Building "keyword" backlinks
-
Looking for some opinions here please. Been involved in seo for a couple of years mainly working on my websites and picking up the odd client here and there through word of mouth. I must admit that up until a few months back I was guilty of using some grey methods of link building - linkvana, unique article wizard and the such. While no penalties were handed out to my domains and some decent rankings gained, I got tired of always being on the lookout for what the next Google update will do to my results and which networks were being hit, and so I moved a lot more into the 'proper' way of seoing.
These days my primary sources for backlinks are much more respectable...
myblogguest
bloggerlinkup
postjoint
Guest Blog Finder http://ultramarketer.com/guest-blogger-finder/ - not sure where i came across this resource but it's very handy
I use these sources alongside industry only directories and general word of mouth.
Ironically I have found that doing the word by hand not only leads to results I can happyily show people (content wise) but also it's much quicker and cheaper. The increased authority of the sites means far fewer links are needed.
The one area I still am having a little issue with is that of building keyword based backlinks. I now find it fairly easy to get my content on a reasonable quality site - DA to 40 and above, however the vast majority of these sites will allow the backlink only as the company name or as a generic read more type thing. This is fine and it is improving my website performance and authority. The trouble I am finding is that while i am ranking for the title tag and some keywords in the page, I am struggling to get backlinks for other keywords. In an ideal world every page on the site would be optimised for a different keyword and you could then just the site name as anchor text to build the authority of that page and make it rank for it's content, but what about when you (or the client) wants to rank the home for a number of different keywords, some not featured on the page. The keywords are too similar to go to the trouble of making unique pages for, and that would also add no value to the site.
My question really then, after a very long winded way of getting there, is are others finding it much more difficult to gain keyword based backlinks these days? The great thing about the grey seo tools, as mentioned above, is that it was super easy to get the backlinks with whatever anchor text you wanted - even if you needed hundreds of the thing to compensate for the low value of each!!
Thanks
Carl
-
if you come up with a big idea, and link the page in the idea, you will get tons of links
-
I'd be really careful when it comes to keyword anchor text links. I find that 99% of them are either unnatural (ie in author bios) or paid for which is even worse (unless you no-follow it!). Ensure that your onpage SEO areas are perfected and make sure that there are no other issues onsite that could be hindering your rankings and then concentrate on producing high quality content.
Have a look at your backlink profile and see what percentage of branded links to keyword anchor text links you have because you should have a higher percentage of branded links. Those who concentrate on including too many anchor text links will (if they haven't been already) be penalised.
-
thanks for the reply, you make a good point about not overdoing the anchor text and using generic anchors to increase a page authority, that is a good strategy in the ideal world where you can optimise one landing page for one keyword. The trouble occurs when a client wants to rank one page for several different keywords. You may be able to rank for one or maybe two on the strength of good page authority and good onpage seo, but what about the other x keywords they want to rank for? Too few clients think about seo when building their site, in my opinion
-
Hello.
Thus anchor in backlinks is very important, I will not only worry about that. With this I mean you can have anchor as "read more" from a very valuable and authoritative website, which will be very important anyway. I will, in this case, not being able to decide anchors, improve my keyword (and similar) mostly ONPAGE, trying also to increment external forward links with the preferred anchor (which I can now choose) and internal linking from / to that page, still using the preferred anchor.
Otherwise, to get anchor you may want also try to ask the webmaster of the site you want the backlink from, to add your preferred anchor. If this is not possible, also try maybe including the whole code in a message to webmaster. You may be able to receive your wanted anchor. But as well, as far as I know, even anchor is very important, to have "read more" anchors may be useful as well, avoiding keyword stuffing in anchor.
Hope my thoughts are right, and may help you a little
Eugenio
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
-
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
Risk Using "Nofollow" tag
I have a lot of categories (like e-commerce sites) and many have page 1 - 50 for each category (view all not possible). Lots of the content on these pages are present across the web on other websites (duplicate stuff). I have added quality unique content to page 1 and added "noindex, follow" to page 2-50 and rel=next prev tags to the pages. Questions: By including the "follow" part, Google will read content and links on pages 2-50 and they may think "we have seen this stuff across the web….low quality content and though we see a noindex tag, we will consider even page 1 thin content, because we are able to read pages 2-50 and see the thin content." So even though I have "noindex, follow" the 'follow' part causes the issue (in that Google feels it is a lot of low quality content) - is this possible and if I had added "nofollow" instead that may solve the issue and page 1 would increase chance of looking more unique? Why don't I add "noindex, nofollow" to page 2 - 50? In this way I ensure Google does not read the content on page 2 - 50 and my site may come across as more unique than if it had the "follow" tag. I do understand that in such case (with nofollow tag on page 2-50) there is no link juice flowing from pages 2 - 50 to the main pages (assuming there are breadcrumbs or other links to the indexed pages), but I consider this minimal value from an SEO perspective. I have heard using "follow" is generally lower risk than "nofollow" - does this mean a website with a lot of "noindex, nofollow" tags may hurt the indexed pages because it comes across as a site Google can't trust since 95% of pages have such "noindex, nofollow" tag? I would like to understand what "risk" factors there may be. thank you very much
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Does 301 vs 302 matter when dealing with "social signal"?
When looking at links and how search engines look at "social signal," does it matter if a link is 301 vs 302? In addition to that, if I build out my own short URL system that gets used for link redirects that include referral attributes, would/could I get penalized if I use 301 instead of 302?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB0 -
"Authorship is not working for this webpage" Can a company G+ page be both Publisher AND Author?
When using the Google Structured Data testing tool I get a message saying....... **Authorship Testing Result - **Authorship is not working for this webpage. Here are the results of the data for the page http://www.webjobz.com/jobs/ Authorship Email Verification Please enter a Google+ profile to see if the author has successfully verified an email address on the domain www.webjobz.com to establish authorship for this webpage. Learn more <form id="email-verification-form" action="http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets" method="GET" data-ved="0CBMQrh8">Verify Authorship</form> Email verification has not established authorship for this webpage.Email address on the webjobz.com domain has been verified on this profile: YesPublic contributor-to link from Google+ profile to webjobz.com: YesAutomatically detected author name on webpage: Not Found.Publisher | Publisher markup is verified for this page. |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webjobz
| Linked Google+ page: | https://plus.google.com/106894524985345373271 | Question - Can this company Google plus account "Webjobz" be both the publisher AND the author? Can I use https://plus.google.com/106894524985345373271 as the author of this and all other pages on our site? 98emVv70 -
How are PDF image alt tags and "subject" field in document properties used for search
Hello, 1. Does google use image alt tags? According to this 2011 document, the answer is no, but I have seen others claiming yes- has google since begun using alt tags for images within PDFs? http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pdfs-in-google-search-results.html I am trying to decide if it is worth updating existing PDFs with alt tags for images for the purpose of SEO. 2. How does Google use the "Subject" field in document properties for a PDF? Should it be used as a description field for the document, similar to a meta description? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | winstoncho0 -
How to keep the link juice in E-commerce to an "out of stock" products URL?
I am running an e-commerce business where I sell fashion jewelry. We usually have 500 products to offer and some of them we have only one in stock. What happens is that many of our back links are pointed directly to a specific product, and when a product is sold out and no longer is in stock the URL becomes inactive, and we lose the link juice. What is the best practice or tool to 301-redirect many URLs at the same time without going and changing one URL at a time? Do you have any other suggestions on how to manage an out of stock product but still maintain the link juice from the back link? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ikomorin0 -
Prowling report says "duplicate titles" for wp-login.php
Hi there, How are you guys doing? I have a quick question. The last prowling report we received said we have three pages with "duplicate titles". Those three pages are: /wp-login.php wp-login.php?action=lostpassword /wp-login.php?action=register I'm a little confused because those pages don't even have a title. Do you think it's a big deal? Also do you have any idea of why the prowling report says those pages have duplicate titles? Apparently, wp-login.php is part of the Wordpress core. It's a built-in page that
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ericc22
handles login and registration. Not something we can edit. Thanks a lot and have a nice day!0 -
Why DBDResults.com is #1 on Google for "Internet Marketing Agency"?
They have a new site, no links, no content, their page isn't optimized for this keyword (it's not even one on the page or their page title)... They only have 5 incoming links with the keyword in it, but its competitors have way more. Can someone solve this mystery?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elcrazyhorse0