Worth changing existing link profile to make it more natural?
-
Hi Guys,
I am picking up responbility for the SEO work for a company and I need some advice please.
The current link stratgy involves a lot of single backlinks from the home page of variious sites. There is also a very big proprtion of the anchor text which is for the exact keyword and also finally there is very little deep linking.
The result of this strategy is some 1st page ranking, but it has required a lot more links than some of the competitors with more natural link structure,
Question is this.... is it worth contacting the webmasters of the existing links and asking then to move some of the links onto subpages and ammending the link tex to be move natural.
Or alternaitvely, I could concenrate on adding some new article links, with a variety of keywords, which would be subdomain links.
The problem with the 2nd approuch is that I can't easily add enough article links to balance out fully the effect of thecurrent problem. However, I'm nto sure if changing the position and the anchor text of the current linking could affect the current main site ranking...
Can you see my problem? Any advice would be gratefully received.
Cheers, Ed.
-
1. If you do want to re-balance, switch the links to use some obscure long-tail anchor text and see if you move up for that term. This is an easy way to find out if they are actually passing juice. Drop the ones that aren't.
2. Build out and balance your link profile. If you can't beat your competitors with less than 20% exact anchor text, then you need to increase your overall link profile.
-
Fair enough, I do appreciate your thoughts
-
I think you are digging in po.
-
Hi,
I understand the point you are making but, in fact, the current links do have a lot of value, even though they may a number of paid links. The reason I say this is the sites ranks on google 1st page for a number of competitive search terms.
This is why I am thinking of an approuch which tries to consolidate the value from those links rather than writing them off. I'm thinking if I can balance out the existing links with other deeper links etc, I might be able to secure more value from them.
If I can, it would be a good basis for gaining value from the new links I hope to obtain in the future.
Has anyone had this situation and tried a similar approach?
Cheers, Ed.
-
...the question is what is the best course of action to try to retain as much value as possible from the existing links.
To me, those links would not have any value. I would not feel better about them if they were moved from the homepage to a deeper page on the same site.
I know that you are not asking what to do for new links... but if this site was mine I would forget about the current links and look to what can be done in the future.
-
I think that some of the links will have been devalued which is why more backlinks have been required than for some of the competitors. The question though isn't what do for new links; the question is what is the best course of action to try to retain as much value as possible from the existing links. I can look to adjust the position and type of the existing links to be more natural looking, or I can try to balance up the linking appearance with something like more deep link articles etc.
Any suggestions gratefully received
Ed.
-
It sounds like a lot of the existing links are not natural and probably paid. My bet is that they have been devalued. If this was my site we would stop "building links" and start "earning" them.
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 is future of Link building ? Any link building experts Here ?
Hey Everyone, its Muhammad Umair Ghufran I have one question about Link Building ? As my Knowledge Google Love the Quality content but Link building rank some low quality website Right ? So, what is the future of link building ; please explain indeep with complete reference for better understanding Thanks Regards: Muhammad Umair Ghufran
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muhammadumairghufran0 -
If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post. Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website. Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal? Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Should I remove all vendor links (link farm concerns)?
I have a web site that has been around for a long time. The industry we serve includes many, many small vendors and - back in the day - we decided to allow those vendors to submit their details, including a link to their own web site, for inclusion on our pages. These vendor listings were presented in location (state) pages as well as more granular pages within our industry (we called them "topics). I don't think it's important any more but 100% of the vendors listed were submitted by the vendors themselves, rather than us "hunting down" links for inclusion or automating this in any way. Some of the vendors (I'd guess maybe 10-15%) link back to us but many of these sites are mom-and-pop sites and would have extremely low authority. Today the list of vendors is in the thousands (US only). But the database is old and not maintained in any meaningful way. We have many broken links and I believe, rightly or wrongly, we are considered a link farm by the search engines. The pages on which these vendors are listed use dynamic URLs of the form: \vendors<state>-<topic>. The combination of states and topics means we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage 🙂 So, not good.</topic></state> We understand that this model is broken. Our plan is to simply remove these pages (with the list of vendors) from our site. That's a simple fix but I want to be sure we're not doing anything wring here, from an SEO perspective. Is this as simple as that - just removing these page? How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs? For example, I could spend effort making sure that \vendors\California- <topic>(and for all states) goes to a general "topic" page (which still has relevance, but won't have any vendors listed)</topic> I know there is no distinct answer to this, but what expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO? Anyway, before I go down this path I thought I'd check here in case I miss something. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Should I change my permalink structure?
Hi guys, hope you've had a manageable working week. Just after some advice! What would you think to changing the permalink structure of an already established entertainment website so that the category and postdate also appears in the URL, i.e "2014-01-01/news/this-is-the-post"? I have done it before without thinking about all the crawl errors it would cause and quickly reverted everything. However, I am now eager to get listed in Google News (don't worry, this isn't the only reason to change the URL) and think it might help things overall. Thoughts? Worth the effort or a pointless exercise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
Multiple Internal links to same destinations
My company is redoing our homepage and there will be 4 links to our main play pages (5 games). 2 in the menu and 2 within the content. I was thinking I should no follow one of the links on the homepage + 1 in the menu so that we don't have link dilution from having multiple internal links to the same destination within 1 page. Does this make sense? Any downside of this or suggestions of a solution that may be more effective? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Webmaster Tools Internal Links
Hi all, I have around 400 links in the navigation menu (site-wide) and when I use webmaster tools to check for internal links to each page; some have as many as 250K and some as little as 200. Shouldn't the number of internal links for pages found in the navigation menu be relatively the same? Or is Google registering more internal links for pages linked closer to the top of the code Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Removing Canonical Links
We implemented rel=canonical as we decided to paginate our pages. We then ran some testing and on the whole pagination did not work out so we removed all on-page pagination. Now, internally when I click for example a link for Widgets I get the /widgets.php but searching through Google I get to /widgets.php?page=all . There are not redirects in place at the moment. The '?page=all' page has been rated 'A' by the SEOmoz tool under On Page Optimization reports and performs much better than the exact same page without the '?page=all' (the score dips to a 'D' grade) so need to tread carefully so we don't lose the link value. Can anyone advise us on the best way forward? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jannkuzel0 -
Sitewide blog link and Article links
Hi Guys I just wanted to give you all a heads up on something I adjusted recently that worked really well and wanted to ask for your own experiences on this. 1. We have a blog that adds regular content and within the blog we link from the keyword we are targeting. Standard stuff right ! We were struggling for movement on a keyword so I removed the links from the articles and added a link on the site wide blogroll. The link on the blogroll included the keyword but was a longer descriptive link. Low and behold we got a first page listing when the changed it.The change in ranking was made a few days later. I have always been given the impression that site wide isn't that great ? So explain this one . Of course there are many other factors etc 🙂 What are your experiences and thoughts on what happened here ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0