How do I know if my SEO person is creating solid links vs spammy links?
-
Please see question
-
Some good suggestions above, try some back link checking tools, check their Domain Authority, etc. However, in my opinion, the best way for you to ensure your SEO person is building good links is to learn the basic difference between a good and bad link and actually check them yourself (the bigger your site and the more links you build, the less feasible this is, but the concept that you should be able to look at the links being built and understand what is a good or a bad link is still applicable). Obviously if you are building massive numbers of links, this is difficult (although there are tools that can help), but if your SEO employee (I assume it is singular) is building good links, they shouldn't be building massive numbers of them unless they are coming organically (through creating content or a product that is so popular that high quality links are appearing without traditional link building). Also, how are you measuring success? Ranking growth? Number of links? Quality of links? If you ask your SEO person to report on the links being built and ask he/she to include measures like Domain Authority, Page Authority, etc and then just try and audit the links periodically, you'll start to learn enough about SEO to measure their performance yourself (seriously, try Googling "audit my back links," there's some great tools out there, as well as reasonably simple explanations of the major things to look out for.
I also agree with those mentioning that outsourcing SEO is a dangerous (if somewhat necessary) strategy. In my opinion, learning about SEO basics is one of the single most valuable things a small business owner can do, since it will both improve your ability to market online, as well as protect you against hiring a bad employee.
-
SEO is too important for the small business owner to outsource it to anyone. Learn to do SEO yourself and you won't have to worry about all these shady practitioners.
-
I've never used LinkDetox, like trung.ngo mentions below but if they have a free version where you can just see if your backlink profile looks spammy to them at least you'd have one opinion on the matter. How many links are you looking to have reviewed?
-
You can hire someone, but you need to trust that they'll do a good job reviewing.
Have you asked your current SEO for a list of links that have been built?
-
You can check out http://www.linkdetox.com/. It's a link auditing tool that will at least at a high level provide some information about whether or not there are spammy links pointing to your site. I'd recommend reviewing the "toxic" links that they report back on manually though to determine if they're actually spammy links or not.
-
Is there a third party that can review the links for me?
-
This all depends on your purpose for SEO. Are you trying to rank well or are you trying to draw referral traffic through these links? Personally, I would shoot for the latter. Once you have your purpose down you should be able to work with your SEO and have them be totally transparent with you about the links they are building for you. If they aren't transparent with you or they give you excuses as to why they can't show you the links they have built that should be a potential red flag for you.
As for determining whether a link is quality or not, that really depends on who's eye is on it. I like to take a look at the websites that I have links on and determine if the site is real first off, then I ask myself if this is the type of site that people I care about are on. That's not to say that I don't have a few links on random sites that aren't necessarily spammy, but aren't really that quality either. What really matters is that you have a variation of links to your site.
It's ok to have a bunch of semi-quality links to your site, just make sure that you have more quality links that actually generate traffic and eyeballs. These are the links that are going to get you visitors and get you bumped up in the rankings. Just have a healthy diet of various links across the web. I hope this helps.
-
The first question I'd ask is where are you getting links from? If the sites are not relevant to your business or the article/page in which the link exists is not relevant to your business, I would say it's time to reevaluate your relationship with said consultant. I would also ask the SEO if they're requesting specific anchor text or not? I'd opt for no specific anchor text requests to keep the links more editorial in nature--having too much specific anchor text can get you in trouble with algorithm filters like Penguin.
Hope that helps you get started in evaluating your links!
-Trung
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
-
Entities and SEO
How do you find the correct words (entities) to explain an entity ? The words (entities) that go together within a sentence seem to be based on the specific corpus (the keyword you want to rank ) and when they are million of results it seems impossible to find what word / entity is going to explain the entity / concept I want to explain. It seems that I got a better chance at the lottery 🙂 a
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Do you have any advice or software that could parse and find the words that co-occure the most often out of millions of results !! Thank you,0 -
Weird Site is linking to our site and links appears to be broken
I have got a lot of weird links indexed from this page: http://kzs.uere.info/files/images/dining-table-and-2-upholstered-chairs.html When clicking the link it shows 404. Also, the spam score is huge. What do you guys suggest to do with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Miniorek
Could it be done by somebody to get our rankings down or domain penalized? Best Regards
Mike & Alex0 -
Different URL structure Desktop VS Mobile Regarding SEO when building a new seperate mobile site
Hi I have a old OScommerce webshop, that i will keep for now, but i have build a complete new mobile site for mobile devices, but it has another url structure. Can i launch this site without any problems when its Google Mobile Search Engine that index the mobile site, and then just make the neccesary rel alternate tags for the desktop site for the product pages and main categories that i can. There will be some differences in the urls i cant make a alternate for.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | noerdar0 -
CDN for SEO (or not)?
Does CDN impact on SEO or not? There seems conflicting ideas as to whether they impact positively or negatively, I realise that if the page loads quicker this is a good thing for SEO and usability of course. Does Google see CDN as just cheating and a get-around for not doing the work from the ground up and using good hosting etc? Do you have any direct experience? All constructive input much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
Lower quality new domain link vs higher quality repeat domain link
First time poster here with a dilemma that head scratching and spreadsheets can't solve! I'm trying to work out whether to focus on getting links from new domains or to nurture relationships with the bigger sites in our business and get more links. Of the two links below which does the community here think would be more valuable a signal to Google? Both would be links from within relevant text/post copy. Link 1. Site DA 30. No links currently from this domain. Link 2. Site DA 60. Many links over last 12 months already from this domain. I suspect link 1 but given the enormous disparity in ranking power am I correct?! Thanks for any considered opinions out there! Matthew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?
Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true? And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page. Thank you, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Advice on further SEO
I am frustrated by a lack of progress for a major keyword I want to rank for. I have made several pages, optimized with Onpage and even a whole site but I can't seem to get my ratings up. I am hoping somone can take a look at my pages and efforts and offer me some advice... Keyword is "National Currency" One site is devoted to this keyword: NationalCurrencyValues This site is ranked 30th and is down 9... and this page on another site is devoted to the same keyword ranked 26th is: http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/National-Currency.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Increasing Internal Links But Avoiding a Link Farm
I'm looking to create a page about Widgets and all of the more specific names for Widgets we sell: ABC Brand Widgets, XYZ Brand Widgets, Big Widgets, Small Widgets, Green Widgets, Blue Widgets, etc. I'd like my Widget page to give a brief explanation about each kind of Widget with a link deeper into my site that gives more detail and allows you to purchase. The problem is I have a lot of Widgets and this could get messy: ABC Green Widgets, Small XYZ Widgets, many combinations. I can see my Widget page teetering on being a link farm if I start throwing in all of these combos. So where should I stop? How much do I do? I've read more than 100 links on a page being considered a link farm, is that a hardline number or a general guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10