How does a good link portfolio look like ?
-
I have been reading a lot about bad links and unnatural links on these forums, but i m not sure how a good back link portfolio looks like, can some point me to the right direction ? maybe with some examples,
what is the one most important factor for a good quality link ?
thanks
-
There are many factors involved but, at a high level, a bad link profile as detected by Google's Penguin algorithm is one with a high percentage of keyword anchor text links.
The way most natural links are created is to copy and paste a link. For example, a link to this Q&A thread is: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-a-good-link-portfolio-look-like. When site owners create links to their own site, they often try to take advantage of Google's algorithm by using specific keywords such as good link thread.
When you take a site which sells watches and you look at the profile and see most of the links are URLs with some occasional anchor text links thrown in, that would be a more natural profile. When you see most of the links use anchor text such as "best watches" or "cheap watches" that indicates a high likelihood of manipulation.
There are numerous other aspects of a good or bad link. Some criteria to consider:
-
the PR of the linking page
-
the number of links on the linking page
-
the position of the link (in content is best whereas a footer link would offer less value)
-
the anchor text
-
the relevance of the linking site to the target page
You can go to Open Site Explorer and examine the backlink profile of good sites such as Google and the New York Times, then compare it to some spammy sites. You will see the difference quickly.
-
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
-
Buy domain, redirect, get all the good links (+link juice) and disavow the spammy ones?
There is a domain for sale that has a quite nice profile and a lot of good backlinks, but also quite a few spammy ones. This domain has a Spam Score of 14% acc. to Moz Link explorer, ours has only 2%. My questions: 1. The domain and the good backlinks are related to or close to our content/keywords. But we are worried whether the "spammy" ones will hurt us. Does anyone has experience with this? 2. Would it help if we disavow the spammy backlinks afterwards? And if so, how do we do that? Add new domain to search console, disavow the bad links and then redirect the entire domain to our domain or redirect the domain first and then disavow from our property? Many thanks for your help!
Link Building | | pissuptours0 -
Refferal links
I have a site where I can pick up where my hits came from. So if somebody clicks from another website link to visit my website, I will then pick up from which website they came from and also which page they landed on. Will google penalize me for this and see this as paid advertising?
Link Building | | Heinwest0 -
Reddit LInks
Are Reddit links worthwhile? I hear they are sometimes follow and sometimes not follow. Also what about links verses self links? I'm pretty handy with reddit so I can probably make content that would actually be upvoted a lot. Let me know, thanks.
Link Building | | RafeTLouis1 -
Self linking - loss of link juice?
There are 10 links on page that point to this page where they exist (link to the page itself). Does it influence on ranking? And what's happening to link juice? How does it spread? Is there any loss of it?
Link Building | | templatemonster0 -
When pitching a whitepaper as Push Content for Link Building, is it ok to give the person I'm pitching a link to a landing page with a form on it?
When pitching a whitepaper as Push Content for Link Building (i.e. pushing out content that my client has created), is it ok to give the person I'm pitching a link to a landing page with a form on it? Or should I create a landing page with the whitepaper included on it? I’m not sure if the client will be ok with this b/c I know they use the whitepaper for sales purposes to gain leads. For example, my pitch email would include a line such as this, "the whitepaper can be found at LINK and I'd love if you could share it with your readers." I think it may be weird/a little wrong to ask a webmaster to include a link on his site to a landing page with a form to get the whitepaper. Does this make sense? What have others done with whitepapers as Push Content for link building?
Link Building | | ArketiGroup1 -
Linking Analyse
Hello, Im doing a research on the link-building analyze of 2 sites. What I want to know is whats the most important fact to analyze in the Open Site Explorer. And also can I see all the links connected to those sites in the Open Site Exporer or should I use other program to verify that? Tks in advance! Pedro Menezes Pereira
Link Building | | PedroM0 -
Link Building
I've been hearing about going after niche directories, and my question is most of them have a ton of links on any given page. Is it even worth taking the time to approach these sites knowing they won't pass a lot of link juice?
Link Building | | azguy0 -
Link Building: Feel like ive hit a wall
Hi, I have been doing SEO on my business website for about 4 years now. And it ranks #1-3 for my desired keywords and i always try to add new backlinks and keep uploading new content to a blog on the site as this is where nearly 100% of our customers come from so its important to me to rank high for the keywords related to my industry. However the last few months a competitor has taken over me for a certain keyword, i have researched their backlinks and site and from what i can see they have less content, and less backlinks, onpage seo isnt that great, and alot of the backlinks arent even related where all mine are in the same industry and i always research my backlinks to make sure that site has good backlinks also (i currently have about 48 root domain and 12,000 page backlinks for various pages of my website). The only thing they have over me is domain age, their domain is about 10 years old. I am also trying to target another hard to get keyword that im currently on Page 3 for, im sure over time i will rise to the top and its something i have to keep working at however i feel i wont get to where i want to be because im running out of ideas on where to get backlinks. After 4 years of building backlinks i feel like i have hit a brick wall, i started out by directory submission, then just links from other related sites, then i did a few article submissions and then i started finding it hard to get links so i started buying related links, however i seem to just keep buying and buying because im running out of ideas and it feels easier just to buy them, the only problem is its getting expensive and im now probably spending $80/month on paid backlinks! Although considering im not paying an SEO company its still a lot cheaper! I have gotten to the point where im researching sites that arent even in my industry (however still automotive related) and getting links on sites their on which was going really well, but now even that feels like its coming to an end and im back to submitting to directories their on. So other then directories, paid links, articles etc. what else could i be doing to build quality backlinks? I stopped doing articles because they were so time consuming and i felt like i was only getting backlinks from them that were worthless and held no authority. I have about 4 blogs (all on different IPs) would it be worth blogging on them and building content and dropping links from those to mine or is it not worth the effort when i could just submit articles to article websites?
Link Building | | defyet0