Hi there,

As others have mentioned, a bit more detail on what you're trying to do would be good, but assuming that you mean that Google isn't indexing your forum and social share links, there isn't a whole lot you can do about that. There are tools available that can speed up the process, but I don't think they're worth the effort because good quality links will be found and indexed by Google quickly anyway. Even if it takes them a bit longer, this won't cause rankings to drop.

With that said, if you're using any automated tools to build forum or social sharing links, these aren't likely to be great links anyway and aren't the kind that you should be focusing on. That may not be the case here, but I wanted to mention it just in case.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

As others have said, buying links is against Google Webmaster Guidelines and if they find you doing it, it can lead to a penalty and depending on how bad the problem is, the penalty can range from losing a bit of traffic to you not appearing for your own brand name.

I won't lie - buying links can still work and I see websites doing it all the time. But you need to be aware of the risks if you're going down that route and if you're working with a business that relies on traffic from Google in order to survive, the consequences can be severe.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Hampus,

Thanks for the question!

If I were to choose, I'd prefer this option:

https://www.granngarden.se/husdjur/hund/c/hundfoder

Mainly because, like you, I prefer shorter/cleaner URLs and am not a fan of repeating the same words. I don't think there will be a negative SEO impact of removing one of the category name words because the repetition is unlikely to be helping that much right now. If there was a valid reason to have it repeated, then my view may be different. But that doesn't sound like the case so I'd say to go with the shorter URL.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Zach,

Just to quickly add to what Nicholas has said, I have seen instances where links to a site via hotlinked images can cause ranking problems. It sounds like you're on top of it with the disavow file, so just keep an eye on things and update that as you find new links.

If you've been hit by the Fred update, that does seem like something different, but again it sounds like you're doing the right things that would help with SEO anyway. It could be worth comparing your site and it's features to other sites that seem to have been affected and see if you can spot any similarities. Here is a list from Search Engine Roundtable.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Rachel,

Given that Trust Flow and Citation Flow are metrics calculated by Majestic SEO, it could be worth sending this to their team to see if a link like that could have affected them.

If you've seen a drop in rankings as well, it is definitely worth investigating further to see what factors could have contributed to this. I'd be surprised if a single link like this would lead to a drop in rankings across many of your clients. If you think this is the case though, it's worth trying to get the links removed to see if that helps. If you can't get it removed and you're sure that this is the cause, then it's worth disavowing the link.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Aaron,

The advice from the other guys here is spot on in that it's more about the quality of the domain linking to you than the number of links coming from it. If it's a relevant link and makes sense for users, it's pretty unlikely that it would cause you any problems.

Just to chime in on this question:

"My question is, is it worth have 2-4 articles from one highly relevant website, or will 1 article have the same weight?"

To give you a concrete example, I've guest blogged here on Moz multiple times and each post has links to my site. The first time a link was found to Google would have had more impact than the subsequent ones, but the subsequent ones would still help me because of the trust and relevance that the Moz.com domain has to my own. It's just that these links probably won't be as powerful as getting brand new links from new domains to my website.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Becky,

There have been some good replies so far but to address your question here, I think it's definitely worth doing the outreach and trying to build relationships. Unless you're a massive brand, it's hard to get noticed online without some form of outreach, at least to begin with.

In terms of time, it really does depend on your other priorities. If I had to put a time on it and given that you haven't really started yet, I'd block out maybe half a day to do some research and contact a few sites and then gauge feedback. Then build up from there.

Bear in mind that some companies will hire SEO and PR agencies to just focus on promotion of their website, so it can take up a lot of time. But if you start on it yourself with a few hours, then you get a good understanding quickly of what's involved.

A quick heads up - it's not easy! But it's important so it's worth pursuing.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Nicholas,

To lead on from what others have said, I'd agree that these links are unlikely to be passing value from a ranking perspective i.e. they're not likely to pass PageRank. Google do try and detect affiliate links and as Matt has said, they see these as placed to get affiliate revenue as opposed to being placed because someone genuinely endorses the website in question.

In terms of how this actually works, I'm not too familiar with Sharesale personally. But I know that similar affiliate programs provide plugins / scripts to affiliates which can make the link look natural, but when clicked, some JavaScript kicks in and adds the affiliate URL and the redirect. The website owner themselves can also do this themselves if they want to "mask" the affiliate link so that when someone hovers over the link, they see a nice clean URL rather than a potentially long and messy affiliate link.

In terms of what you can do - it really comes down to whether you value the traffic from the affiliate and if that drives revenue. If it does, then that's more valuable (I'd guess) than having a normal link. Plus, would they actually link to you at all if they couldn't get affiliate revenue? If not, then stepping out of the affiliate program may cause more harm than good. But it's really a balance between the affiliate revenue and potential link benefit.

I hope that helps a bit!

Paddy

Hi David,

In terms of whether these links could hurt you, I'd be more concerned about the quality of the links than the topic. If the majority of links pointing at these user generated pages are low quality, then that would be of concern and you may want to disavow the ones that are very low quality such as the spammy sites / directories etc that you've found. You may even want to go as far as removing pages where the people who set them up are clearly spamming the pages hoping to get them to rank for some reason.

The fact they come from websites that are off-topic is a slight concern but they shouldn't "hurt" you as long as they are genuinely natural and it doesn't look like manipulation. If you're also generating links to other areas of the site that are on topic, then I wouldn't worry too much.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the response to David's question. I just wanted to clarify, I don't think David is referring to the topic of these pages or the links from these pages out to other websites. I believe he is referring to links from external websites pointing inwards towards these user generated pages. Therefore, Panda isn't something that should come into consideration.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Syed,

Thanks for the question.

There could be a number of reasons why you can't rank any higher in search results. One place to start is to look at the websites that rank above you and see what they have that you don't. The things I'd look for are:

• Are they stronger, mainstream brands or established websites who are naturally stronger than you? For example from the UK, I see websites such as Buzzfeed and Amazon ranking for this keyword. These types of competitors are going to be very hard to move above.
• Do they have more and better quality links than you? Radi pointed this out in his answer and Open Site Explorer can help give you an answer here.
• Is their content better than yours on this topic? Be honest with yourself here and see if they're doing anything better than you and see what you can learn from this.
• Do they have larger audiences (you can get an idea of this from their social channels or engagement such as blog comments) which means they may be generating more user signals to Google?
• Is their content more keyword focused than yours? You can use the Moz on-page grader here to get an idea of this.

It can be hard to jump above stronger websites, but focusing on lower competition, niche keywords first is definitely the right approach.

I hope that helps!

Paddy