Forum Profile Links
-
Are they really important?
Many preach they are, and there are tonnes of services out there who give you thousands of forum profile links in no time.
I strictly believe in genuine links built the hard way, and definitely don't want to get into anything which is black hat.
Please suggest if building several Forum Profile Links is an appropriate way of building links?
-
You can try Ontolo's link building query generator tool:
http://ontolo.com/link-building-query-generator-V2
Citation Labs also has great link building tools for finding prospects:
-
Thanks Keri. I will do so right now.
-
Have you read the Link Building category of the SEOmoz blog? Take a look at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4 and you might also get some more ideas for building quality links (both for forums and in general).
-
I have been actively looking at the option of guest blog. Can you help me with where to start? I need help with finding blogs that allow guest blogs, or how to approach them etc
-
Building links on highly relevant sites would be a good idea if you're willing to put in the time to make a useful post. If the forum allows do-follow links, that will help you a little. As part of a balanced link building strategy, they could be beneficial.
Any site that sells you thousands of links will be using an automated tool. This is considered very spammy because the links have no value, they'll be on trashy sites, and on sites that there will be thousands of other links on as well. The value a service would provide you wouldn't be worth the money.
-
I would not buy any forum-links but as long you provide relevant content and add to the discussions then you will be fine. If you have the resources and time, then perhaps it might be an idea to guest blog instead?
-
Test them on a dummy site if you have the budget, or on some pages that already link to you.
-
You won't get any referral traffic but Forum profile links (the dofollow ones) do pass link juice. Not much, but some.
Although I wouldn't trust mass-outsourcing services, in my experience forum profile links can be used as supplementary to content-based strategies without any risk of penalty.
-
Those services you mention which give out thousands of forum profile links are usually not worth your time or money, you see the same thing with generic directory listings, they are useless. Unless the forum topic is relevant to your website and they are do follow then don't waste your time.
I've found that signing up to 3 or 4 popular forums and being really active in them is a lot more beneficial in the long run.
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
-
Secure HTTP Change - No Links in WMT
Website was changed over to secure HTTP about twp months ago. Just looked in Google Webmaster Tools and it only shows about 8 inbound links. We did a permanent 301 redirect for all URLs. There are over 800 links according to Open Site Explorer. Is it just that they are showing only the HTTPS inbound links? Should I add the HTTPS version in WMT? Thanks for any assistance
Technical SEO | | EBI0 -
Internal linking disaster
Can someone help me understand what my devs have done? The site has thousands of pages but if there's an internal homepage link on all of the pages (click on the logo) shouldn't that count for internal links? Could it be because they are nonfollow? http://goo.gl/0pK5kn I've attached my competitors opensiteexplorer rankings (I'm the 2nd column) .. so despite the face the site is new you can see where I'm getting my ass kicked. Thanks! psRsQtH.png
Technical SEO | | bradmoz0 -
What is meant by to many on page links
I have just done the report for my site http://www.in2town.co.uk and it says i have 246 on page links but i am not sure how come i have got that many. I know i have a large number of links and in the old days it says that you should keep the links under 100 but now with website speed and the net, people are saying this is no longer listened to. A report i read said that the links should not confuse the reader or put them off, so i am just wondering what your thoughts are on a site with over a 100 links on the home page and also if my site does have to many links what should i do about it. I cannot understand why it is showing 246 when i do not see that many on the page, any advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Sitewide Links delete or add nofollow
This question has been asked before, and I’ve read most of the answers. However, things are somewhat different, as we are a web hosting company and have many clients that link to us site wide in the footer, as well we have a website builder application where we control the footer links on our end user's websites. Most use just our “domain name” or “Powered by Domain” Should we remove them? It does provide visitors some value as they can tell where the website is hosting, has been developed or how to sign up for our website builder or web hosting services. Right now, they are all follow, and we are working on cleaning up our link profile so looking for some great advice on how to proceed. Our link profile is very large since we are a web hosting company that has been around for 10 plus years. Thanks in advanced for your recommendations.
Technical SEO | | goodhost0 -
First link count - passing of pagerank
I am asking this question after reading similar post. My question is does the first link count rule - Only the first link is counted, if we point to same page with two different anchor texts - applies to anchor text only. Does the PR is passed to the second link ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20052 -
A Puzzling Link
I'm stumped and I'm hoping some mozzers will be able to help. I run our company blog (http://scottymacblog.com/). The last couple of days I have noticed that the blog is receiving some traffic from cnn.com. I looked, but cannot find any mention of the blog on cnn. Adding to my frustration is that the content on cnn is constantly changing. Our blog doesn't do any sort of advertising and no one affiliated with the blog posts on cnn. As great as it is to be getting traffic from such a valued source, I have no idea why. Has something like this happened to (for?) anyone else? Any ideas on how I can research the source of the link? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | EssEEmily0 -
Tips on How to Optimize a Forum
Hi, I am looking for some good tips and tricks on how to get the most of a vBulletin Forum, we already got vbseo.com which works quite nice for text/titles and many other stuff, but it would be great to know some insights on optimizing this kind of forums or any other forum. thanks!
Technical SEO | | andresgmontero0 -
External Links from own domain
Hi all, I have a very weird question about external links to our site from our own domain. According to GWMT we have 603,404,378 links from our own domain to our domain (see screen 1) We noticed when we drilled down that this is from disabled sub-domains like m.jump.co.za. In the past we used to redirect all traffic from sub-domains to our primary www domain. But it seems that for some time in the past that google had access to crawl some of our sub-domains, but in december 2010 we fixed this so that all sub-domain traffic redirects (301) to our primary domain. Example http://m.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ redirected to http://www.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ The weird part is that the number of external links kept on growing and is now sitting on a massive number. On 8 April 2011 we took a different approach and we created a landing page for m.jump.co.za and all other requests generated 404 errors. We added all the directories to the robots.txt and we also manually removed all the directories from GWMT. Now 3 weeks later, and the number of external links just keeps on growing: Here is some stats: 11-Apr-11 - 543 747 534 12-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 13-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 14-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 15-Apr-11 - 521 528 014 16-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 17-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 18-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 19-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 20-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 21-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 26-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 27-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 28-Apr-11 - 603 404 378 I am now thinking of cleaning the robots.txt and re-including all the excluded directories from GWMT and to see if google will be able to get rid of all these links. What do you think is the best solution to get rid of all these invalid pages. moz1.PNG moz2.PNG moz3.PNG
Technical SEO | | JacoRoux0