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
-
Removing many pages from my site a problem?
I have to remove two blog categories from my site which amounts to about 98 pages. I will redirect the URLS to other appropriate pages on my site. Will Google rank my site different if I lose that many pages?
Link Building | | artsp1 -
Spammy links redirecting to homepage of site -
Hey guys, I'm auditing a website at the moment and Moz is showing a few spammy links linking to it. The problem is these domains are all 301 redirecting to the domain I'm auditing. Let's say I'm auditing Site A. Site B is been flagged in Moz OSE with 12 spam flags. When I try to open Site B in a browser, it redirects back to Site A. What's the best thing to do, here? Disavowing domains redirecting to the site is surely a bad idea? Cheers.
Link Building | | BrianYork-AIM0 -
Sitewide link to a sister site question
I own two websites that are somewhat related. On Site A, in the nav bar below the header I had a link to Site B. The nav bar shows on all several hundred pages. A few weeks ago I got nervous about this as I was doing some reading about sitewide links. Not exactly sure if they were a bad thing or not in this specific case, I decided to change the nav bar so that the link to Site B only showed up on Site A's home page. Well, within a week or so my site started dropping from its long-held #1 position for its main, high-volume keyword, slipping a bit every few days. Today it is #4. My question is, would the removal of the sitewide links and replacement of them with just a link on the homepage cause something like this to happen? And, I'm thinking about putting the sidewide menu link back in -- is this a bad idea? Note: the ranking on Site B is very important, with double the RPM of Site A.
Link Building | | bizzer0 -
Dofollow vs nofollow for place listings?
Our travel website has thousands of places, each with an individual page, that users can interact with via our site. The info includes a link back to the place's main web presence if available (homepage, Facebook page, hosted listing elsewhere, etc.). We have no problem passing along PageRank to these sites and setting the link as dofollow. However, due to the sheer number (50k+) of these place pages that have the same anchor text of "Visit Website" in the same location on every page, I fear Google will see us as spammy and ding us. That said, would it be better to set these external links as dofollow or nofollow (or leave them as part of the Javascript as they are now)? Thank you in advance!
Link Building | | brandonRT0 -
Advice for brand new site
Dear All I have been an SEO for several years now, and have just laucnhed a new site www.householdsaver.co.uk its in its early stages as I expect to add a community option where people post deals and offers they have found, share them with friends etc My question is really are all the old seo practices still worth doing? Things like directory sites, blog comments, articles sites, social bookmarking etc.... (I have already built up twitter users on the account before the site went live) With Moz's trust factor is it best to go for highrank trust sites first or... I guess you could say that I am suffering from what do I do first and is it all still worth doing and what are the early pit falls to think about..? ie too many links too soon and from to high or to low trusted sites? Any comments from anyone who have put a new site live in the past couple of years would be appricated. Thanks James
Link Building | | JamesT2 -
Multiple blogs for one site
Hello, one of my competitors built all these blogs and pointed them to their main site.. Is this white hat? http://steelbuildingsblog.org/ PR3 http://metal-church-buildings.net/ PR2 http://commercial-metal-buildings.org/ PR2 http://metalandsteelbuildings.net/ PR1 http://steel-storage-buildings.org/ PR2 http://texas-steel-buildings.net/ PR2 http://steel-metal-buildings.org/ PR3 http://metal-buildingstore.com/ PR2 http://metalagriculturalbuildings.net/ PR3 Also I am looking at my links vs. theirs and they have a much higher point score for links... But the company I am doing SEO for has most of same quality links. Can this be the reason they have an edge?
Link Building | | SEODinosaur0 -
Does it hurt your site to syndicate content on other sites?
Does publishing an article from your site on other sites hurt your site if you require a link back to your site? If website B, C, and D publish an article found site A, but they link back to site A, does that hurt or help site A?
Link Building | | nicole.healthline0 -
Listings, paid profiles and directories
Hi, In the industry I am working in (education), we do have a lot of portals offering paid listings (for example profiles featuring a school, the courses you offer, sometimes with reviews etc). Almost all big competitors and big names normally do have these kind of listings. Besides from having to decide if these sites really bring the relevant conversions, I am wondering about their impact on SEO. An example for an offer:
Link Building | | ecnic
Our Top Picks listing is a 40 word listing and logo we put on any 30 pages of our web site, example.com for 12 months, for $595 US. You can choose the pages you want, or we can put you on all our [category] pages, or certain continents/countries you want to target. Now, I am wondering: Do I have to worry about my linking profile ? (All of sudden a bunch of links with the exact same anchortext and content embedding to our site?) Or can I just decide to go with a paid listing based on the link value the page offers me? Looking forward to reading what you think!
Nicole0