Links from Blogs and Forums
-
Hello Everyone,
We are a small, local business in a city in Canada. We just got a new website and I am responsible for basically all of it, including the SEO.
I was researching the back-links from our top-ranking competitor (another small, local business in our city). Here is their ranking:
- PA 40, with 441 Links from 111 RDs
- DA 30, with 6,864 Links from 116 RDs
Here is the second-highest guy:
- PA 29, with 101 Links from 10 RDs
- DA 15, with 1,682 Links from 11 RDs
As you can see, the top-ranking competitor's PA & DA are just about double his closest competitor. (Don't ask where we currently stand!)
But, on closer examination, most of the links from our top-ranking competitor come from a local blog, where our competitor's ad appears in an advertisement on the sidebar. Each time they make a post, which is just about every day, our competitor gets a link.
They also have a lot of links from a forum on a rock band's website. The original post was something about finding music, but the responses all have links to unrelated websites.
This seems really, really slimy to me.
What's going on?
-
The total number of links is almost always going to be higher than the RDs. This is because the domain is counted once (hence "unique") whereas there are often many links coming from that domain. Consider your own site - your own site will provide links (these are called internal links) and you will have hundreds or thousands of links from your own site. If you have a homepage link on the menu bar, that is creating one link on each page of your site.
So the number of links is not very helpful to look at alone. It may be useful to look at the ratio of total links to RDs, but that's a separate issue. The more useful metric is RDs. If I were you, I would pursue links from different sites so that you can build a portfolio of more RDs.
It's not unusual to have 10-15 RDs for a new domain. After 1 month I would be surprised, but seeing that after a few months would be normal.
-
Thanks for your reply. And thanks for the encouragement - I need it!
May I ask another question?
Both #1 and #2 have a HUGE number of links.
I find this odd, especially since #2 has only had their new (and presumably "optimized") website for about 1 month.
How did he get so many links in such a short time? (And why would he want so many from so few RDs?)
-
The blog link you mentioned will provide diminishing returns as the initial link you get from a domain is the most helpful and each subsequent link from the same domain is worth less and less.
The forum does indeed sound sketchy if there are links to unrelated sites. You are in a good position because your competitors link profile doesn't look great.
I also look at the proportion of DA and PA to number of RDs. The lower the ratio (more RDs) the worse the link profile is. For instance a site that has a DA of 30 with 15 unique domains has a great ratio. A site with DA 30 and 500 RDs has a much worse link profile.
This particular site is not impressive.
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
-
Blocking external links in Robots.txt - need advice on Best Practice
I look after an affiliate site that is doing quite well in the search rankings. We've been doing a review of our practices and one thing that has cropped up is our robots.txt. In it, we disallow Google from crawling external links. This used to be best practice in the affiliate industry a couple of years ago, but I wanted to know if this is still the case, and what the implications are if we were to: a/ leave it as is? b/ allow crawling? Thanks in advance.
Affiliate Marketing | | Ben_Malkin_Develo0 -
What impact do affiliate links have on SEO
We commonly reference engineering standards on our site (because half our products are known and searched for by those standard names) and have just signed up as an affiliate to an organisation that sell the standards. Which seems a nice match We're going through and making sure all are no follow now because that seems the general advice - but should we be doing anything else? Yoast says you should mask affiliate links - https://yoast.com/affiliate-links-and-seo/ - but that was from 2010. Matt Cutts is fairly clear on nonfollow - http://www.webpronews.com/heres-what-googles-matt-cutts-says-about-affiliate-links-and-nofollow-2012-06 - but not on whether it affects SERPS Does it? And what is the best way to handle it? This is a typical example of a page where we would have an affiliate link or two. http://www.oakleysteel.co.uk/fake-mill-certificates-en10168
Affiliate Marketing | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
How to flag inbound affiliate links to Search Engines
Afternoon Mozzers, I was chatting to our VP of marketing earlier about one of our sites with a somewhat unhealthy looking link profile. This is primarily caused by the sector its in and the fact that lots of low quality lead generators / affiliates operate there, sending traffic to us in return for payment on accepted leads. Now, he recalled that there is a way to mark these inbound links, through a URL parameter he thought, as being affiliates and therefore should be ignored as we don’t want them misinterpreted as an attempt to manipulate our rankings. I have been doing a spot of research but can't find a straight answer. heres a few articles i looked at: blogaid, Yoast, Webmaster world and the Moz Q&A.The problem is all these are from the perspective of a site linking out and acting as an affiliate, so all deal with that page not losing PR. The two methods i have derived from this boil down to: No follow the links Use an intermediary redirect page and script which you can block from robots.txt So, back to our case - Are there any ways we can signal to Search engines, as the destination site, that these links are from affiliates (such as this URL parameter our VP had vague recollections off) or should i just get in touch and ask the sites to make them Nofollow? Thanks, Tom.
Affiliate Marketing | | Sarbs0 -
What is the best way to boost no. of quality sites linking in?
Analysing my site ranking compared to competitors, I see that our weakness is getting others to share our content and link into it via their own blogs and social media - although I would say our social media activity is pretty good. We have also worked on getting listed free on relevant sites related to our product area (learn spanish in spain) in order to increase sites linking but this is still minute compared to our 2 main competitors. (As a note: paid listings are not totally justifiable for us at this point in time but perhaps in the future we will expand on this). Am I missing something here?
Affiliate Marketing | | sparkit0 -
Where to look for relevant links
I and many others are targeting keywords such as "free iphone" or "free ps3" as part of incentive marketing schemes that offer rewards for referring new users to businesses. These often seem too good to be true but actually do work (if you don't get caught up in the spam sites). The thing is, what sort of link building should I be looking at once I have my site showing the users how the opportunity works and that it is a legitimate site. I don't want to have free iphone links placed where people may think I'm scamming them, so should I look at press releases, creating infographics or what? I look forward to hearing some of your ideas...
Affiliate Marketing | | GrassRootsSEO0 -
Two Tier Internet, Bad Blogs and One page Affiliate Sites
Hi, I start a post on a popular internet marketing forum about how bad blogs - (i.e. the ones with one posts of over optimise spun garbage) - and the one page affiliate sites - trying to sell you something... (you know the ones) - were REALLY starting to annoy me and if/when something would be done by ISP's or Anyone really. Obviously google is aware of the issue with trying to push Google Plus to crowd source better search results. But with more and more sites popping up telling people how they can make money from having a niche website/page with adwords on it aren't we fast moving to a two tier internet.... How websites/pages exist purely to game search engines.... and will they ever disappear.... Sorry mini rant..... might even get some ideas for a blog post 😛 (not on a bad blog before anyone says anything)
Affiliate Marketing | | JohnW-UK0 -
Sponsored Blog Posts?
We are looking at working with http://www.socialspark.com/ which is a Blog Sponsorship Network. How does Google treat the sites that work with advertisers like this? Do they treat these the same as selling links? If we add a no-follow link would this cause us any problems? Are we ok working with them, or should we consider looking into something entirely different? With the Panda updates, we're looking into additional ways to work with advertisers. We're trying to thin down the affiliate type banners on the side & focus more on the content side. What guidelines does Google have for working with advertisers that wouldn't hurt us in our rankings? Thanks, BJ
Affiliate Marketing | | seointern0 -
Outbound Affiliate Links - Positive or Negative Effect
Hello I would like to increase the value of my value proposition to users by adding complimentor affiliate links and embedded widgets like postcode search to my promote my affiliate's service. I already have a great ranking.... Am I jeopardizing my position by putting outbound links to affiliate sites? Also would a nofollow tag on an affiliate link work? I understand Google is fast changing - so what is the latest advice on this for Spring 2011? Thanks a lot
Affiliate Marketing | | philipjterry0