Why are my paid vendors not showing on our links?

[ModernPallets]

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.

[ModernPallets]

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.

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[ModernPallets]

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.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

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?

[ModernPallets]

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.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

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.