Can links be hidden?
-
I was wondering if anyone can help me with some advice on agency work.
We have just employed a new SEO agency to conduct work on one of our websites. I took a look on OSE and GWT to see if we had any new links since the agency started working (1 month ago) but there's was nothing new.
When l asked for an update as to what link building efforts had been completed last month, l was told they don't give out a list of links as it could compromise the agencies techniques. They told me that they use software to hide links form link aggregators so that our competitors don't know what we are doing.
Can anybody confirm that such software exists or is this agency just taking us for a ride? If there is such a software, could this not hinder what links the search engines could see?
Any comments would be greatly appreciated.
-
If you are paying a company to build links for you, and they refuse to show you the links they have built I would be very weary. Tell them you can't pay them if you cannot see that the work has been completed.
-
Still, I think the same thing rings true. You can totally hide links from OSE, Majestic, and Hrefs if you want. There are really only two ways to do it though, you either own the link network where you are posting the links, or the link network is expressly for this purpose and they make it known that they hide from these tools. (Make it known as in the sense of people that are buying the links)
There was a site that kept emailing me a while back, I cannot think of the name of it for the life of me, but they basically sold links on PR ranked sites. I bit and I looked into it, just to expand my knowledge on the area, but it was like $6-12 for a pr1 page and like $30-45 for a pr 4 page. I am pretty sure they went up to pr 7 or 8 for like 600 or 800 a month. But one thing they did have somewhere on their site was that they hid rogerbot and what ever bots the other guys use. Actually I think the only bot they allowed was google bot. It was stuck somewhere in their terms, I did a fake account sign up like I wanted to sell links on pages, just to see what it was about.
-
You might also do a google search, limiting it to the last month, for your business name or keyphrases you've asked them to build, and see what that may turn up on sites.
-
One thing to do would be to look in your analytics software for traffic coming from referring sites
Traffic from sites you haven't seen before? Might be your link builders, and in that case you can check out the links.
No traffic? Then you can ask why the sites with links weren't relevant enough to get any traffic.
Legit agencies won't hide what links the help you earn.
-
I think the OP is asking about software that hides the links from places like OSE and Majestic, rather than software that creates links.
-
Such software does exist in a sense. There are automated SEO tools that can do this, like I said before, in a sense. What they do is primarily comment spam and forum spam. Some companies have their own link networks set up, and even others use sites that you can buy links on.
If I were you I would demand a list of links and if they did not give them to you I would RUN not walk away from them.
No tools is 100% accurate in finding all of the links created, if it were, they would branch it into a search engine. That being said, I give my clients a list of links that I built at the end of the month. Moz sometimes does not pick them up yet and it gives them something to click on and see I actually did my job, if it was link building I was doing. Some of the local citation sites are really not indexed quickly by Moz I have found, at the same time providing a link really removes any question of what I have done.
In the past links were a one way street, the more you had, the better off your site. Now things have changed. Links are a two way street now, I would almost relate it to negative link juice.
The short and sweet of it is, I would get a list from them, and if they do not give a list I would can them.
-
Well, you can block crawlers in robots.txt, though that's certainly not a special software.
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
-
Value of no-follow links
I'm curious to understand roughly how much % of value a no-follow link has in building authority relative to a do-follow link? I understand that Google seems consistently and growingly focused on value - ie. is the link valuable in growing the business, irregardless of SEO - and perhaps therefore the no-follow / do-follow distinction is becoming a more unnecessary dichotomy. How does Google look at do-follow vs no-follow links? And how much weight now is really given to one compared to the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Linking to External Websites?
Is it good to link external websites from every page. Since, the on-page grader shows there should be one link pointing to an external source. I have a website that can point to an external website from every page using the brand name of the specific site like deal sites do have. Is it worth having external link on every page, of-course with a no-follow tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Should I remove all vendor links (link farm concerns)?
I have a web site that has been around for a long time. The industry we serve includes many, many small vendors and - back in the day - we decided to allow those vendors to submit their details, including a link to their own web site, for inclusion on our pages. These vendor listings were presented in location (state) pages as well as more granular pages within our industry (we called them "topics). I don't think it's important any more but 100% of the vendors listed were submitted by the vendors themselves, rather than us "hunting down" links for inclusion or automating this in any way. Some of the vendors (I'd guess maybe 10-15%) link back to us but many of these sites are mom-and-pop sites and would have extremely low authority. Today the list of vendors is in the thousands (US only). But the database is old and not maintained in any meaningful way. We have many broken links and I believe, rightly or wrongly, we are considered a link farm by the search engines. The pages on which these vendors are listed use dynamic URLs of the form: \vendors<state>-<topic>. The combination of states and topics means we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage 🙂 So, not good.</topic></state> We understand that this model is broken. Our plan is to simply remove these pages (with the list of vendors) from our site. That's a simple fix but I want to be sure we're not doing anything wring here, from an SEO perspective. Is this as simple as that - just removing these page? How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs? For example, I could spend effort making sure that \vendors\California- <topic>(and for all states) goes to a general "topic" page (which still has relevance, but won't have any vendors listed)</topic> I know there is no distinct answer to this, but what expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO? Anyway, before I go down this path I thought I'd check here in case I miss something. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Different Hosting Accounts for Linking?
I have several different sites which link to each other (for valid reasons...sister companies etc). Would it be better if these were hosted from different web hosting firms? And if they are hosted by the same hosting company would it be better if they had different accounts and different IP addresses? Not sure I understand C blocks etc. Any tutorial on here about that? I wouls assume it would look better to Google if the links were not from the same IP address. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ebtec0 -
Internal Linking for better seo
On our site http://villasdiani.com we have a blog called Kenya news, which is a category where we regular post articles. I am always creating external links to the category Kenya news so as it would pass juice to the posts in it and the posts have back links to category. There are no internal links among posts in the category. As our main target is to rent beach villas and boutique hotels, each of that posts in the category Kenya news has only a link either to category with beach villas or to category with boutique hotels. My question is, if this is good practice?, is it just not too much links going to categories to beach villas and boutique hotels form the Kenya news?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca1
Thank you very much for any thoughts Iris0 -
What To Do With Too Many Links?
We have four pages that have over 100 links (danger, danger from what I gather), but they're not spammy footer links. They are FAQ videos for our four main areas of practice. Does that make a difference? If not, should I just take half the questions on each page and make four additional pages? That strikes me as a worse UX, but I don't want to get penalized either. Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Widget Links Still Acceptable?
I own a funny video site that is getting about 1-4 of it's videos embedded on various sites daily. In todays form, is widget link still acceptable? This would show up under the video embed. Example: Funny Dog Video From Site Brand Or is it best nowadays to just have Video Provided By Site Brand
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | superlordme0 -
What is your onsite linking strategy?
So there are a few different routes to take when you're SEOing your site. My quest is to determine which is the best way to approach this. Let's use a real life example of a product. It's project management software, online collaboration software, employee scheduling tool, business process streamlining tool, client management tool and task/to do manager. It works for virtually any industry. I've created my keyword document and it's HUGE. I've created my wireframe with related keyphrases in buckets. Each one of the example keyphrases listed above have slight variations then a whole list of long tails. I have a few options as I see it: Create site sections within the main site that focus on each (This can make the site look slightly sloppy and categories would have to be masked so it doesn't appear spammy) Create a page in the blog relevant to each keyphrase and link all subsequent blog posts within that keyphrase family directly to that blog post (This seems like my best option) and have cta's or conversion mechanisms on this page Link all keyphrases to the home page (Seems like a terrible idea) Not sure if I answered my own question here, but I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cmdsonline0