What's been your experience with profile link-building?
-
What have your experiences been? Short Term? Long Term? There isn't a lot written about it, and I'm wondering where it falls in the order of things.
I was very hesitant to jump in, but have launched a few campaigns, both for local geo targeting phrases, and national accounts. Surprisingly, I've seen a surge in rankings, but also wonder how short lived they will be.
I've noticed the links still don't come up in tools like open site explorer, but I'm able to find them when searching for the unique username I used while building the profiles.
The sites I'm listing on have no relevance to industry, unless by chance, although the PR's I'm using are all 4 or higher.
Is this considered gray hat?
-
In theory, you're correct - the premise being they'd not want to risk penalizing innocent site owners.
In reality, Google makes mistakes all the time. Some bounce back, others don't.
Also, Google is constantly changing their rules. And based on rule-changing patterns I've studied over the past several years, if a technique even appears to be in the shady category today, it's very likely to be a primary target tomorrow. Because of this, I prefer to focus on methods and tactics I believe to have a much more resilient long-term potential.
-
Alan, thanks for your input, it's appreciated. I can imagine the only way you'd suffer for it is Google dropping any kind of juice that your getting from such links. They can't put you in the sandbox, as what would stop competitors from doing that too each-other?
-
The PRs are all 4 or higher? really? You called Google and asked? Because if you didn't, you're relying on that mythical TBPR (ToolBarPageRank) that is a) wildly inaccurate b) several months old c) a shiny object that routinely causes people to lose focus on what matters regarding SEO.
Whether the boost will stick is not something any of us can know - every site, every link and every market is unique. All I know is in my own personal experience working with clients, it's not a high quality long term strategy, and if it is done, should only be a small portion of the overall link building effort. If too many links come from this source type, search engines will see a big red flag and you will suffer as a result.
-
It's not relevant to the target web site, but the PR's are all 4 or higher, and do follow's. The anchor links are placed in the bio or signature section.
Again, I was very skeptical before the campaigns started, but wanted to test it out, and so far, the results have been very good. My main question is if this boost will stick.
-
Consider the source. Is it a profile on a site that's highly relevant to the target web site? Is the link in the profile tagged with a nofollow? How popular is the site the profile is on? How well optimized is the site? How well optimized is the profile page? How far down the link structure is the profile section?
All of these are factors in determining whether it's worth it to even bother if you're just looking for links. And even with all other factors considered, profile pages should always only be considered a minor link building opportunity.
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 a Link Wheel Safe If I Control the Wheel?
Hi, folks. Our company operates over 50 disease-specific, nice websites. Currently, we're building resource/landing pages for some therapies and other related topics. One experimental therapy is being investigated across four different disease types: cystic fibrosis, Muscular Dystrophy, Hemophilia, and cancers. We have sites for all of them, and have created original landing pages for each site. Question: is it safe / does it make sense to "link wheel" these pages, especially since the wheel is composed of all our own sites? The other option of course is to simply interlink all of them, but will I get more visibility with a cyclical linking scheme? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Michael_Nace1 -
It's possible a bounce-rate attack manipulate SEO?
My site has been visited by unusual users with one second session times. This leaves my analytics data confused.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CompraBit0 -
Outranked by link farm
Hello Mozzers, I got a questions about some rankings. Some of my sites always had no. 1 rankings for most of the competitive terms per niche. I recently made the change to a full responsive design for more mobile friendliness. No all of the sudden I see different competitors that are not mobile friendly outranking me for some of my most important keywords but also I see some link farm sites (like: camping.startpagina.nl) outranking me for some terms. I was under the impression that Google doesn't like link farm sites? Also I provide a lot of good unique content on my pages and my competitor does no such thing. Still for some terms he outranks me. I understand that it can't be just 1 thing and that there are a lot of factors playing a rol in the big picture but still, you must understand that this is pretty frustrating. I obey the rules of the search engines and see competitors do no such thing and still being outranked by them. Further details of this matter can be send to you in PM if you need it. Looking forward for your thoughts on this. regards Jarno
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JarnoNijzing0 -
Still Battling On With Link Profile Audit
I'm getting there, I can see the light! 🙂 I have covered one complete audit of the link profile and I am now going back over it looking at the links I had 'question marked' - I should have this completed by the end of this week and I will then focus on using DISAVOW for the links that I am really struggling with, the foreign sites that are in Chinese or Russian, the sites that have absolutely no 'contact us' information and have been privately registered (in WhoIs) I have come across this domain which links to our site about 8 times and although I cannot find any contact info I can't quite make my mind up, to be honest I would rather get rid of it BUT I'm trying to avoid taking the easy option of disavowing where I can; http://www.askives.com/ Fo anyone who has gone through what I am currently going through, please help me just this once and tell me 'should it stay or should it go'?! 🙂 Many thanks! Andy
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TomKing0 -
Advice on links after Penguin hit
Firstly we have no warnings or messages in WMT. We have racked up thousands of anchor text urls. Our fault, we didnt nofollow and also some of our many cms sites replicated the links sitewide to the tune of 20,000 links. I`m in the process of removing the code which causes this problem in most of the culprit sites but how long will it take roughly for a crawl to recalculate the links? In my WMT it still shows the links increasing but I think this is retrospective data. However, after this crawl we should see a more relevant link count. We also provide some web software which has been used by many sites. Google may consider our followed anchor text violating spam rules. So I ask, if we were to change the link text to our url only and add nofollow, will this improve the spam issue? We could have as many as 4,000 links per website, as it is a calendar function and list all dates into the future.......and we would like to retain a link to our website of course for marketing purposes. What we dont want is sitewide link spam again. Some of our other links are low quality, some are okay. However, we have lost rankings, probably due to low quality links and overuse of anchor text.. Is this the case the Google has just devalued the links algorythmically or is there an actual penalty to make the rankings drop? As we have no warnings in WMT, I feel there isnt the need to remove the lower quality links and in most cases we havent control over the link placements. We should just rectify that we have a better future linking profile? If we have to remove spam links, then that can only be a good reason to cause negative seo?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xtopher660 -
Google 'most successful online businesses'
how come this guy has all but 1 of the top ten results? (UK results - I'm guessing same in USA?) - with thin content on a spammed keyword on multi-sub domains? How can we 'white hat' guys compete if stuff like this is winning?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheInternetWorks0 -
Deny visitors by referrer in .htaccess to clean up spammy links?
I want to lead off by saying that I do not recommend trying this. My gut tells me that this is a bad idea, but I want to start a conversation about why. Since penguin a few weeks ago, one of the most common topics of conversation in almost every SEO/Webmaster forum is "how to remove spammy links". As Ryan Kent pointed out, it is almost impossible to remove all of these links, as these webmasters and previous link builders rarely respond. This is particularly concerning given that he also points out that Google is very adamant that ALL of these links are removed. After a handful of sleepless nights and some research, I found out that you can block traffic from specific referring sites using your.htaccess file. My thinking is that by blocking traffic from the domains with the spammy links, you could prevent Google from crawling from those sites to yours, thus indicating that you do not want to take credit for the link. I think there are two parts to the conversation... Would this work? Google would still see the link on the offending domain, but by blocking that domain are you preventing any strength or penalty associated with that domain from impacting your site? If for whatever reason this would nto work, would a tweak in the algorithm by Google to allow this practice be beneficial to both Google and the SEO community? This would certainly save those of us tasked with cleaning up previous work by shoddy link builders a lot of time and allow us to focus on what Google wants in creating high quality sites. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | highlyrelevant0 -
Linking Profile Gone Bad?!
Recently, I was looking over the linking profile for one of our large clients, and I noticed that a ton of spammy links were appearing. I have never purchase any links or done anything shady that would contribute to this large increase in bad links. It appears as though someone is trying to hijack the SEO of this company, and I don't know how to proceed. Currently, they have not been penalized by Google, but I would not be surprised if a penalty is on its way due to the obvious link spam. Is there any way to report this to Google to ensure that no penalties occer? Any advice on the issue is much welcomed! Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tqinet0