
Hi all been looking at the keyword research tool , phrase is dog beds site at number 10 is **www.ideas-4-pets.com ** opened site explorer http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.ideas-4-pets.com%2F Took at a look at linking root domains ths guy has some huge linking domains , so thought I would take a look at how they managed to get links from sites like Samsung , the UN , Php.net, Linking Root Domain Domain Authority Linking Root Domains *.parallels.com/ 97 129,927 *.php.net/ 97 201,007 *.dmoz.org/ 94 80,621 *.swsoft.com/ 92 24,586 *.samsung.com/ 89 54,125 *.oreilly.com/ 88 48,350 *.undp.org/ 88 21,578 I cant understand how he has got links off psd files or on page assets like embedded swf files. Anyone know how they are dong this , is this pure Darth Vader black hat >>??? Thanks in advance May the Google be with You
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jbloggs0