I am tempted to purchase a listing on an industry specific website directory with high domain authority. Will that be frowned upon as buying links?
-
I am tempted to purchase a listing on an industry specific website directory (http://marketingresourcedirectory.ama.org/) with high domain authority. Will that be frowned upon as buying links?
-
Samuel's three questions are really good and are exactly what you should be thinking about. I am not so sure that you're directly asking for trouble by getting this link in "followed" format, although a Google rep would say that those links should be nofollowed.
Definitely only do this if you believe you should be getting this link regardless of whether it passes authority. I say this due to it being a link on a directory - they're notoriously iffy for SEO, but obviously there are directories where you SHOULD be listed for marketing's sake. Because this is visibly paid and followed, beware of any alternate intent Google might assign to listed businesses.
-
Whenever I ask myself if I want to pursue a such a specific link actively (paid or unpaid), I ask myself three questions:
1. Would I want this link if Google did not exist? (i.e., would the link send me valuable referred traffic anyway?)
2. Is this link curated by a human who is an expert in the field and who does not accept each and every submission?
3. If this link is being paid for, does it not pass PageRank (i.e., is it a no-follow link that adheres to Google's guidelines as such)?
If the answer is "yes" to all three questions, the link is usually safe.
Now, your situation is interesting. The American Marketing Association is a recognized, authoritative resource. But if they are accepting paid listings, then I see in the source code that they are not no-following the links -- which directly goes against Google's guidelines. So, I would play it safe and not buy a listing there. Plus, the fact that they put the paid directory on a subdomain makes me uneasy -- it seems like they did that as a safeguard so that if Google would ever penalize the subdomain, it would not affect the site as a whole. I'd also think that they'd know to no-follow paid links.
Instead, I'd see if you can somehow "earn" a link from that site at the root-domain level instead via content and PR and such.
-
If this link is relevant to what you do and is useful to your target customer base do it. A baseline rule I have is that anything that helps users get the information they need or makes their internet experience better it is worth doing. I can't see how this would hurt as it looks like a credible link.
On a side note pay attention to the description you put in. If it makes sense include references to your area or the areas that you like to provide services. This will help this listing show up where you want it to:).
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
-
Website in capital letters
Hello, Is website in capital letters affect SEO ?? or we can apply with it ?? please help thnx in advance..!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | iepl20040 -
International Website Targeting
Hello fellow Mozzers, had a quick question. So we have a new eCommerce client that is interested in launching a website in multiple countries. According to their vision, they want a US site, UK site, Japan site, etc and so on. I have a few concerns about doing it this way. First, there is the issue with the sites being the same. They only difference will be that they have a different domain, such as domain.co.jp for the Japan-based site, domain.co.uk for UK, etc. Even if we target different countries in webmaster, won't the sites still compete with one another and potentially get tagged as duplicates? I'm thinking there has to be a better way to have a site targeted at the world, without having to clone and duplicate and relaunch. Anyone have experience with this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David-Kley0 -
About link building in 2015?
I don't think we still can use the same link buildings tools of years ago. So, how relevant is this article (from 2009):
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nans
http://moz.com/blog/17-ways-search-engines-judge-the-value-of-a-link Or is there any update? Nancy1 -
Should I Disavow More Links
My SEO website got hit with a very severe penalty about a year ago and it was totally banished from the rankings for all of the money terms like SEO, SEO company and search engine optimisation (before the penalty I ranked in the top 10-15 for all of those phrases, top 3 for SEO company). I was probably hit for being listed in shed loads of paid directories, low quality free directories, footer links in client sites, keyword forum signature links and articles with keyword rich text links. A month or so after I got hit I started trying to clean up my link profile, I got rid of all of the client website links, I changed the link text on the majority of forum signature links and article links, I managed to get rid of about 50 directory links and the ones that I could not get taken down I disavowed - about 150. During that time I sent 2-3 separate reconsideration requests and I got this message each time: "Links to your site violate Google's quality guidelines" After doing all of that work and being rejected I pretty much gave up - things just seemed to get worst, not only was I no longer ranking for the money terms, but all of my blog posts tanked as well. I got my site redesigned and switched to Wordpress - I used 301 redirects and everything but they totally didn't work. My organic traffic went down to less than 50 hits a day - before the penalty I was getting over 300 a day. Then on Saturday just gone, almost exactly a year after I got hit with the penalty I noticed my site ranking in position 23 on Google.co.uk in the UK for the competitive phrase SEO company from being absolutely nowhere and I do mean nowhere. This sign has given me hope and the motivation to get rid of the penalty altogether, update all of my articles, get rid of bad advice in old blog posts and get rid of the rest of the bad links. Thing is that I am nervous to go getting rid of more links and disavowing, what if I do more harm then good? Do you think the penalty has been removed and I should just leave the rest of the bad links or should I continue trying to clean things up? By the way, my website is http://www.seoco.co.uk
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eavesy1 -
How to gain links to this site
Hello, How would you suggest I gain backlinks for bobweikel.com in light of all present and future Google updates? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Off-page SEO and link building
Hi everyone! I work for a marketing company; for one of our clients' sites, we are working with an independent SEO consultant for on-page help (it's a large site) as well as off-page SEO. Following a meeting with the consultant, I had a few red flags with his off-page practices – however, I'm not sure if I'm just inexperienced and this is just "how it works" or if we should shy away from these methods. He plans to: guest blog do press release marketing comment on blogs He does not plan to consult with us in advance regarding the content that is produced, or where it is posted. In addition, he doesn't plan on producing a report of what was posted where. When I asked about these things, he told me they haven't encountered any problems before. I'm not saying it was spam-my, but I'm more not sure if these methods are leaning in the direction of "growing out of date," or the direction of "black-hat, run away, dude." Any thoughts on this would be crazy appreciated! Thanks, Casey
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CaseyDaline0 -
New sub-domain launches thousands of local pages - is it hurting the main domain?
Would greatly appreciate some opinions on this scenario. Domain cruising along for years, top 1-3 rankings for nearly all top non-branded terms and a stronghold for branded searches. Sitelinks prominently shown with branded searches and always ranked #1 for most variations of brand name. Then, sub-domain launches that was over 80,000 local pages - these pages are 90-95% similar with only city and/or state changing to make them appear like unique local pages. Not an uncommon technique but worrisome in a post Panda/Penguin world. These pages are surprisingly NOT captured as duplicate content by the SEOMoz crawler in my campaigns. Additionally about that same time a very aggressive, almost entirely branded paid search campaign was launched that took 20% of the clicks previously going to the main domain in organic to ppc. My concern is this, shortly after this launch of over 80k "local" pages on the sub-domain and the cannibalization of organic clicks through ppc we saw the consistency of sitelinks 6 packs drop to 3 sitelinks if showing at all, including some sub-domains in sitelinks (including the newly launched one) that had never been there before. There's not a clear answer here I'm sure but what are the experts thoughts on this - did a massive launch of highly duplicate pages coupled with a significant decrease in organic CTR for branded terms harm the authority of the main domain (which is only a few dozen pages) causing less sitelinks and less strength as a domain or is all this a coincidence? Or caused by something else we aren't seeing? Thanks for thoughts!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Are there tools out there to determine when a link linked to your site? I want to know when a link farm was done a site.
In Webmaster Tools I discovered that a client of mine with signed up for or hired another company to get links. The links are poor quality and from other countries, so it looks like a link farm was done. I want to know when they links were linked to the site, and not sure how to find that information out. Does anyone know how to find this out?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | StrategicEdgePartners0