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
-
NoFollow Affiliate links from (very) shady websites will effect rankings?
Should I be worried , and if so what to do, if affiliates are linking from shady / gaming/adult websites? or dost the fact that the links are nofollow solve this issue completely ?
Affiliate Marketing | | KSafer0 -
Tweeting affiliate links...?
I work in the music business & am published music producer. I'm an authority in my niche. Yada yada. I have a website that sells products to other music producers. I recently set up an affiliate partnership with someone who is also in the music business but on the management side. She is not an authority to my customers as far as music making goes. But she does have a huge following of people who are EXACTLY who I am targeting. She has been tweeting my affiliate links. The traffic has been great, but the purchase response has not been. I've had much better responses from reviewers and other music producers who have tweeted my links. I was just wondering if anyone had any tips for the most effective ways of tweeting affiliate links? Thanks!
Affiliate Marketing | | PedroAndJobu0 -
Can linking out to a weak site harm my sites SEO?
We have an affiliate that wants us to link to his site to help him get started. His website looks okay and is in the same niche as us. However, he has PR 0 and no Page Trust. We could work in a natural looking link in a news article, but there is no way he could be considered any kind of "authority" link. Can linking to his site harm us?
Affiliate Marketing | | theLotter0 -
Sponsored Links on Amazon, help
So from what I can see CLickrive was discontinued by Amazon, replaced by a9. I have been asked by a client how they can get onto Sponsored Links near the bottom of a search query on an amazon page. Now I can see from the amazon associates site that you can put widgets, display ads, product search links etc but there is no mention of 'Sponsored Links' other than: SPONSORED LINKS Sponsored links are advertisements related to your recent product search query or content on the page. Sponsored links are always clearly labeled. When you click on a sponsored link, we get revenue. Generating additional revenue from sponsored links allows Amazon.com to offer lower prices to you - something we are dedicated to doing in every way we can. There is no mention on how to actually be a sponsored link... I have read on various blogs etc that it is delivered by a third party network... no mention as to whom... thought Google but no mention of this on any information I can find on Google blogs etc. Anyone have an idea? Thank you 🙂
Affiliate Marketing | | ChalkWard0 -
How much SEO benefit am I getting from 'affiliate' links?
Hi all, We run lots of different campaigns with affiliates and as such they have links on their websites pointing back to ours. I was keen to know how much 'link-juice' these kinds of links are passing back to our websites or how much SEO benefit we are getting from them. The links have "?=affiliate" in them. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!! Many thanks! Rob
Affiliate Marketing | | RobertHill0 -
Limit of links in the same page
Hi, I have some pages that have more than 100 links. They are links to some stores (affiliate links). I set all of them as rel="nofollow" but I think Google is penalizing me because the link quantity. What is a good number of URL in the same page? Thanks
Affiliate Marketing | | GDB0 -
Hiding Affiliate Links
Hello, Currently I'm developing a website that will contain a lot of affiliate links (5000). This is because I'm going to compare the prices of a lot of products. The visitor can go to all websites (my advertisers) that sell these products via affiliate links. My question is how to hide these affiliate links. I've read lots of solutions, like: cloaking, rel=nofollow, using JavaScript, 301 redirects. I would like to know what the best solution is to deal with these affiliate links for SEO. Regards, Martijn
Affiliate Marketing | | MartijnWijbenga290 -
Important question on affiliate links
The website I am working on is http://www.treadmillreviews.com. If you look at any of our affiliate links, they all have an href value of # or something that keeps the user on the page. However, there is an onclick="window.open('affiliate link URL')" code in them that has the affiliate link open in a new window. This website was set up to "hide" the affiliate links in essence this way. I just tried to make a PPC campaign in Google. Got shut down in about 20 minutes for being a "bridge page." Now, all of the content is original and not copied from anywhere. Supposedly Google could not see these links. Yet we got labeled how we did, and now I"m thinking it is causing rankings to hurt a bit. My question is, should I change how all of the links are set up? Should I make the href value be the affiliate link? It is a redirect like CJ.com uses. Should I nofollow those affiliate links? What is the best way to handle this problem? All help is appreciated.
Affiliate Marketing | | DanDeceuster0