Do you stop link building once you have your desired rank?
-
So with all these updates hitting sites left, right and center.
Now you have your desired rank on Google, do you stop link building for that project?
I can see some positives in this
You will not add links that will get hit by future updates.
If you do get hit in future updates you have less links to remove.
Obviously it an outstanding link came along from BBC or CNN you would go for that. But press releases etc would you now stop anything like that?
-
One thing to remember is that even if you change nothing about your site (on-site or off-site), your competitors are still working and changing things. If keep everything the same, your competitors could still be out there working harder, and there goes your rank.
-
I agree Tina, I think more so in this market to continue link building once you have a local rank could cause you issues.
-
With local SEO it could be a little different we built our sons Karate school's website two years ago, the majority of his links come from Karate tournament videos on Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, Manta, and a couple other local sites.
We had first place after 2 months, and have never added another backlink. He is still number one, but this is because the competition is so small.
He may have 20 real competitors for his top 4 keywords, but most of their sites have little to no SEO at all.
I think it depends on your competitors if they are adding good links you should be adding good links.
For larger national keywords someone is always going to be adding backlinks so to stay relevant you will need to as well.
-
What do you think about Local SEO.
I see a lot of the sites post Penguin ranking with only 20-30 decent links.
In my opinion keeping it going could be overkill and cause you issues in the future for simple local keywords. What does anyone else think?
-
Never. Stop. Link Building.
Look at it like buying real estate. You want to protect your investment, you want to build it up as best as you can, and one day, if you choose to sell it, it'll resale quite nicely.
Sure, if you have other open projects, you can now kick up their priority status a bit, but always continue to drive authority to the domain.
Do you rank for 1-3 short tail keywords? What about long-tail keywords? What about variations? Market defined variations? #pointstoponder
-
I agree with eyepaq. It depends largely on the quality of the links you are generating. To the best of my understanding, press releases should only be published to a single authoritative site (either your site or a third party, not both). If you are distributing the same press release to multiple websites, those will likely be counted as duplicate content. If your site is one of those duplicating the content then your rankings could suffer.
However, if you are producing legitimate back-links from social media, blogs and other viral marketing channels then don't stop. Your competitors won't stop, and they will keep on moving past you. SEO (and marketing in general) is never done.
Never stop producing new, useful, engaging, unique content and getting the word out. Even if your current content ranks well, you should be producing new content that needs to be shared. I believe Google considers freshness of content as a marker of relevancy, so if all of your content and back-links (especially social) are 3 years old I suspect your rankings could decline.
-
Unless the links build are not shady I will move forward. Once the ranks are achived then maybe cut from the pace a little - don't invest that much as the ROI will only go down from there but stoping it's not a good choise in my opinion: it's not natural, there are spikes in the link profile, some old links will fade and at some point you will want to resume, competition is never at sleap.
Move forward while you are ahead and make the gap between you and competition even bigger - long term you will only have benefits.
On the other hand, yes, if the links are bad, spammy then you should stop before starting
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
-
Is Forum Link Building a Waste of Time in 2018?
Hi there, this is a general question about link building strategies in 2018. It actually relates to reports derived from the link building audit tool on SEMrush, so forgive that. We use Moz as well, it's just that we happen to be working in SEMrush for link analysis. Basically, the audit tool looks at our links and our competitors' links. It has come back with a number of 'opportunities' for link building and I'm questioning the value of many of them, in 2018. Many of the 'opportunities' the tool is suggesting we explore include answering forum questions on places like Reddit, Quora, etc. The tool has been good at identifying topical threads which might hold promise (a very specific branch of legal services) but most of the threads are 3 - 8 years old. To answer them, I would need to muster someone with expertise to post a relevant answer. So, obviously, my question is does anyone think there is any value in this sort of link building in this day and age? I really think our greatest value will be in guiding their content strategy and looking for content creation opportunities on high authority sites. Thoughts?
Link Building | | Daaveey1 -
Backlinks vs External Links vs Referral Links vs Outbound links
Hello all, I was just wondering if you could explain the difference between all the links above? I'm confused as they all seem to be the same or similar and I would just like to clearly know what distinguishes them from eachother. Thanks for your help, Jayne
Link Building | | NCOREGSEO0 -
Link building strategy - my weak link!
Please help me understand link building. I've read the articles on Moz, but they seem vague to me. Specific questions: 1. How do I get my webpage on good quality sites? 2. Guest blogging? Good or not? 3. What about when people pick up one of our blog stories and publish it on their site with a link back? Is that bad now because it is duplicate content??? 4. Forum posts with a link in the signature? Good or not? 5. Directories - I get it that these are no longer good... are they severely negative? Should I take them down. 6. PR - Looks like this is bad... right??? 7. Youtube - any value? 8. Pinterst, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram? Any value to backlinks here? 9. What about sites like redit? 10. Anything else I should consider?
Link Building | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Frequency of Manual Link Building Monitoring
Hey Moz! We're in the middle of performing a link remediation campaign, and had a question regarding new links. We do not acquire any links through methods that break Google's guidelines, but we recently discovered a suspicious link to our website that happened organically. What is the recommended frequency for manually checking all newly discovered links to our website in order to catch/remove toxic links? Monthly? Bi-monthly? Yearly? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | TheDude0 -
Is it time to pay for link building?
I've been using the Moz tools for a while now and love them. Our SEO efforts are certainly paying off as we're ranking well for a lot of our desired keywords. That being said, I'm finding link building to be a very frustrating process. As much as I like to be hands on and try to do everything, I'm wondering when it's time to "throw in the towel" and hire someone? Is there anyone else who might have gone through a similar evolution? I'd love to hear some other stories about how or why you decided to hire out your link building. I'd like to think that whatever we spend on link building could likely reduce our reliance on AdWords, although I'm not sure how this would really play out over time.
Link Building | | koalatm0 -
Drowning In a Sea of Link Building Advice
You can visit one SEO forum after the other and 50% of the folks will say 'do this' and the other half will say to do something else. It's always black hat vs white hat and then you still get the grey hat in between. So what does really work? Leon
Link Building | | leonfrancois0 -
Link building options...slim
I am in a smaller town and sell real estate. I have seen a lot of the competitors links and some of them are just blog commenting spam and things like that (although they are ranking well for certain terms and their links are coming from sites that have nothing to do with real estate.) I guess what I am trying to say is should I start going after links from other towns/cities in my state or should I go outside of my state and start looking for other links in other cities and states? I have bought my townstate.com from someone recently and it ranks highly for town,state. I am trying to find different ways to get to number one for my "town, state real estate". What would you do? Would you continue to add content once a week or so as well as build links? Thanks!
Link Building | | blake-766240