Page and Domain Authority and other bits

[WillBlackburn]

Hi,

I am in the process of finding blogs to have a few articles published with a couple of links in each. Articles will all be unique and relevant to the link I drop in and relevant in someway to the reader

However I have a few questions.

My site is a designer menswear site, so I have picked fashion and sports sites first and foremost to have the articles published.

Now, I have a guy who owns about 30 different websites. 2 of them are sports based and about 10 are fashion based. Around $10-$15 an article.

I have ran them all through the Open Site Explorer Tool and picked out the best ranked ones.

Now my problem is, how do I know if its a good site to not only list an article on, but to pay for it as well.

The sites page ranks are around the 30-45 range, the domains are around the 35-45 range. What is a good range to have? I know the higher the better but is 30-45 good enough to pay for? (I don't mind paying the $10 each (£7 my money) for each one)

Also as he is quoted me in dollars, I assume there all USA based, so majority of users are USA based. Well I am UK based and only ship to the UK. Will this matter as much if I am trying to gain backlinks? Obviously a UK based site, would be ideal, but is it a case of getting more external links on the web for Google to find, as long as they are relevant to the user?

Any help would be great.

Thanks

Will

[RyanKent]

I always though guest replies would be ignored by Google, is this the case?

Guest replies are definitely not ignored by Google. Sometimes you can perform a search for a term and the result will lead you to an article where the search term is only located in the user generated comment section of the page.

Our competitor sells clothing but has a reply on a CSS site? Would this be worth doing like this or is it a waste of time?

I would suggest working to obtain as broad of a link profile as possible. I like being linked to from credible off-topic sites such as a CSS or graphic design sites for two reasons. First, if it is a follow'd link it offers at least some value and serves to broaden the site's link profile. Additionally if my client's site looks so good it is being mentioned on web design sites, I know the overall design is good. Of course there is the corner case where you are being called out for bad design, but I'll let that topic go

In short, receiving mentions or links from design and other off topic sites is nice, but should not be a focus for your link building efforts unless your site is related to those topics.

[WillBlackburn]

Cheers. Very interesting.

What would you advice be on sites like this: http://sixrevisions.com/css/30-exceptional-css-navigation-techniques/

One of our competitors have a link on this site, it is a PA of 69 and a DA of 88.

I always though guest replies would be ignored by Google, is this the case?

Our competitor sells clothing but has a reply on a CSS site?

Would this be worth doing like this or is it a waste of time?

If you look for the comment from Aphrodite, that links to their site.

Cheers

Will

[RyanKent]

What other methods do you suggest?

A couple suggestions:

• publish the content on your site then promote it. You can use social media, commenting on active blogs, forums and other means to promote your content. You would then get full credit for the article and build your own site's user base.

• publish the content on sites which accept articles without charge.

You also need to understand how easy it is for those sites to completely manipulate their stats. Traffic stats are very easy to manipulate, as are DA and PA. You need to evaluate the site's real value yourself.

I looked at the first site http://urban-gear.com and I would definitely devalue that site (i.e. consider it's true DA as lower) based on it's link profile. When using OSE to view a site's link profile I recommend using the following four filters: Followed + 301, only external, pages on this subdomain, group by domain. Using those settings I see the following:

• The site's strongest link is from weiderprohomegym.info, but that link is actually gone as the site's domain registration expired.

• The second link is from feeds.feedburner.com/nerdlike and appears to have been deleted as well. I cannot locate the link.

• The third link is nofollow'd but the fourth link is real and I can verify it. The PA is 48 on the page, which is a big drop down from the 67 PA of the first site.

When you remove a site's top links, if the site does not have a very deep profile there can be a big drop in measurements such as DA/PA. Unless this site has earned new, strong links it's rankings will drop noticeably.

I looked further and cannot find support for the quality of the other inbound links. The 4th/5th/6th linked sites offer social media and user comments but NONE of those articles have even a single user comment. Two of the articles have ONE tweet (which may have been by the author) and no other social signals. Not a single Like or +1.

I can't dedicate the time to investigate the other sites, but I found exactly what I expected. The first site's visible link profile is very weak and does not even support it's low DA.

With respect to the USA links, if you have a UK site targeted to UK readers then the US links will be foreign and not offer the same value as links from the UK. If your site is e-commerce and you do not offer prices in USD then the link value will not be the same as other UK links.

[RyanKent]

Now my problem is, how do I know if its a good site to not only list an article on, but to pay for it as well.

Without looking at the site I can tell they are NOT good sites on which to list an article. Why? Because good sites don't charge you for permission to publish your content.

There can be exceptions such as a PR site who charge to distribute your article to particular news fronts. Otherwise you simply should never pay to publish content in this manner. It is black hat SEO and Google may already be aware of the site. If Google is aware, they will devalue the links so even if you see PA 10 & DA 10, you are actually getting 0 from the site. If they are not presently aware the site is selling links, they can become aware of the issue at any time in which case you will pay for the links now and later the links will be devalued and you will wonder why your rankings have dropped. When you have 1000 links you wont be able to tell which links have been devalued with a reasonable amount of effort.

Even if you were going to actually pay for a link, the DA of that site is way too low for consideration in my opinion. Try other methods to get your content noticed.