Why do the best ranking websites not seem to follow SEO best practice, particularly in terms of link building?
-
I work for an online retailer, which predominantly sells perfume products. In recent months, we have been spending more and more time on SEO, particularly in terms of improving our content, and as part of our strategy we have been working with beauty bloggers in particular (independent reviews, articles etc) to increase the number of links to our website.
Whilst we’ve seen steady improvements, we are concerned that some of the key words/phrases we are targeting still aren’t ranking as high as we would like. Some weeks they will move up a few places, but more often than not, they will then move back down.
We are more frustrated as we are seeing other websites, which are much poorer in terms of quality content, number of products, etc., ranking quite highly for these terms. From analysing these sites, it seems they are achieving their high ranking from having a considerable number of what appear to be poor quality links.
We have been warned countless times to avoid link farms, etc., yet these sites have 100s even 1000s of links coming from suspect sites and it isn’t doing them any harm.
Recently, we noticed a lot of our competitors are receiving links from websites such as LinkPartners. When we checked the website, we could see that whilst it appears to be a fairly SPAMMY website, its domain authority (67) is actually quite high.
Should we base our decision about whether or not to place a link somewhere solely on how high their domain authority is, i.e. would it be more beneficial to us to have a link with what appears to be a link farm if their domain authority is high, than what appears to be a fantastic independent beauty blog with a low domain authority? Or should we avoid these sites whatever the circumstances?
It’s slightly confusing for us as we are being warned about placing links on websites as google is apparently going to penalise us for it, but then we see our rival sites doing well by simply placing links everywhere they can.
-
You can always inform Google about it : https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1
-
Thanks for your replies, Chris and Amie.
We definitely don’t want to jeopardise the brand in the long-term, hence we’ve done a lot of research into SEO to make sure we are following best practice. I guess we are just a little unsure as to what would be classified as a spammy link and what wouldn’t be given we aren’t seeing other sites being penalised for having numerous links from sites that appear on the surface as fairly dodgy.
For example, are websites which offer free links to be avoided also, or is it primarily the ones that require payment to feature that should be of concern? We’ve come across a few websites which appear to be fairly poor given the fact they simply feature a high number of links and a short amount of info about each site, but they don’t require payment to feature with them, and their Domain Authority is quite high (over 65 in some cases)... We were of the understanding that if a website has a high Domain Authority then Google would see it as a quality site, and subsequently a quality link, but given the perceptions of quality and what we’ve read, we feel like we should avoid them...
On those lines, we are concerned that whilst we are essentially building up organic links from beauty bloggers, who have quality sites and are producing good, detailed features, because their DA is quite low (10s), we aren’t actually going to see much benefit from these in terms of SEO... Would we be better off paying a large amount to get our organisation on a major website and having that one link, than having a 100 links from low-level sites...
Would it would be better for us to trade off our MozTrust (which is quite high currently, consistently in the 5s) to increase our MozRank (currently in the 3s) and bring a bit of parity (i.e. if our MozTrust drops to 4 but our MozRank rises to 4, would we be more likely to see an improvement without causing much damage as they are both still relatively high?)...
Also, how soon after we make changes should we expect to see a reflection in terms of moving up the search engine results page? We’ve made a lot of changes to our Meta titles, descriptions, updated our onsite content, added our own blog posts, as well as having outside beauty bloggers linking to us, but we haven’t seen the big jumps we would have hoped for.
We obviously want to make sure we give it the time to have an impact; but on the other hand, we don’t want to keep heading down a path that isn’t working for too long as it obviously involves a lot of time/resources.
-
Hi,
You're right, it's a pig to watch a competitor who has done bad linking constantly out-perform you.
However, as Chris says, you need to balance the risk against the reward - if it doesn't matter to you that at some point (dunno when) your site will get hit by an update then, knock yourself out with links. But, if you want to protect your brand and website then you shouldn't copy your competition by following their lead with spammy links.
Instead build links for traffic. Find out how and where your target audience hangs out online and look at ways your domain/products can be put in front of them (which, to be fair, you've started with the reviews etc). Use analytics to determine how well these referral links convert and refine your strategy from that (keep doing what affects the bottom line and drop what doesn't)
There are loads of online opportunities out there that don't rely on first place listings. Yes, these help (I'm an SEO - of course I'd say strong listings help!!!) but they are not the be-all-and-end-all. Build relationships, get in front of your target customers and target the longtail with blogs, PR and other content. Use social media if it's where your target customers are.
Do what you can to improve your site - this is something you control. (BTW, I haven't seen it, I'm NOT suggesting it's in a bad way or anything). Look at your engagement metrics - time on site, bounce, pages/session - get these to improve and you should find your site starts to pick up. It's amazing what can be done just by improving these metrics.
That's how you succeed, and one day (dunno when!) you'll find that because you have a fantastic website (that converts!) and have built up a strong positive reputation you out perform your competition without needing all those spammy links.
Good luck, and don't give up!
Best wishes,
Amelia
-
I know the frustration but remember they never stay at the top, it's always good to look at it this way around -
if you were to do as you said and go down the black hat route that's fine you might rank for sometime but at some point you will get hit with a penalty its not an if but a when. When it does happen you will drop off the radar, you will loose money and it will take months to recover and even then one wrong move and your in more trouble. So can you afford to loose business for a few months for the sake of one month of good business?
I know its easy to talk about good links and watch competitors rank above you but as long as your constantly moving up your on the right path, on top of that your doing out reach with bloggers which is a great way to build your brand and then you might find people looking for you direct.
In short - you have to asset the risk and can you afford to loose, because if you do it will hurt.
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 Building
I have a question as competitor made backlinks on longtail keywords and just for one specific post, If I wanna rank in Google SERP, then should I have to do the same strategy as my competitor did. or can I use just my own keywords to get rank?
Link Building | | aamirmurtaza670 -
At What Point Are We Doing Too Much Link Building?
Hello Mozzers! This is a question that has been gnawing at the back of my mind as I learn more and more about link building. Historically, we have offered scaling package sizes with larger numbers of backlinks hand-built each month. We do this so our packages are very tangible for our clients. Our packages range from 15-100 backlinks each month. As I learn more about how to build links PROPERLY I am finding it next to impossible to keep up. I feel like we are definitely going the wrong direction in that regard. What are some of your thoughts on this? Thank you in advance for your valuable advice and support, Moz community!
Link Building | | ChoChauRice0 -
What's the best seo link building company after May 2013?
Which is the best and most trustworthy seo company if I want to outsource my link building after being severely hit by the google penguin 4 update?
Link Building | | naimelhajj0 -
No Follow Links
On my campaign report from SEOmoz I have noticed that all my 3 competitors have 99% followed links versus 1% no-followed links. Should I do the same? How can I check were are the no-follow links on my site? I have found some tool online but it shows me that there are only 2 no-follow links on my website which are both www.cloudflare.com while SEOmoz report shows me that I have 1031...where can i view this links?
Link Building | | VillasDiani0 -
Build links to home page or internal to rank internal pages?
I understand that naturally people link to the home page and internal pages - probably the home page more often than not. In order to build a natural looking link profile I also understand that I need a variety of anchor text, brand and url links. Should I be building links mainly to the home page with only a few to internal pages? Ultimately I want my internal pages to rank for specific terms so in my head it makes sense to concentrate my link building effort to internal pages but that would seem unnatural to google I'm sure. For arguments sake if I only built links to the home page with a mix of the anchor texts described above would these internal pages rank eventually anyway as 'link juice' flows throughout the site? Or is it an absolute must to build some links to internal pages. Could a page rank for a keyword without having any links to the site with the keyword anchor text (simply url links) based on the page title/content? Also what is a good ratio of home page to internal links? I would assume around 10:1? A lot of questions I know but I'm confused as to what will be the best strategy.
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Looking to outsource some of our link building...
Hi Everyone, We are a small online marketing firm in the UK and we are starting to hit a bit of a bottleneck in terms of the resources that we have that can be devoted to link building. As a result, we need to outsource the link building for some of our clients (around 10). Obviously, we only want ethical, white hat link building to take place and it really is a focus on quality rather than quantity. As you can imagine, being a fairly small firm, we also have a very limited budget! We would ideally like to work with UK link builders but would definitely look at overseas partnerships if it worked out more cost effective and the standard of the link building meets our standards. Just so that I'm not wasting anyone's time, we have a budget of around £200-300 for this (I know, its a very limited budget!). I understand that with this budget comes limitations so we would be more than willing at looking at some stripped down packages (for example, we already have in-house bloggers, so we wouldn't need that). Let me know if you are interested or if you would be able to recommend anyone to me. It would be a great help. Matt
Link Building | | MatthewBarby
Wow Internet
matt@wowinternet.net0 -
Squidoo for link building?
Hello Mozzers I'm thinking about using squidoo as a part of my link building. I've never used squidoo before, I'd love to hear from Mozzers using sqidoo for link building and traffic generation.
Link Building | | Thommas0 -
How to do SEO for catalog websites?
Hi, I am just start to build 10 wordpress based ecommerce website cataloges. It is optimised and quick, but what should I do more? Link building? Build relevant category structure and start to register websites? I know both of them has to be unique. Thanks! Best regards,
Link Building | | Netkreativ
Misi0