SEO in Africa

[AngolaCarro]

Hi everyone,

I am a new danish SEOMOZ member currently living in Angola, Africa. I have created the site AngolaCarro.com  - an online marketplace for cars. The website is in Portuguese, as this is the main language in Angola.

I am struggling finding good Angolan/Portuguese sites for solid back links and I would be extremely thankful if anyone could give SEO advice on how/where to build strong links from Portuguese language sites.

Will using dropmylink.com to create back links from English language sites to my Portuguese site be a waist of time or will it have a SEO effect?

Thanks in advance and have a great Sunday.

Ken

[RobertFisher]

Happy to help. Keep us posted with how it goes and what you learn.

Best

[AngolaCarro]

Thanks for your great advise, it's much appreciated.

Have a great Sunday.

[RobertFisher]

I do not see the english/US dealer links as a problem as they are relevant to what your site is. As to the links from Portugese sites, you might try contacting the english dealers and asking about their connections in Portugal or Brazil. They might be able to assist you. Assuming you speak Portugese, you could start looking for some Portugese blogs that are relevant and let you post with links or post comments with links.

This usually works better once you have made a few good contributions.

I went to dropmylink and see that they allow you to test keyword anchor text for sites that allow links. If you do not speak portugese, translate on babylon, etc.: I used cars for sale, auto sales, etc. and got the following translations:

Carros de vendas, de autopeças para os, concessionários de auto de venda aos, concessionários de auto angola

Using Carros de vendas, Dropmylink returned some fairly good looking sites (I speak passable Spanish, so simply translated using Google translate to English).

Hope this is helpful to you and good luck. I have a good friend who sells heavy equipment in Ghana and Nigeria and the African market is quite interesting.

[AngolaCarro]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your useful answer. I didden't set Angola as my target area on Geo settings, but that is now fixed.

The site is in Portuguse, but most of the listings are from US dealers (about 1.500) and those listings are mainly in English, is this an problem, as I am using gTLD? See: http://www.angolacarro.com/ezautos/49992-2010-mercedes-benz-c300-sedan-automatic

I am finding it difficult getting good Portuguese back links, can you recommend any solid sites?

Again thanks for your help.

Ken

[RobertFisher]

Welcome to moz Kenneth,

...SEO advice on how/where to build strong links from Portuguese language sites.

The countries I will suggest you will likely know, but are Portugal obviously and Brazil. (My favorite word in Portugese is Porto or Port!) You are using a generic TLD and, "The website is in Portugese,..." I am assuming you have set the geotargeting tool to let Google know you are targeting Angola and not these other countries: Google Webmaster Tools:Multi Regional & Multi Language. I am  also assuming that there is no French or English or Bantu on the site. (Since you are using a gTLD as opposed to a ccTLD, etc.)

You can link from other language sites and so long as you follow the other linking guidelines, you should not have a problem with your links. You do want to insure you are getting Portugese language links though on several levels.

I have not used dropmylink before, but on the face of it, I see no problems. Just remember that if you are getting junk links  you are setting yourself up for pain down the road. I insert this only because they offer up .edu and .gov links and I am not researching anything past the first page of that site. So, if these are known bad links, you will have problems, OK you could have.

Hope this clarifies and assists,

Robert