Backlinks
-
When examining our inventory of backlinks (and our competition's), is it more important to look at overall domain authority or page authority where the backlink comes from?
-
Hi Brad
Keep in mind that sometimes the DA can be misleading when a site or link is on a subdomain(blogger being a good example) since Google will class the blog/site on it's own and you would then look at the PA.
Also worth noting is that the links relevancy and position within the relevant content and anchor text is ideal.
Personally I would check the competitors backlink profile, sort by domain authority(keeping an eye on subdomains that inflate this figure) and then start checking for relevancy.
Hope this helps
-
Hi Brad, An ‘Authority site‘ is a site that seems to get an extra ranking boost from the search engines. Somehow, in their analysis of the site and its backlinks profile, the search engine algorithm recognizes a site as being an ‘Authority’. Getting backlinks from sites that are seen by the search engines as an authority are close to being the sorts of links that probably past the most link juice, so they are much sought after.
The authority of the site linking in to yours is measured, and the boost to your SEO is measured accordingly. If you have 100 or more backlinks, but they all come from sites with little or authority in your niche then they're all but worthless. If these backlinks come from sites with more links than content (a linkfarm) then your ranking is damaged by participating in the linkfarming.
For checking the backlinks of a particular website then you must use a tool that is free of cost & gives yu all the details of the backlinks.I hope that you will found the solution.
-
Hi Brad,
Overall domain authority give a very good perspective of what the domain could achieve. PA is less important (in my belief) because you can have a low PA (if the page was recently added, for ex. new content on the site) and still rank well and drive good traffic through that specific link.
Therefore I would go for having a look at DA after that PA.
I hope that helped,
Istvan
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
-
Buying domains for the backlink profile: Still a white hat strategy?
There's a DR 51 domain we'd like to buy, with a quality backlink profile. We'd like to 301 redirect this domain to our DR 46 domain, and possibly setup something to make the user experience smooth for people expecting the old domain. Is this still a white hat strategy? How would you calculate the value/what kind of offer to make?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | catbur0 -
Backlink Indexing - will this technique hurt or help?
So I came across this idea on YouTube: Indexing your backlinks. I understand its not enough to just have google crawl your pages - you want them indexed. So, if you create backlinks on say a blog or social profile, will it benefit you to have them submitted to other popular blogs, news / pr sites, video channels - of which may be unrelated - for the sole purpose of getting them not just crawled but indexed? There are SEO companies that I have seen that claim they do exactly that (publish your backlinks all over the web - making backlinks for backlinks) but in reality is this a good thing or a bad thing? Could this help rankings or hurt them?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | momentum_technology_services0 -
Bad backlinks is it possible that Google is penalizing me?
Hi guys, since December I'm receiving thousands of bad backlinks from websites that copy my content and content from other websites. I also noticed a drop in the organic visits each month. Is it possible that Google is penalizing me for those backlinks? I know that I can ask the webmaster to remove the links but I don't believe that they will do. Look like it's a robot that does all this automatically. Should I use the Google disavow tool? Any other ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
Check images below please.
Thanks! OjAFwgT mni5lke UPVp9bW0 -
Assessing the true value of a backlink
I want to start a discussion about assessing the true value of a backlink. Here's a scenario: I've just started working on SEO for a new client. Once I've got the strategy stuff out of the way, I like to start by looking at backlinks that competitors have. I use Moz OSE (and other tools) and filter by followed links to the root domain. This gives a good starting sense of where competitors are getting links from. As I start to explore those links, I see some black-hat (or grey-hat) practices at play: display:none links, footer links, sidebar links, comment spam, etc. The problem I have is, there seems to be no way of knowing whether or not those links are responsible for boosting the competitors rankings. They come from sites that have good DA and PA, yet we're told that tactics like display:none and comment spam will either get those links devalued or may cause some sort of manual action. My question is, how do others evaluate the full spectrum of the value a link has that goes beyond trust, authority, and citation flow?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEMbyotic2 -
Spamming Backlinks - doesn't seem to be detrimental enough?
Hi, We have noticed sites such as http://www.rattanfurnitureoutlet.co.uk & http://www.supremerattanfurniture.co.uk/ have huge numbers of what appear to be spam like and invaluable backlinks yet they have both maintained a great ranking for their search terms despite this. We would like to know why, does the good outweigh the bad so to speak?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | birdmarketing0 -
Need help determining how toxic this backlinking is
Okay, so my company has an SEO company already. However, we're trying to get people internally cross-trained on SEO, so I've been selected to kind of do a crash-course in SEO and look at our site from a new perspective. We are in the process of getting our old site ported over to a new one we've also created on Wordpress. I've been doing a LOT of online research, but this is definitely a very new field for me. Here's our current site: www.cedrsolutions.com So, here's my question: While doing some SEO-optimizing automatic tests on our site, I came across some weird backlinks to one of our pages: http://www.cedrsolutions.com/dental-office-manual/ http://en.calameo.com/read/003415063525a885728e7 Here's the thing: We didn't make this. It looks HORRIBLE, the copy is gibberish, and it looks weird. Doing some more searching, I started finding stuff like this https://lessons.engrade.com/dentalofficemanual/1 http://pumosust.over-blog.com/2014/09/how-to-get-customized-dental-office-manuals-online.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egMonqa5eRo (???? I don't even understand how someone did this, the photo in the book is just the photo from our page) http://www.tuugo.in/Companies/cedr-hr-solutions/0150008267958#! http://www.webjam.com/dental_office_manual/$my_blog/2014/09/12/how_to_get_customized_dental_office_manuals_online Conservatively, I'd say there's at least 100 of these types of pages out there linking to us, maybe more Then I started finding comments on blogs http://blog.kenexa.com/hr-focus-on-increasing-revenue-not-just-managing-costs/ http://geekologie.com/2012/05/bad-ideas-boyfriend-visits-dentist-ex-da.php (some NSFW language on that one) So, my first thought is obviously "Okay, these are gibberish, over-optimized, and ALL of them are trying to bump our relevancy for something along the lines "Dental office manual" EDIT: I should also mention these links ALL just appeared out of thin air. A whole bunch in early July, and more in mid-September. They didn't just slowly accumulate. So (finally) here's my questions: 1. Did our current SEO company probably do this? The only thing they've mentioned before is that they were going to create some backlinks for us, with an assurance they'd be genuine links that would build Pagerank without getting us slapped by Google. 2. Am I correct in my opinion that these are toxic links that could get manual action taken against us by Google? I'm not sure how LIKELY it is (as again, there's only about 100 or so) but they seem to be violating multiple Google principles. With how often Google pushes out algorithm updates I feel like we could still get busted for this even if the links are like 6-7 months old and not sending us much traffic. I'm asking because I've been told to set up a conference call with the account manager at our current SEO place, and I want to know what I'm getting into. I might be wildly over-reacting about nothing, I might be kind of right but it's not that bad, or I might be 100% right and what they are doing is not cool at all, and could kill our SEO if we get busted by Google. I'm not sure which it is. Checking Google webmaster tools and analytics, I don't see any drops in organic traffic between July '14 and now, so I don't think we've been smacked by Google algorithm-wise. And there's no notice from Google of manual action being taken, or anything being wrong with our backlinks, so I'm fairly confident these links haven't hurt us at least as of today. I'm just worried going forward (especially when we finish the new site and submit it to Google to get crawled, the URLs will be the same) Sorry this was so long. I'm kind of nervous, honestly. On the one hand, these backlinks seem SUPER sketchy to me, but on the other hand, I don't KNOW any of this stuff. It sounds kind of ridiculous for me, someone with maybe 3 weeks of intense Google-education in SEO, to be questioning something a real, established SEO company is doing. I mean, I kind of have to assume they know better, right?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CEDRSolutions1 -
Do shady backlinks actually damage ranking?
That is, it looks like a whole bunch of sites got smacked around the penguin/panda updates, but is this by virtue of actually being hurt by google's algorithms, or by virtue of simply not being helped "as much"? That is, was it a matter of the sites just not having any 'quality' backlinks, having relied on things google no longer liked, which would result in not having as much to push them to the top? That is, they would have been in the same position had they not had those shoddy practices? Or was google actively punishing those sites? That is, are they worse off for having those shoddy practices? I guess the reason I ask is I'm somewhat terrified of going "out there" to get backlinks -- worst case scenario: would it just not do much to help, or would it actually hurt? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | yoni450 -
Do backlinks with good anchor text from bad sites help?
Hi, In the Netherlands, the SEO competition for terms like loans is very competitive. I see a website in this industry that seems to be doing very well based on links with good anchor text from sites that seem quite worthless to me, such as: http://www.online-colleges-helper.com/ and http://www.alohapath.com/ My question is: is it worth pursuing this type of links? I assume these must be paid links, or am I wrong? I'd really rather not go down this route but I don't want to be outranked by someone who is using these types of links... Many thanks in advance for any type of insight! Annemieke
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AnnemiekevH0