Why are my paid vendors not showing on our links?
-
We pay a hefty amount to site that claim to bring in leads. ie... Cars.com, Edmunds.com, Cargurus, and I also have my dCard (digital business cards) with links to our URL. Why aren't they showing on our PA or DA? Could it be our web host? We have on;y 2 options for web hosts per Acura (a compliance thing) Please help with any thoughts or answers to this. I see many other dealers with strong links who use the same companies. Our site is http://findlayacura.com and thank you for any help. We appreciate it greatly.
-
The main reason I personally don't like these sites is there claims to get impressions. I caught them advertising of Facebook with my cars!! When I asked if this was part of there 94k impression my store got last month they couldn't come up with a straight answer. You can definitely monetize your site as long as you properly address what makes your site different then these big corp sites that are charging you a huge sum then turn to your competitor and get them to pay more to put banner ads across my cars. I am always open to trying out a pilot program if you're interested.
-
Cody has a good answer here. We don't have the server farms (or server barges?) that Google has, so we can't crawl as much of the web as they do, and can't always crawl all of the links. Do also check in Google and Bing webmaster tools to see if the links are showing there.
-
I don't have access to the webmaster tools we pay a company as I'm sure you know to do this for us. I only can submit a ticket to our support team and see what the come up with. With the help of MOZ I am able to uncover a lot of things that our SEO and website team don't pick up on or even look at. This is why I posted the question to begin with. you are absolutely right when I ask me Rep if they can provide links back to our site I get let me check with tech support then about a month goes by and next visit I get oh yeah they weren't able to figure out what I asked them.
It's the normal automotive rep bs.
Thanks again for responding I am going to now open a ticket at the next window lol while forwarding this over to my internet team. -
I know what you mean. I work with pretty much all the vendors, and I can say that you should just be happy you don't have a Ford Direct site, which requires you to pay a "SEO Fee" to just change title tags.
Anyway, if you install the "Redirect Path" plugin on Chrome, which shows when you get redirected on a site, and what kind of redirect it is, you will see that the link to your dealership page from one of your VDPs on Cars.com is actually a 301 redirect. Basically, they are doing their best to keep any authority from going to that page that would help the link back to your site. They also link to the www. version of your website, which then gets 301'd to the non www. version of your website. If, and how much, authority is lost with redirects is highly debated, but I usually go with a 10% loss of authority. Basically, any authority that the link might provide is greatly decreased by these redirects.
This is just Cars.com, but I would guess the others are similar. Do these links register in your Webmaster tools?
-
Cody Jerry
I really appreciate you taking the time to respond to this question. I am a Sales Manager here who also is running our internet department. I am trying to think outside the box in the auto biz. As you know most of the SEO and website host are cookie cutter to put it blunt. I can't stand the fact that we pay companies like cars .com or autotrader, it's our inventory, it's our product, without us they wouldn't be here. You're right on the fact that they would never give up any info on analytics so no sense working that angle. Why if there PA is so high and I compared us to another dealer who uses them am I not getting any results in the link Analysis? Thanks for the help.
-
I actually specialize in automotive seo, but haven't really thought about it. Anyway, I took a look at your cars.com link, and it registers as a PA of 1, which means it has very little authority being passed into it. The reason why you aren't seeing these links is because the pages in which they reside have such little authority that the Moz spider does not locate them. I've also never seen one of these links in Google Webmaster tools, so I would guess that they don't consider them very authoritative links either.
Consider this, though. You are paying for that service, so those links are Paid Links. It's also possible that search engines ignore them because they know this fact, and don't bother indexing them. The only way to really get an idea of how important search engines feel those pages are would be to look at server level crawl stats. Unfortunately, Cars.com would never share that data with you, and your rep would probably just give you a blank look if you asked.
If you have any questions about your dealerships SEO you can PM me.
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
-
Problems With Link Detective
Is anyone else experiencing problems with Link Detective? It seems to of been down for a few days now with the same message that it will be back 'later today'. I have not seen any issues noted elsewhere but I know a fair few members here are using it so before I start pestering them I wondered if anyone else is having issues. Thanks
Competitive Research | | mos_rich0 -
Page Linking Root Domains and Root Domain Linking Root Domains?
hi, i want to know if Page Linking Root Domains is less and Root Domain Linking Root Domains is higher in number, at that time your keyword is highly competitive or less competitive? for example if a keyword having this information:- Page Authority is:-83 Page Linking Root Domains:- 295 Domain Authority is :- 94 Root Domain Linking Root Domains:- 42,399 which point is more important to consider? if you want to bring your keyword on the first page of the Google ?
Competitive Research | | parallelseo0 -
Analyzing Back Links - Says site A has back link to Site B but when I look at site B I can't find any back link to Site A. Why?
I am new to SEO Moz - It looks like incredible technology. I was playing around with different websites to see where they had back linked to see how it works. Looked at a site called racingsecretsexposed [dot] come and it said that it had dozens of links to www.ndesignstudio.com such as: ndesign-studio.com/blog/best-wordpress-sites?replytocom=893 with link anchor text "laying horses" but when I do a search for the company name, or the anchor text "laying horses", or the owner of the company's name on ndesignstudio.com - nothing appears. Why not? Isn't the back link anchored by the text laying horses, which should link back to the racing secrets website? Thanks
Competitive Research | | NewtoSEO900 -
What's the best way to make sure a link is worth getting?
I know what tools to use and I use all of SEOmoz's tools daily. PA, DA, MR, & MT are all things I take into account, but sometimes all you have to do is look at a site and you can tell it's not worth it. I'll analyze the page's backlink's and everything in between. Are there any tricks out there that can help the decision making process? I'm tired of trying to get links on sites that clearly are not worth it, but all of their stats say otherwise. So do you stick with stats, or is it a judgement call? I'm particularly curious about determining the amount of possible traffic from a link. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Competitive Research | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Keyword based link problem on site
So I think I might have identified an issue with a site that I'm trying to get ranked for a specific keyword but, wanted to get some opinions before I started making some big changes on the site. On my homepage I have the keyword that I would like to be ranked for in the title lets say "Blue Widgets - Company Name', also on the home page I have some descriptions of our services including the keywords. I also have a couple of the keyword based links within in the content, navigation and footer. But these keyword based links all point to another page on the site: blue-widgets.htm. If I really want my home page to rank for the keyword "Blue Widgets' should all of these links point to the home page instead of the sub page? I know there are a great number of other factors that contribute to rankings but looking at my competition, this is something that they seem to be doing. The keyword based links within the content, navigation or footer all point to the homepage. I also have a higher Domain Authority than some of the sites that rank higher than me so I'm not sure if building more links is the answer. Of course I always want to build natural links but these sites don't seem to be doing that either. Any comments, suggestions or input would be greatly appreciated.
Competitive Research | | TRICORSystems0 -
SEOmoz total links fluxuations
I'm analyzing my clients and competitor back links and are noticing alot of up and down fluxuations. For example last month we had 1400 back links, last week 1350 back links, and today 1450 back links. Also, one competitor went from 25,000 to 2,700 in the space of a few weeks. My question is how can I explain to the client that their back links are going down when they are paying for a back link building service (100 back links per month). Thank you for your time.
Competitive Research | | SharpKiwi0 -
What is the right way to due a competitive Link analysis?
Trying to use the saturation report suggestion with no luck for google.com,and looking for away to benchmark either Pagerank or page authority to figure out how many links are required to overr take competitors from diversified sources. What is the process to do this to get the best results for the client.
Competitive Research | | bmcfarlane0 -
Question regarding back link analysis and anchor text
Hello, I am looking at my competitors back link analysis and comparing a range of link based metrics from the top 10 SERPS. I am then putting this data into excel and comparing our back link profiles. When looking at the anchor text distribution i am not sure whether to look at exact match anchor or phrase match anchor. For example, one of the companies I am looking at holds positions 3 and 4 in the SERPS. Looking at their linking profile I can see that only 1.7% of their links use the exact match anchor 'widget'. Looking at their phrase match anchor is an entirely different story, 93.5% of anchor links contain 'widget' somewhere. i.e. 'cheap widgets', 'widget sale', 'buy widgets at www.examplewidget.co.uk' etc. Obviously their exact match and phrase match anchor distribution tell a completely different story. THIS IS TRUE FOR MANY OF THE TOP 10 SERPS. Therefore, should I be looking at phrase match anchors instead of exact? Side note: would people recommend targeting anchors with 'brandname widget' based on predictions of Google giving weighted anchor more weight. Robert.
Competitive Research | | 87ROB0