Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does this count as a backlink to my category page?
-
I am ranking high with a certain category page and I am reading that I need backlinks to that page. It is going to be a challenge to get a backlink to that specific category page but how about this?
Category page URL:
Backlink to this URL:
www.mysite.com/category/name/specific-blog-post (EDIT: Apparently these types of links don't exist! I went into the category page and clicked on a blog post and it just gave me the www.mysite.com/blah-blah-blah)
Will that count as a backlink to the category page? Right now I am only getting backlinks to these blog posts:
www.mysite.com/this-is-a-blog-post
Any help appreciated!
EDIT: Well I guess now my question is worthless. But if you have any input, it would be appreciated.
-
Dang, you are awesome. That helped a lot and I appreciate it. Today I am working on cleaning up my category pages and making sure everything is filed properly. I am really happy to hear that getting backlinks to a blog post in one category will pass value to the category. Thanks!

-
Hey, let me take a swing at this.
As I understand, you would like to rank with the www.mysite.com/category/name page, and you can get backlinks to your blog posts instead of your category. Your problem is that www.mysite.com/category/name/specific-blog-post redirects to www.mysite.com/specific-blog-post, and you don't know if that counts as a backlink to your category page.
First of all, you're right, getting backlinks to your category page is usually pretty hard, and your best bet is to get backlinks to the blog posts that are featured in that category. This can be efficient especially if your internal linking is sound, so that on the blog post page you link back to the parent category (and not to many other parts of your website).
Second, there is no problem that www.mysite.com/category/name/specific-blog-post redirects to www.mysite.com/specific-blog-post. That's the way you set up your WordPress permalinks, which isn't bad and is actually fairly common. Google doesn't associate the blog post with a category based on URL, it associates them based on the relationships (internal links) it finds while crawling your site. Getting more backlinks to blog posts in one category will pass some value to the category itself, so naturally your category will also rise in ranking.
Hope this helps, cheers!
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
-
How Many Backlinks does I need to rank?
A keyword Olehana private label cosmetic company that also my competitor have 4k ref domain for this keyword. So Do I need more than 4k ref domain with anchortext "olehana" Please help me. Thanks.
Link Building | | arainbadami0 -
Backlinks and SPAM
I was doing some back link review of competitors and I have noticed that many of our competition have 300+ do follow back links from Justia.com and an additional 300+ do follow links from law.cornell.edu (they share the same database). The links on Justia are from different pages and they are all going to the root of our competitors site. So the questions are as follows; 1: For the purpose of SEO is this considered SPAM 2: If not SPAM, then does it have a positive effect on the competitions website and should I attempt to emulate for my client. Thanks in advance. -Jeff
Link Building | | FriedmanSimon10000 -
Spammy no follow backlinks - what should I do?
There is a individual/company that is creating lots of spam sites in my niche. It doesn't seem that they are trying to rank for any keywords, so I'm a little confused as to their purpose, but here's what they're doing. They scrape the top 10 Google results for each keyword and create a page - so if the niche is "widgets", they scrape the top 10 ranked sites for 'widgets', 'blue widgets', 'red widgets', and so on. A 'results' page is created for each keyword, which is linked from a home page. The results page always contains 10 websites - text is the site metadescription or similar. Each website gets a nofollow link back with the page title used as the anchor text. The host sites all have the keyword in the domain name - e.g www.widgetsxyz.com. The sites are thrown together but interestingly have a very crappy but individual logo (like 90's clipart). The host sites all have high DA/PA due to some very extensive link spam pointing to the sites, with very targeted keywords. There is seemingly no purpose to these sites that I can see - no other 'followed' links on the page or site. Whoever is doing this is churning out tens, if not hundreds of these sites. Any ideas what might be going on here, and whether I should be disavowing these sites (even though no follow). The fear is that they could switch the links to do follow, and get all the major players penalised in one fell swoop. ???
Link Building | | johnohara0 -
Backlinks from newpapers that requires subscription
Don't know if this has been answered in another post, but what happens to backlinks that requires users to subscribe and/or pay to view the content with the backlink on it?
Link Building | | helgeolaussen
Some newspaper sites has subscription requirement to view certain content.
Does the backlink drop in value? Or is there any negative effect from this?0 -
Do links to my website improve all pages?
I'm currently building links to my home page (through directories) and blog pages. However, none of these pages are actually targeted pages for main keywords. In SEO, do links to any webpage of a site contribute to the improved rank of other pages?
Link Building | | Gavo0 -
Homepage Vs. Inner Page Backlink Building?
If I'm trying to rank multiple inner pages, when does strengthening the homepage become more productive than strengthening the inner pages themselves? Is there a strategy to this? For example, maybe you build up a few dozen backlinks to each inner page, and then focus all your efforts on the homepage? Because, from my understanding, strengthening the homepage will go a long way towards helping your inner pages rank. Is that correct?
Link Building | | JABacchetta0 -
Linking to root domain or index page
While link building, should I link to index page of my website i.e www.mydomainname.com/index.html or should I link to root domain i.e www.mydomainname,com Also I see duplicate title error for index page and root domain in error statistic. How can I get rid of this.
Link Building | | ArtiKalra0 -
Paul and Angela Style Backlinks
Do Forum Profile Links provided by Paul and Angela hold any SEO merit ? Will it help in improving SER?
Link Building | | krishrun0