Backlinks or content? What is the problem here?
-
My Moz ranking is 29, Ahrefs Domain rank is 49 and Majestic Citation flow is 44 whereas trust flow is 17.
This is a plain question - If the above are the rankings for backlink problem, then where is the problem more likely to be found? Backlink or content?
In more detail - My site has been dropping in search since the last few weeks. With these rankings, is it likely that a backlink related problem is there? I myself agree that some content is poor and thin and there is a problem of plagiarism also. But overall, do i keep focusing on content? I do not know how good are these rankings as shown above.
My URL is www.marketing91.com
Please let me know whether the backlink profile looks good or not? So that at least i am not worried that there is a backlink problem as well. (i will surely work on toxic links soon) I can worry only on content.
-
Thank you Andy. This was a week long foray into backlink audit and its finally coming to an end. Now its content content and content.
-
**They are purely for links. So do i directly disavow them? **
Yes, if there is no way to do anything about it, just disavow.
Should i go ahead and disavow the bad links? Or let it be?
Yes, these sorts of links will be doing you no favours at all. OK, Google might just be ignoring them, but much better to err on the side of caution. If Google was just ignoring them but then changes their stance at a later stage, you know you are covered.
-Andy
-
Dear Andy,
I hope you answer this. Yes, i checked ahrefs and Moz.com backlinks thoroughly. I could find 57 backlinks which included "Payday loans" or from link farms or in general bad backlinks. They might have a Domain rating of 40 in Ahrefs, but they were bad back links.
I cannot remove them because these sites just dont have a contact us button. They are purely for links. So do i directly disavow them?
Secondly, my answer to content is that i am rewriting all content which was top of the serps again. I am a problogger now and i have more time in my hands. This solves the plagiarism problem and also ensures that i get the google "answer box" which is repeatedly a pain in the A. I am losing to competition because of some poorly written articles by other authors. So content will be overhauled.
The question in my mind is, even if the loss looks because of content, should i go ahead and disavow the bad links? Or let it be?
-
Hi,
** I myself agree that some content is poor and thin and there is a problem of plagiarism also**
This is a biggie - Page quality is a huge thing for Google and you must ensure that pages someone lands on, have a reason to exist, and answer the question they asked correctly.
If you know there are spammy links, just how spammy? Are they damaging? Do they link with money-phrases? Has there been any penalty on the site at any time? All these should be looked at (and more) when assessing a backlink profile.
If you know there are links that are so poor that they could be damaging, either ask for them to be removed, or disavow them.
-Andy
-
On an average, in AHREFS, my competitors have a Domain rank of 53 and i have of 49.
In moz, they have a rank of 50 again. But i have around 29. So yes, the competitors are ahead of me. But till date i was ranking well with the same backlinks. At least for my keywords?
So any insight with this data? Major question, do i rectify my backlinks, build more content, or the more exhausting and expensive one, do both?
-
Backlinks: depends on the quantity and quality of the backlink profiles for your competitors. If they have a much higher DA/PA/Trust, than you probably need to build that up to compete.
Content: unique, long form content works best. Aim to be share worthy... if people share your link on social media, they will probably link back to your website as well.
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 the best way to eliminate this specific image low lying content?
The site in question is www.homeanddesign.com where we are working on recovering from some big traffic loss. I finally have gotten the sites articles properly meta titled and descriptioned now I'm working on removing low lying content. The way there CMS is built, images have their own page (every one that's clickable). So this leads to a lot of thin content that I think needs to be removed from the index. Here is an example: http://www.homeanddesign.com/photodisplay.asp?id=3633 I'm considering the best way to remove it from the index but not disturb how users enjoy the site. What are my options? Here is what I'm thinking: add Disallow: /photodisplay to the robots.txt file See if there is a way to make a lightbox instead of a whole new page for images. But this still leaves me with 100s of pages with just an image on there with backlinks, etc. Add noindex tag to the photodisplay pages
Reporting & Analytics | | williammarlow0 -
Google Webmaster. Backlinks
GWMT only shows that there are 3 domains pointing to a site of mine. I'm looking under "Links to site". But this can't be true because the site is pretty old and I know there are hundreds of domains that point to this one. What would explain this discrepancy? And is there some other free tool that will show all the backlinks? I've used Opensite explorer but that tool isn't close to comprehensive as GWMT usually is (based on other sites I've analyzed)
Reporting & Analytics | | priceseo0 -
Backlink Profile in Webmaster Tools
The quest for the "accurate" backlink profile never ends. We now have Webmaster Tools to help us with this search. My question is whether the backlink profile according to WT is the backlink profile according to Google. Do Google's search algorithms and WT synch up? If this is the case, forget OSE and MajesticSEO, WT will be the main backlink analysis tool I use going forward. Thanks for any insight.
Reporting & Analytics | | b40040400 -
Google Analytics Content Experiments don't deliver 50/50?
Our A/B test is actually delivering at about a 70/30 page view rate. 70% in favor of the original version and only 30% of the new. We are sending 100% of our traffic to this homepage test. Has anyone else experienced this? There seems to be a lot of folks experiencing this.....anyone know why?
Reporting & Analytics | | VistageSEO0 -
Large recent drop in "Domain Authority" and backlinks through OSE
Hello, I've noticed that our sites domain authority has dropped enormously this past week according to Open Site Explorer. It also shows us as having lost about half of our backlinks. Google webmaster tools doesn't show a corresponding drop in links and we haven't done anything to our domain recently. Anyone have any ideas what might have happened? Our site is at: http://www.GoldMaxUSA.com Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | JFritton0 -
How can you tell if your new content has been indexed?
Other than simply doing a search in each case, is there any way I can tell (in Webmaster Tools, for example) if the 500-1000 new pages of content I have added have been indexed and are now appearing in search results? My traffic hasn't risen much, but I know at least a few of them are in there... How can I tell when they're all in?
Reporting & Analytics | | corp08030 -
Duplicate content? Split URLs? I don't know what to call this but it's seriously messing up my Google Analytics reports
Hi Friends, This issue is crimping my analytics efforts and I really need some help. I just don't trust the analytics data at this point. I don't know if my problem should be called duplicate content or what, but the SEOmoz crawler shows the following URLS (below) on my nonprofit's website. These are all versions of our main landing pages, and all google analytics data is getting split between them. For instance, I'll get stats for the /camp page and different stats for the /camp/ page. In order to make my report I need to consolidate the 2 sets of stats and re-do all the calculations. My CMS is looking into the issue and has supposedly set up redirects to the pages w/out the trailing slash, but they said that setting up the "ref canonical" is not relevant to our situation. If anyone has insights or suggestions I would be grateful to hear them. I'm at my wit's end (and it was a short journey from my wit's beginning ...) Thanks. URL www.enf.org/camp www.enf.org/camp/ www.enf.org/foundation www.enf.org/foundation/ www.enf.org/Garden www.enf.org/garden www.enf.org/Hante_Adventures www.enf.org/hante_adventures www.enf.org/hante_adventures/ www.enf.org/oases www.enf.org/oases/ www.enf.org/outdoor_academy www.enf.org/outdoor_academy/
Reporting & Analytics | | DMoff0 -
Regex in Analytics for longtail content
I have spent quit some time now, trying to figure this out. I wannt to segment landingoage traffic to the longtail content. That's content in the 3rd or 4th subdirectorylevel. I would like to do that by saying google: "Just show me traffic that arrives on landingpages with 3 OR 4 slashes "/" But I can't get a solution, can anybody help in the seoMOZ community?
Reporting & Analytics | | viventuraSEO0