Inbound external links

[singingtelegramsuk]

Hi I have a question about inbound external links

The good news is that I have 135 inbound links showing up in open site explorer, where my main competitor has 4

The bad news is that these are not the links that I have been building myself.

The links are sometimes in a foreign language, rarely in an entertainment category, which my website is, and there seems no way to add a link on the page.

I did buy some links when I first started out, but I was advised not to do it again

But these are clearly working despite their apparent lack of value

Then the question is where are my web directory listings, social bookmarks, social media content and web 2.0 articles, and the links I found my competitor had, that I was able to add my own website on, I have manually grafted for these links,  have I been wasting my time with all of these?.

[singingtelegramsuk]

Ah thank you the webmaster tools list reads much more healthier, so that's good.

The link I was talking about was in the hotfrog directory, in the correct category, with photos and video too, and lots of unique text I wrote about my products and services and it shows up in webmaster tools too

thanks for answering

[DennisSeymour]

Hi!

OSE doesn't show them because it hasn't indexed those yet for your site. You can check them in your webmaster tools. They are probably there.

They dont have to show in OSE to mean that the link is there so dont worry about it.

Anyway, you still need to check the quality of the link. It doesnt always mean that if your competitor has it, then you need to have it as well so do take care with those links.

[Hutch42]

Just because you are ranking does not mean it is due to the links you bought, there are many factors that go into why your site will rank, not just links.  If those links are spammy you will want to have them removed, either by contacting the sites (first thing) or if that does not work using Google's disavow tool.

You should keep up your content development and gaining links by providing quality moving forward.  If you focus on having content worth linking to, you will find that links come naturally and people are more prone to come to your site as they see the value of the content you are providing.