Partner links - is this bad?
-
I have been looking at whys to get natural links, another SEO company said that instead of doing Guest Blog Posts there now adding single links to partner pages on websites which have a follow link. To me this sounds like basically a links page rebadged as a partners page. Is this a dangerous practice? or does this carry some weight with the search engines?
-
The Google quality guidelines say that "excessive" creation of partner pages for the purpose of cross linking is against the guidelines. But, they don't tell us what constitutes excessive.
This is not always a bad idea. Here are some criteria I would use to make this decision:
-Would having a page like this actually be good for your readers/clients to use? Or does it just exist for search engines. For example, if you are a realtor, having a resource page to list local home inspectors, mortgage brokers, etc. is a good idea and being listed on their resource pages is probably ok. But, if that page contained mostly links to realtors in other cities and unrelated businesses like local casinos or payday loans companies or car insurance businesses then you'd start to think that this page was created just for links.
-What is the quality like on the pages that are linking to you? Do they look like they were set up just for links?
-Avoid using exact match anchor text. If your resource page contains links to Realtor in Seattle and Best Home Inspector in New York then that's a sign that it's set up for SEO purposes.
-
Is it relevant to the post? If not, a good site would remove the link.
-
I dont think I would accept it. First, you have no idea of the history behind that domain. Could be that they spam the daylights out of people, or have a questionable backlink strategy. If their domain is compromised or gets in trouble in the future, it could hurt you.
Instead of posting your articles and content on someone else's site and building their page count and relevance, spend the time posting on your own. Get the backlinks you seek by submitting your articles and content to trusted sources, and get people to link to you. This can be time consuming and difficult, but ultimately much more rewarding. (both in pride and seo)
Best case scenerio, if they have a great domain history and its not spammy, I woud still look at the long term goal of building up your own content, on your site.
-
Don't do it. Create original, good content and get people to legitimately link to it because they place such a high value on it.
-
A few which are considered "natural" are perfectly fine if there is "relevance." However excessive link exchanges "you link to me, and I'll link to you" or partner pages for the sake of cross linking in not good and will get you in trouble with the Google Police.
My advice, keep it natural.
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
-
Link juice - What could be the reason for our bad internal page Page Authority
So OK we have a domain authority currently of 41, we are well established but unfortunately we don't have any pages with PA. I have a fair idea of why this is the case but want to get some other opinions before I form my strategy. 1.It appears our internal link structure is not great and is not very organised 2. It appears we have 58 links going externally on some pages. Some of these external links are social media icons in the footer which are followed. Is there any other factors I should be aware of when building PA on some of my inner pages. Any Thoughts would be appreciated.
Link Building | | CAQ1 -
How many links per week/month should a link building campaign acquire?
I am running a linkbuilding campaign for my company. I am mostly focusing on guest blogging opportunities and responding to emails from HARO. How many links would I have to acquire each week or month to be considered doing a good job over a 6 month or a year time period? Thank you,
Link Building | | fersu0 -
Link removel
When removing links should I be worried about bad links from websites that have already been deindexd from Google or should I think that since it is not in these index any more it cant do harm?
Link Building | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Buy links
I know that many of you are against the whole thing with buying links. Your feelings put aside. Will it be better for my site to buy links or even do link exchange? Haven´t the crawlers been thought by now how to find these untrue links? I have read somewhere that the stop after 100 links, aren´t they smarter than that?
Link Building | | mato0 -
Why does my website have 2,000+ links, but only 16 linking root domains?
Why does my website have 2,000+ links, but only 16 linking root domains?
Link Building | | thestudio40 -
Link value
Hi I have some links from blogs to our ecom website. My question is if anyone knows what happens if you have several different blogs on .blogspot linking in to you. Does that make them loose value because they are on the same domain? I can probably quite easily have 5-10 blogs on blogspot all with PA of 35-40 link in to us. Is it worth striving for or should i strive to get blogs that have their own domain to link into us instead ? Or equally important ? Dan Lærum
Link Building | | danlae1 -
Link Placement and Trust
Hey all I am looking at a new SEO campaign and am just starting to have a look at the competition and their links. This is a client in the website design industry who operates in a given city in the UK. Taking a quick look, the competition seems well established and there is plenty of companies ranking on the first page for all of the key terms. When I start to dig a little deeper though it gets a little more interesting and this maybe relatively unique to this industry but I think it also applies to spam links and any company that supplies white label website based services. Basically, the competition have lots of links. I have reviewed the top 10 competing sites across various terms and there is no shortage of links and lots of anchor text variations. Here is the stats from open site explorer for the one site that commonly comes up again and again. Page Level 61 - Page Authority 6.78 - mozRank 6.13 - mozTrust 30,144 - Total Links 30,064 - External Followed Links 33 - Internal Followed Links 325 - Linking Root Domains Domain Level 53 - Domain Authority 5.13 - Domain mozRank 5.10 - Domain mozTrust 47,969 - Total Links 44,788 - External Followed Links So, this gives us lots of nice metrics and the new deep analysis tool in keyword research easily allows us to get some more data on what exactly is driving the ranking of this site and the others who all rank in a similar way. Link Quality This is where it gets a bit more interesting and this applies to all the sites in the first ten results for the various keywords we are interested in (general keywords for the homepage at this stage). The links are primarily domain wide and in the footer. They are things like: website designed by x
Link Building | | Marcus_Miller
web design by x
website design
website design in <area name="">
<area name=""> website design
(you get the picture) Quality vs Quantity So, whilst the competitors have lots of links, from a reasonable number of sites, they are pretty much all site wide footer links. This is fairly clear when we look at total links 30,000 from only 300 sites. My thinking here is that the quality of these links is not that great: poorly positioned on the page domain wide narrow anchor text and in some cases no 'click to visit' type links Content These sites are pretty much all dull as hell. Service pages, clients, jobs done, maybe a case study but really, nothing I would really class as interesting (hence only links from their clients sites hey). So, my question is Has anyone built a campaign with quality vs quantity? Do you have any tips, experience or feedback? Our strategy will be built around great content, promotion of that content and much more (not explored that) but at the foundation it will be a content and promotion strategy. Really, if I break it down, I am looking at the above as 300 links, from the footers of various sites. If we were to get 300 links from quality sources and then bulk it out with some similar footer style links from the clients clients (they are not 100% keen on this so we may not go that route yet) then... these established big boys really should not be too difficult to topple in my mind given enough time, content and effort. What are your thoughts people? Anyone conducted a quality vs quantity campaign like this? Any feedback? Cheers
Marcus P.S. SEOMoz - is there any chance that a link trust or quality metric could be built into the tools at some point in the future as sheer volume, is not always the best indicator and as times goes on I would imagine that to be even more true.0