I only have 65 extrernal links after 8 months of link building?
-
I am currently employing an SEO consultant who has been carrying out link building for the past 8 months. having signed up to SEOmoz i noticed that i only have 65 external links when my competitors have 13,000+.
My consultant gave me a list of over 300 links he has putting into place but SEOmoz only shows 65.
What I am concerned about is why I have only so few and where the others have gone? And how do i catch up to my competitors and put a proper (better) strategy in place.
-
Check your site into Google Webmaster Tools and you can see exactly what they are counting toward your backlinks
-
Linkscape is limited, and right now a couple of months behind. We'll be releasing a new index sometime next week, and you should see some changes then.
-
A universal challenge: How do I see my links?
Linkscape is, by SEOmoz's own admission, limited. Yes, it's getting consistently bigger all the time, but there are still links they miss because their index is small. If you want a different perspective on where links are coming from, check out SEO Majestic or Raven Tools. Rand has openly said SEO Majestic's index is substantially bigger than Linkscape, but it's also older.
Remember that what all these companies are doing is trying to mimic Google. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but understand that by definition they're sometimes going to get it wrong. Just because SEOmoz or one of these other services hasn't caught some of your links doesn't mean Google has missed them as well.
Try to look carefully at the nature of the links that your consultant has built. If they're predominantly directories or footer links, then I'd question their value, and like you I would be concerned about the quality of the consultant's work. But if there is diversity in the types of links - some blog links, some directories, some press releases, etc. - then it's more likely your consultant is doing good work.
One final thought. I'm a big believer that the very best links are the ones your competitors can't easily duplicate. Earned links from blogging, good PR and good writing can be hard for the competition to neutralize. This is one reason SEO can be so hard.
-
Everyone has to make up his own mind on some things... but with the way that google is acting these days.... spammy links may be worse than no links.
-
Go to opensite explorer and put your domain in, you could filter by do-follow as well.
If you click the results that come up you should be able to find your link on that page, if the website is spammy note it down and maybe make a list say 10. Ask him if he created these links?
You can also look at the anchor text tab and see what kind of anchor text he has been building. This should be a mix of your brand name, targeted keywords and variations.
Or put your domain up here and I or someone else (EGOL is clued up a lot) and we can have a look for you.
-
Thank you for this, I am clear on what you are saying about quality over quantity, but do you think there should be some questions I should be asking my consultant to make sure he s doing the right things?
-
You might find that 13,000+ is not from 13,000 websites, if they managed to get a sitewide link maybe in the footer and that site has 1000 pages that's a 1000 links out of the 13,000.
Also those 13,000 might be rubbish, shed loads of directories with no Auth, if your SEO is doing it right he might have built only 65 links but from 65 high Auth websites.
For example a link from the BBC could be better then 1000 directory submissions.
-
Thanks for this, one thing I would like to add is that another second opinion I have already had, suggested many of the links my consultant had in his report were very spammy and SEOmoz would probably ignore these, do you think this could be a possible reason?
I am concerned me SEO consultant is not doing his job well and I need to go elsewhere?
-
There are a couple of possible reasons....
A) Perhaps the links that your SEO acquired have not been spidered yet. Crawling every page on the web can take a while to find links on obscure pages that might only have one link into them from another obscure page.
B) Perhaps the links that your SEO acquired are on pages that are unspiderable - either because they have no links into them from the greater web or the links into them are not spiderable.
About your concern that your competitor has thousands.... go to their website and see what they have that might attract links... and you can run a link assessment for their site just like you can for your own.
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
-
The best way to track internal links in Google Analytics
Hi there, we are a retail business and we have invested in quality editorial content which sits in our Blog at ourwebsite.co.uk/blog/ The Blog links to the main site (an online store) and I want to track the 'value' of the blog by how many clicks the blog content generates back to the main store. At the moment we're using this code on the end of every link in the Blog: ?utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=Widget&utm_campaign=FromBlog Does this affect SEO and is there a better way of doing it? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Bee1590 -
Curious, anyone ever had over half of their indexed links drop on an e-commerce site?
In a year went from around 300k indexed pages to around >100k according to GWT. Could this be duplicate content issue, lost links, spam, aged links or all of the above? either way an audit is in order. Thanks! Chris
Reporting & Analytics | | Sundance_Kidd0 -
Best to Leave Toxic Links or Remove/Disovow on Site with Low Number of Linking Domains
Our site has only 87 referring domains (with at least 7,100 incoming links). LinkDetox has identified 29% of our back links as being toxic and 14% as being questionable. Virtually all of these links derive from spammy sites. We never received a manual penalty, but ever since the first Penguin penalty in 2012 our search volume and ranking has dropped with some uneven recover in the last 3 years. By removing/disavowing toxic links are we risking that over optimized link text will be removed and that ranking will suffer as a result? Are we potentially shooting ourselves in the foot? Would we be better to spend a few months building quality links from reputable domains before removing disavowing bad links? Or toxic links (as defined by LinkDetox) so bad that it should be a priority to remove them immediately before taking any other step? Thanks, Alan
Reporting & Analytics | | Kingalan10 -
Suspect Links from Yeusaigon.net Causing Server Errors
Good morning, Webmaster Tools is reporting an increase in server errors on our site due to some very suspect links from Yeusaigon.net. After taking a quick look, it appears they are some form of search engine attempting to link to our images by using incomplete URLs. For example: http://yeusaigon.net/search/images.php?q=htc%20one%20max%20phone%20cases&page=1044 Is linking to: http://www.mobilemadhouse.co.uk/caseflex-htc-one-max-real-leather-flip... As this URL is incomplete, it's throwing up a server error. There are currently 139 instances of there errors from the same domain, and is increasing by around 5-10 per day. The domain, however, is linking to some of our pages/images correctly, but I fear Google may look at these as spammy links - they certainly look that way! So, what can we do? I can't find any contact details on Yeusaigon website so I have disavowed the entire domain. Is this the right thing to do? How do I stop the ever-increasing number of sever errors due to incorrect URLs? Cheers, Lewis
Reporting & Analytics | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Linking Multiple Niche Site In Same Google Analytics Account
Hi, I am providing SEO for Local business. Is it advisable to separate out the Google Analytics into different Google account or is it ok to remain it this way? Some of the client might be in the same niche, and might be competing with the same keywords as well. What I was worried is, Google might see these sites as same owner and only rank for 1 of the site. I was thinking to get the owners to register for their own Google Analytics and share the access to me.
Reporting & Analytics | | JonathanSoh0 -
Spam link? Links from linguee.*
Hello, in a site, in which I'm working .. in webmaster tools i see a lot of links as following: With more links to your site: linguee.es 3.066
Reporting & Analytics | | jarizaro
linguee.com 2.964
linguee.pe 2.722
linguee.mx 2.721 Total inlinks to my site are 20.000, and links incoming from linguee.* are more than 50% !!! My site is about spanish courses in spain, but i think all these links are fuck*ng me. I checked if these links have nofollow tag, and not, they don't have this attritute. What can i do? My site is going down in Google. ¿disavow that domain? Please help.0 -
Link from Itunes
Does somebody know why links from Itunes are not visible in Seomoz/ Majestic. While the content is indexed by Google. (even if no-follow, I dont see the link). I hoped that building an app for one of my sites, is they ideal linkbait strategy for my EMD domain 🙂 Especially when apple is linking to my website from I tunes 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | remkoallertz0 -
Want to link to GA profile, but the one I want is not showing in drop-down
How can I manually add the correct Google Analytics data in to my account? The two options I see on the drop-down are not the ones I want to select and I don't see a way to do it manually. Help!
Reporting & Analytics | | Uniqueson0