Are Links/Resources pages considered spam?

[Zachary_Russell]

I'm dabbling with link building in a non link-happy industry, traffic safety (IE Traffic cones, barricades, safety vests, etc...). We currently are doing #RCS in terms of giveaways for college students as well as discounts in a wider EDU Outreach campaign as well as legitimate guest posting.

I have started to use Link Prospector, and got a list of links/resources pages that we can get info from. I found some great links through here, including ways to get links from higher-profile .gov domains, but was wondering if it is worth it to go after the high(er) quality links/resources pages. By higher quality, I usually set a floor of a DA 25-30 and have a limited amount of external links per page. These would be for branded keywords (IE the company name/domain) and not exact match anchor text.

I'd really like to see how other SEOs feel about this.

Thanks

Zachary Russell

President, ProTech Internet Group

[SoftzSolutions]

_Ok, here I am assuming that you are sending mails to high quality sites with the hope of getting your website listed legitimately there and you hope that this initiative will drive some traffic and add credibility to your brand. I do not take it a worrying trend because you are not spamming the web with exact matched anchor text or trolling gov sites with comment spams. However, if the Gov sites are asking to return the favor in exchange of some kind of link back, in that case, it could be something to worry about. Now, if you are still worried, you can simply use rel nofollow tag against the link. _

[TomRayner]

Links/Resources pages can be, under the right circumstance, a great place to be linked from.

Now this is dependent on a number of factors.  A website that has a resource page that contains links only from within their niche/area of expertise, on a website that you can be sure has not built dodgy links itself, then there should be no harm in having a link there.  Even if the page has a lot of outbound links, if it's a reputable website then your link will still be worth something, although might be diluted due to the other links.

Of course, a site that has one link pointing to pet supplies and another linking to viagra on the same page is going to raise suspicion.  Similarly, if the resource page sits on an authoritative domain but the PA score is nil or very low, then it may not be worth pursuing.  That's why I'd also approach the issue from an issue of branding.  I'd think to myself "Would a link to my website from this website come across as authoritative to the user?"  That is to say, if someone was on a user journey to buy car parts in michigan, and on the government resource page a link to your car parts website is there, that's going to be a ringing endorsement for your website in both the eyes of the user and a Googlebot.

In many ways, you could approach links/resource pages like web directories.  If you have the opportunity to get a link from an authoritative one on a solid website, I can't see it doing much harm.

[SebastianCowie]

I think you've answered your own question in a way. Link pages come in a variety of formats. Most universities / government / non-profit websites have link or resource pages. If you can get a legitimate backlink from those properties then you're doing it right!

If on the other hand you're targeting "resource / link" pages that are obviously trading links in an attempt to funnel pagerank or manipulate serps then steer clear.