Do you make member profiles on sites that have public member profile listings?
-
Or do you find that this takes more time than it is worth? I mean there are literally thousands of websites that allow you to signup and create a public profile and drop your link in there. But is this really worth the efforts?
Would like to hear from some people on both sides of the argument, as i am sure there are people who do this, and also people who don't on here.
-
then why do other SEOers do it so much?
Just sayin my philosophy... You don't have to agree... and I hope that most people don't agree.
You will not defeat a competitor by mimicing his strategies. You defeat them by doing something more effective. Keep in mind, there are only ten positions on the first page of Google for any given keyword and EVERYONE ELSE ranks lower.
-
then why do other SEOers do it so much? it must work if people do it this much, look at any of these for example. You will find literally thousands of fake profiles on each, and this is just a tiny microscopic subsection of what is out there.
http://cartthrob.com/forums/member_profile/memberlist
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/forums/observer/memberlist
http://ee.twitchfilm.net/site/forums/member/memberlist
http://www.crossfitbrandx.com/index.php/forums/member/memberlist
http://www.andrewjohnstonmusic.com/forum/member/memberlist
http://www.miniaturewargaming.com/index.php/forums/gamers/memberlist
http://www.trakax.com/software/forum/member/memberlist
http://www.realmacsoftware.com/forums/index.php/forums/member/memberlist
http://www.asbcla.org/forums/member/memberlist
http://www.cbi.com/member/memberlist -
My general rule of thumb is that if I can create a link quite easily myself then it's likely not going to be valuable.
So, if I can easily sign up for a profile on a site and create a link back to my site quickly it's likely not going to be that helpful.
With that being said, if I genuinely want to be a member of that website then I'll definitely set up a profile and take advantage of the link back. It's not going to hurt! But I wouldn't put in special effort to create profiles on sites that I really don't care about.
-
What about sites other than forums? like what about our links here on our SEOMoz profiles?
-
I don't do it.
Many of these links are nofollowed.
Many of them that are followed have very few (if any) links into them if you are not an active participant in the site, making posts and comments.
I believe that search engines can recognize these types of links if they want to and a backlink profile filled with them would look like a desperate manipulation attempt instead of a worthwhile site.
I think that my time is better spent on content. One genuine link into an article would be worth a ton of profile links on the rear ends of forums.
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
-
What will the SECOND link from a site do for me
Say I have an opportunity to get another link from a high authority site that has already linked an important article from me (a page I REALLY want to rank well). Now a month later, they are interviewing me and asking what I'd like to link. I have plenty of good content I can offer, but I really want that page they already linked to to climb a bit in the rankings. So my question is, how is that second link best spent? Would linking to the same page give it a boost? Or does Google see it as "oh. Another link from the same domain. Yippee." Would that link do more for a different page on my site at this point?
Link Building | | cbrant7770 -
Penalty? NoFollowed Link Profile
Could an abnormal ratio of nofollow links cause a drop in rankings? Our "Followed Linking Root Domains vs. NoFollowed Linking Root Domains" is 50/50... while our competitors have an average ratio of 90/10. The reason for our abnormal ratio is that: A) We're a relatively new site, with a small link profile so far. B) We have a WordPress plugin that allows other publishers to add our content to their site (which has a nofollow backlink included). And, as a followup question... if we removed the nofollow backlink completely, but still left the branded text there... could we potentially still benefit from it (our brand name being near targeted keywords that appear in the plugin content)?
Link Building | | JABacchetta0 -
Www.thousandreasons.org - is this an article submitting site?
Hey Guys I was viewing my competitors back-links and I noted that he had a link to www.thousandreasons.org I was somewhat baffled as this site pertains predominantly to USA Newspapers. Can someone please confirm if this is an Article Submission Site?
Link Building | | Giorgio680 -
Host a wordpress blog as a folder or external site?
I've been speaking to our developers as I want to introduce a blog. My intention is to host the blog as part of our existing site, so the url becomes www.example.com/blog I have a personal wordpress blog and I love it, the amount of plugins, themes and ease of use makes it a fantastic platform. I spoke to my developers and requested if they could install Wordpress within a folder of our existing website. This gives me control to do plugins, custom themes etc. Straight forward I thought, but I didn't get a straight forward reply. They went on that it would require two linux php servers, a load balancer between them, and set up and configuration would take 5 days. Their day rates are high, so 5 days is a lot of money. This got me thinking, what if I hosted it externally and linked from our website, so the blog URL would be www.myblog.com This gives me the power to have a wordpress blog for cheap and use all the fantasic plugins to optimise the site (Yoast, Schema plugins etc). I know for SEO, it's better to host it as part of your existing site, the ranking juice remains in your area and it further helps strengthen the site. But then i'm thinking, if the wordpress stand alone blog works out, it will end up being a great external linker, further boosting my existing site's presense. Have any of you faced any similar problems? Thoughts?
Link Building | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
No Follow User Profiles?
So our site has these user profiles and when they leave a comment on a page it links to the users profile. Now there is no way there is spamming with these profiles because they can't use outside links on them so I was wondering what peoples thoughts are of making these user profiles no follow. I'm asking because some pages are coming back with 110 or more links on a single page because of the profiles so I was thinking of making the profiles no follow since I don't see them effecting too much of the site, but I was wondering what others thoughts were on this one.
Link Building | | KateGMaker0 -
Wordpress Blog or page within site or guest post on other site?
Where is the best place, from an SEO perspective to have my articles published? 1: My WordPress blog 2: As A guest post on another site. 3: Within the normal pages of my site. Here is my site: www.fvl.co.uk Any help and or advice would be gratefully recieved. Andy
Link Building | | First-VehicleLeasing0 -
Mutiple domains pointing on the same web site issues
We have in out company lots off different domains pointing to the same web site (On for most major countries actually...) . Unfortunately this was done by having all the DNS names to point to the same IP address to the target web site, and not by using a redirect as should have been done. As most of the pages on the web site are linked internally (All the pages of the site links at least to the front page), this resulted to have all the different domains linking one to each other causing artificial external backlinks to our main .com web site. I just wonder if google is giving us a penallity for this backlinks ? Also this causes the same content to be shared among different domains, resulting probably to self competition for keywords. Should we now remove all other domains resulting to a loss of these "artificial backlinks" ?
Link Building | | opic0 -
Run of Site Links
I recently got a link from a relevant site but it ended up being a run of site link. The site has over 3,000 pages that now link to my site. Will my site get penalized for this?
Link Building | | mj7750
