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
-
Poor internal linking?
Hi guys, Have a large e-commerce site 10,000 pages as a client and they are currently not getting much organic traffic to their level 3 sub-category pages, the URLs are like: https://www.domain.com.au/category/s...-category-type These pages have been on-page optimised, category content added, yet hardly any traffic. However the site level 1, level 2 pages do quite well. So this suggests this might be an internal linking issue? The site is definitely not penalized and as enough authority for these level 3 pages to rank. Any ideas would be very much appreciated! Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
Link building… how to get high rewarding links?
Hi Guys, I have a few people whom I have built relationships up in my industry with that would like to link to my site. Is there any particular things I need to be mindful of before having them link to me? I'm just mindful of the unknown. Also, which links to use etc? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Joomla SEO
With so many articles on the web talking about how difficult Joomla is to work with in regards to SEO, I'm curious as to what techniques / changes you guys make when using Joomla with your SEO / inbound practices? Any extensions that you love? An extensions that you hate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougHoltOnline0 -
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 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
Redirection - Seo trick?
Hi, After analyzing the site I found several Redirections of exact match domains. With different domain name extensions. Is Seo trick? Is the second website which i fond that is using this technique. Can anyone gives more details? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Competing with Spammy Links
One of my client's leading competitors is well stacked in terms of rank/authority. PA: 61, DA: 53. However, in OSE I estimate that +/- of all links on the first page are from sites such as "http://www.shopp011.freedownloadhub.com/Link-Exchange/browse.php?id=17", "http://www.shopp002.freedownloadhub.com/Link-Exchange/browse.php?id=17", "http://www.shopp029.freedownloadhub.com/Link-Exchange/browse.php?id=17". Personally, I would consider this to be a little spammy. However, I admit that I could be wrong. What's the best approach when trying to take on a competitor like this? Wait it out and tell my client to keep blogging/selling as per the schedule until Google pics up on these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShippingContainer0 -
Dynamic Links vs Static Links
There are under 100 pages that we are trying to rank for and we'd like to flatten our site architecture to give them more link juice. One of the methods that is currently in place now is a widget that dynamically links to these pages based on page popularity...the list of links could change day to day. We are thinking of redesigning the page to become more static, as we believe it's better for link juice to flow to those pages reliably than dynamically. Before we do so, we need a second opinion.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RBA0