Link building - BBB, high quality associations and also botw.org

[BobGW]

Hello,

We would like to gain some quality links to compete with the competition.

We already have about 70 backlinks.

We are an eCommerce site.

We are thinking of adding the following links:

BBB online

2 high quality PR5 associations in our niche (one is $500 and the other is $200)

A couple of less expensive but still quality partner listings, probably in the $40-100 range

botw.org

For current and future Google standards, do you think these will improve things? Do you see anything wrong with adding these?

We want a clean link profile for as far into the future as possible.

Thanks.

[BobGW]

Thanks Jane,

That makes everything except possibly the BBB not any good. Glad to know. That pretty much leaves us with content marketing. What's your opinion on the best online guides for developing content marketing in an industry where it's tough to find article niches, i.e. nobody links to the content in our niche.

Thanks, I'll close this soon.

Bob

[JaneCopland]

I would stay away from botw.org to be honest - your time and money are better invested elsewhere than with traditional directories, even well-known ones. Google is well aware of how entries are made into directories like this and are perfectly capable of disregarding the authority that would otherwise be passed here. Suffice to say, I am not a fan of using directories for SEO purposes anymore at all.

Similar can go for the BBB but if you are comfortable that you are also doing this for visibility purposes, then the sole purpose is not SEO.

Other partnerships and associations can send good authority to your site, but be aware that if you are "paying for a link", Google may also be aware that the paid link opportunity exists and disregard / penalise it accordingly. What I mean to say is that any link you can easily find the payment terms for, Google can easily find the payment terms as well. Google would say that paid links should all be nofollowed (in which case, no problem, not no SEO benefit either). Again, this isn't my personal view on what an ideal web looks like, it's what Google regards as "how you should link."