Optimize Pages for Keywords Prior to Building Links?

[Kingalan1]

Greetings MOZ Community:

According to site audit by a reputable SEO firm last November, my commercial real estate web site has a toxic link profile which is very weak (about 58% of links qualified as toxic).

The SEO firm suggests than we immediately start pruning the link profile, requesting removal of the toxic links and eventually filing a link disavow file with Google for links that web masters will not agree to remove.

While removing toxic links, the SEO firm proposes to simultaneously solicit very high quality links, to try to obtain 7-12 high quality links per month.

My question is the following: is it putting the cart before the horse to work on link building without optimizing pages (with Yoast) for specific keywords?

I would think that Google considers how each page is optimized for specific terms; which terms are used within the link structure, as well as terms within the meta tags. My site is partially optimized, but optimization has never been done thoroughly.

Should the pages of the site be optimized for the top 25-30 terms before link building begins. Or can that be done at a later stage. Note that my link profile is pretty atrocious. My site at the moment is receiving about 1,000 unique visitors a week from organic search. However 70% of the traffic is from terms that are not relevant. The firm that did my audit claims that removal of the toxic links while building some new links is imperative and that optimization for keywords can wait somewhat.

Any thoughts?/

Thanks for your assistance.

Alan

[Carson-Ward]

If the links are toxic, your firm is correct in that it's important to start the removal process. That said, I don't see any reason not to start optimizing pages for your terms. These aren't dependent tasks in any way. If the links were built by you and are toxic and your pages are not currently well optimized, you should definitely be working on both of those things.

If it's time that's the issue, think about what you can do on your own. There's no need to have a paid firm gathering contact info from the linking sites when you could easily be doing that yourself. Make sure you're communicating with one another so that they're helping with things you need help with

[artdivision]

Hello,
Firstly, no submission of disavow file doesn't mean that you will get a manual review. it doesn't even mean that Google will indeed ignore those links. If you know what you are doing, filter the domains correctly and disavow low quality links you can only gain from this.

The second part i want to refer to is to the good quality content. Good quality content is an amazing marketing tool but not a replacement for keyword rankings as most people think. For example an article about "5 easy tips to design the perfect email marketing campaign" will definitely drive few visitors per month on the site (lets say 100) but you wont substitute the 5000 you will get if you rank for "email marketing services" (this is just an example with random numbers). Keep always in mind at all times that Google doesnt want to make web sites popular, they want to rank popular sites.

Lastly you mention Yost SEO which means you use wordpress and also onpage optimisation. Yoast tells you that your onpage optimisation is top notch based on the content your write but doesnt take into account the fact that wordpress by default is an on-page nightmare. make sure you take care of tags, categories and always consider them in case you use your targeted keyword onpage.

[Kingalan1]

Hi Brett:

The domain is about 9 years old and that has value. Organic search volume dropped from 6800/month to about 3100/month after the April 2012 Penguin update. It has climbed back in the last five months to about 4500/month. So the penalty has atleast been partially lifted.

I never received a notice of penalty from Google. However my SEO firm believes that so many of the links are toxic (per "LinkDetox") that that some sort of penalty exists on the site. Google Pagerank has decline to 2 from 4 and Cemper Trust has also declined significantly. Strangely enough search volume has increased significantly in the last 4 months despite the drop in PR and Cemper Trust. Being that the site still performs, I really hope it is not necessary to move to a new domain and start from scratch!!!

Are you saying that submitting a disavow will trigger a manual review of my site? If so, this may be very good, as the content on the site is useful and unique.

In the scenario above, where the site still ranks for keywords, search volume has increased but Cemper Trust and PR have declined, do you believe recovery and improvement is possible? Note, I have never received any penalty notice.

Thanks,
Alan

[Kingalan1]

Hi George, thanks for your response.

Actually, the content is high quality, unique content that is useful to the visitor. I have noticed that as new content is added search traffic increases.

Prior to the April 2012 Penguin update organic traffic was as high as 6800 visit per month, dropping to as low as 2800 per month. Search traffic is now about 4000/per month.

In 2010 and 2011 submissions were made to a few hundred low quality directories. As a result there are many toxic links pointing to the site, which I believe should be removed.

Content is useful, question is should that content be optimized with Yoast before we remove links?

Thanks,
Alan

[Brett-Harland]

Hi Alan,

Do you need this website? would it be better to ditch and rebuild a new site. Its very hard to get back from a penalty. I would advise ask yourself these questions first. The SEO company will advise it can fix these things of course for a fee. At the moments Google's spam robot has spotted your links and warned you by using disavow it may mean they take a manual look at your site. Sorry to be negative but all the time getting back from this it could be easier to build a new site and learn from mistakes.

[Asjad]

Hello Alan,

You should Optimize pages First.. Well Optimized Pages with Good Quality backlinks Will get you Required Rankings.

As a Start, Optimize your Web pages in regards to your Keywords and then start building backlinks.

Thanks

[George.Fanucci]

A house built on sand? Low quality pages will not attract natural links. Without good content, there's no there, there.

Build a quality site with good content, and useful design, relevant to your prospects and clients needs, before you do anything else. Deliver value first.

Even with fewer links, a site with higher quality content can often outrank a site that has more links, and will also be more link-worthy.