Links and how they count?
-
We managed to get ourselves out of a penalty 6 months ago and 100 days later after the message of penalty removable we finally felt that we were moving back on track (not a lot of movement before and 50% down due to links being taken away), we have around 120 really high quality links but 95% of them are urls or the business name.
Anyway we still have a couple of pages that I feel are fairly down on rankings and most of the links as mentioned above are high quality but they are either anchor text of the website name or url my main question is that when looking at my competitors I see that they have the same or less links and from much less powerful places (most I would not touch) but they seem to have a ratio of 5 - 10 % of the links are the keywords they are trying to rank for.
My question is if you have 50 links from better places but they are unrelated terms such as the web site name or just urls and you have 50 links from average places but 5 - 10% are on related terms to what you are trying to rank for which ones would win out.
-
Agreed with Chris. I'd prefer to have a ton of branded links (whether it's URL or brand name) and then target whatever keyword I want on the actual page.
-
A fair amount of value would have to do with the relevancy of the sites/pages with the links to the pages they're linking to. If they're not relevant to each other, I'd say all bets are off. If they are relevant to each other, then the answer is easy--it's another toss up.
The authority of the branded links from the better (thematically relevant) sites will certainly help with the authority of the page they're linking to but if that page isn't optimized well for a particular keyword, the additional authority may not help it rank better for a hoped-for keyword--if it is well optimized the link could help quite a bit.
On the other hand, the relevance provided by the anchor text from a link on a thematically relevant page could certainly be beneficial but it would depend on how exactly the anchor text matched the target keyword, how many other back links also contained the exact same anchor text.
On a site with 120 back links, 5-10 of them with exact match anchor text is a pretty obvious footprint and if I had my choice today, I'd prefer the authority links over the keyword links.
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
-
Pinging Links
Interested to know if anybody still uses the strategy of pinging links to make sure they get indexed, there are a number of sites out there which offer it. Is it considered dangerous/spamy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seoman100 -
Internal Links to Ecommerce Category Pages
Hello, I read a while back, and I can't find it now, that you want to add internal links to your main category pages. Does that still apply? If so, for a small site (100 products) what is recommended? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Do legitimately earned links from unrelated sites help or hurt?
We have a few charity events coming up that have offered to link back to our homepage. While we do genuinely like the charities we are going to sponsor, I'm not sure how those links will look seo-wise. For example, one is for the local high school basketball team and another is for a Pediatric Care Mud Run. To a human, these links make perfect sense, but to a robot, I'm not sure if it differentiates these links from spam/some negative link. Granted, I understand that a small percentage of links probably won't do anything either way, but I'd like to ignore that for the purposes of my question. All things being equal, do links such as these help or hurt? Thanks for your time and insight, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Duplicate content or not? If you're using abstracts from external sources you link to
I was wondering if a page (a blog post, for example) that offers links to external web pages along with abstracts from these pages would be considered duplicate content page and therefore penalized by Google. For example, I have a page that has very little original content (just two or three sentences that summarize or sometimes frame the topic) followed by five references to different external sources. Each reference contains a title, which is a link, and a short abstract, which basically is the first few sentences copied from the page it links to. So, except from a few sentences in the beginning everything is copied from other pages. Such a page would be very helpful for people interested in the topic as the sources it links to had been analyzed before, handpicked and were placed there to enhance user experience. But will this format be considered duplicate or near-duplicate content?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | romanbond0 -
How do I know what links are bad enough for the Google disavow tool?
I am currently working for a client who's back link profile is questionable. The issue I am having is, does Google feel the same way about them as I do? We have no current warnings but have had one in the past for "unnatural inbound links". We removed the links that we felt were being referred to and have not received any further warnings, nor have we noticed any significant drop in traffic or rankings at any point. My concern is that if I work towards getting the more ominous looking links removed (directories, reciprocal links from irrelevant sites etc.), either manually or with the disavow tool, how can I be sure that I am not removing links that are in fact helping our campaign? Are we likely to suffer from the next Penguin update if we chose to proceed without moving the aforementioned links? or is Google only likely to target the serious black hat links (link farms etc.)? Any thoughts or experiences would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BallyhooLtd0 -
Links to partner sites
I have some partnerships in some portals, usually I put the banner of my company with a link to my site on a space partners. How should I proceed? To place the banner no link? To put the link nofollow? Can’t I do it? Don’t I need to worry about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | soulmktpro0 -
Does anyone know of a good link building case study? A B2B focus would be a plus
Looking for a solid analysis of a white-hat campaign that showed tangible results (if one exists).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RiseSEO0 -
Any recent discoveries or observations on the "Official Line" of incoming link penalization?
I know this is always a contentious issue and that the official, or shall we say semi-official line is that you can't be penalized for incoming links, as you can't control who links to you (aside of course from link buying, and other stuff that Google feels it can work out). I was wondering if anyone had any recent discoveries or observations on this? Obviously there's the problem that is usually brought up where you could damage a competitor buy link building to them with spammy links, etc... hence the half denial of it being an issue... but has anyone seen or hear anything on it recently, or experienced something relevant?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SteveOllington1
