Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: Link Building

Chat through link building best practices and outreach techniques.


  • What is the thoughts on republishing content that has already been published on a big new site onto company blog? My gut feeling is at best Google will ignore at worst a penalty could be round the corner? All thoughts welcome. ThanksRichard

    | seoman10
    0

  • Hi, While looking for link opportunities for my client in the shoe business, I came across a page of a running club's website that hosts discounts for members of the running club. To actually view the content of the page you must be logged in. When not logged in all you can see is the sign-up page and a message asking you to log in. Would this link be at all useful in terms of SEO or would crawlers not be able to view the page content as well? Thanks!

    | RickyShockley
    0

  • I have a low-traffic website (under 100 unique visitors per day) and I've encountered a strange issue started yesterday morning. I acquired three back-links, one of these back-links is contextual and the other two are site-wide. The site-wide back-links are from PA 40+ blogs. It looks like the back-links are already indexed by Google. Despite these new back-links, my rankings across multiple keywords have dropped several positions. I'm new to SEO, but I would assume new back-links would improve my rankings. None of these back-links are low quality links, they are from real established blogs with high domain and page authority values. Could anyone give me insights into why my rankings may have dropped with new back-links?

    | poke1
    1

  • Interested to know if anyone has heard of Linklicious? They apparently get your links noticed by Google. Not sure if it's genuine or what to think about the idea. Personally sounds a bit dodgy to me, any thoughts?

    | seoman10
    0

  • Each of the categories I would certainly fall under aren't accepting sites at this time because of it isn't showing the icon you need next to it to submit a website. I have been checking this for months, but it isn't changing. Is there another way in or am I just out of luck here? See step 3:  http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/add.html

    | pmull
    0

  • Hi All: As per my understanding, Internal Equity Passing Links is a metric defining PA. Now my website has around 65 internal links while few of my competitors have more than 180 links. I am unable to understand how to increase the internal links passing equity on my website, because I can see, more number of links on my website than my competitors but opensiteexplorer does not show that. I am really confused. Please help out if anyone knows something about this issue. Thanks in advance.

    | sidjain4you
    0

  • Hi all, Our blog utilizes a fair amount of guest blog articles. Each article includes a link to the authors site. Some memebers of our team believe it is best practice to no follow all of these links while others believe we should follow the links, Our page rank and domain authority are almost always much higher then the guest blogger's site so we want to know the pros and cons of nofollow vs follow of these links. Since the domain authority and page rank of guest blog sites are low will this have a negative effect on our site? They aren't spammy and are legitimate sites covering similar content. Any feedback would be greaty appreciated!

    | STP_SEO
    0

  • Hey guys, So I'm having trouble understanding why we aren't receiving credit for linking root domains by Moz. Our site URL is https://www.expertip.net Google states that we have 3,648 links - most of which were obtained by Yext indexing us for our locations. We don't seem to be getting credit for ANY of those links. Most seem to be reputable, like yellowpages.com, etc. and google shows 156 domains. Any help here can be appreciated. I believe that we've followed best practices as far as root domains and 301s go. I've attached images to show further. Thanks,
    Greg 9U0bG lwAdD

    | greg.lanier
    0

  • hello, my website is www.anavasis.gr and it is in Greek. Which is the best way to build backlinks? Hire a freelancer and let him making links to any site? What should i ask from a freelancer when building links for me? what should i give him like (keywords) ?. what is important to take take of? When you go to freelancer.com there are people offering backlinks for less than 100$ is that a good method? Will this help my seo? Is it a matter that my site is in Greek? thanks

    | anavasis
    0

  • I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations for free or inexpensive backlink audit tools? Of course I have access to Search Console and to the OSE but it seems they don't offer a complete picture of our backlink profiles. I have previous experience using Link Research Tools for this but this is too expensive for the amount of use we would get out of it so I am looking for (much) cheaper alternatives. I look after 8 websites, however very little active link building was done for these in the past so we are not experiencing any issues due to bad links, but I would still like to get a better picture of our complete backlink profile. I've considered just using a trial of Majestic or Ahrefs for this, but this would only be a one off solution. I would welcome any suggestions. Thanks!

    | ViviCa1
    0

  • I have done the whole moz open exploer and I am not understanding why my site wouldn’t have more links registering to my website.. I have lots of sites(directorys and 3rd party) with my website domain in them. The only one that is linking to my site is BBB.com and my advertsing with saint paul press. www.somerersetautodealer.com But if I have links with all kinds of automotive directories why wouldn’t they register? I am sure this a simply answer or that I am not understanding something. Thanks for your help! Scott

    | Scott1234
    0

  • Hi, One of our client  named Exclusive Limousine  has been ranking in second page for a while in Google Australia for the keyword "Limo Hire Melbourne". Earlier, this website is handled by other SEO company who created more spammy links from irrelevant sites. I have used google disavow option to remove the urls. But, the ranking still remains the same. Though, we tried different approach nothing works. what steps can i take to improve the rankings. Please assist me in fixing this issue.

    | jkovalan
    0

  • Hello, I got an affiliate program on my website, that redirects the affiliate link to the main site like: site.com/ads/aff_code/  ->  site.com/ (The redirect is done using a 301 status code.) On the redirect process the site stores a cookie to track the affiliate sale. Will Google and others SE follow this permanent redirect, transferring the relevance of this affiliate link to my main site? In other words, if an affiliate does something wrong (like spams), does the bad reputation will be transferred to my main site? Is there a better way to do that from a SEO standpoint? Thanks,

    | darkmediagroup
    0

  • Say I have an opportunity to get another link from a high authority site that has already linked an important article from me (a page I REALLY want to rank well). Now a month later, they are interviewing me and asking what I'd like to link. I have plenty of good content I can offer, but I really want that page they already linked to to climb a bit in the rankings. So my question is, how is that second link best spent? Would linking to the same page give it a boost? Or does Google see it as "oh. Another link from the same domain. Yippee." Would that link do more for a different page on my site at this point?

    | cbrant777
    0

  • I run a high-PR (or whatever we're calling it now) website builder. When you sign up, your URL is a subdomain of the main site (like yourname.foo.com). My site is lucky enough to be on the spammers radar, so they frequently create sites to get more back links. A while back, I caught onto this and neutralized their links (even though they had nofollow tags) by only displaying them as plain text instead of anchor tags. Spammers continue to sign up and create sites, even though their links are now text. My question: Are these text links still affecting my SEO negatively? Or do they know something I don't?

    | watilo
    0

  • My site is samhillbands.com If I search “Book a band in Charlottesville” - This page is returned #1 out of 427,000 https://www.samhillbands.com/bands-by-location/Charlottesville-VA However if I search "Book a band in Atlanta" - I do have a result on page 1 out of 16,700,000 https://www.samhillbands.com/bands/retreat-band But the corresponding /bands-by-location/ page is nowhere to be found: https://www.samhillbands.com/bands-by-location/Atlanta-GA Thoughts on what I can do?

    | brianvest
    0

  • Are they worth anything, if they are from relevant sites?  I'm I better off avoiding linking back wherever possible?

    | littlesthobo
    0

  • HI, I wrote an article for photography life over 6 months ago and was surprised to discover it is placed second in the serps for  the keywords "nikon cls" I have just written another 1500 word article for another photography blog and I am wondering if I will serve myself better just writing the content for my own site? Best wishes. David.

    | WallerD
    0

  • We have started building some good links but I'm just wandering how important anchor based text ones are now.
    I'm not talking about spamming/going too heavy but a few here and there. What's your recent experience?

    | nick-name123
    0

  • I am working on SEO for a dental client, and I was looking at the external links for the main competitor. I noticed that a very large number of links were coming from other dental websites. When I looked more closely, I found that all of these websites had been created by one particular company specializing in dental websites. This company had hidden a directory on each client website with links to all their other client's websites. Is this something that can be reported? Is there anything I can do about it? Now I understand why I can't reach the number of external links that some of these other sites have! There are also many links coming from an online bookmark manager. I'm guessing these are accounts set up just to generate external links. How can anyone compete with that?

    | Karen_110rpm
    0

  • Hi! Can someone tell me the best way to determine what caused a big drop in External Followed Links? I have used tools like remove em in the past to try and get rid of exact match keyword links but I'm unsure if this was the root cause. Our rankings went up the 3 months after this period, but this year they have dropped back to levels from 2015. I'm wondering if this drop has anything to do with this decline. See attached. EHyIy

    | KerryK
    0

  • Hello Moz Friends, So I wanted to ask a quick question. About 2 months ago I was on the phone with a Yext representative and they were doing a demo with me of their services. I said that I did not have many clients ye and was offered a deal that wet like this: Pay $300 now and then pay $50.00 per month per location. Then all of the sudden the guy said his day was over and had to go. I never heard from him again. So I wanted to ask if anyone sells Yext services? and if this special sounds right? I am just starting my official seo consulting business and Yext is expensive for the startups like me. So maybe you know of some alternatives or cheaper solution for doing mass citations at one time? Thank you ever and happy 4th!

    | asbchris
    0

  • Hi, im wondering if links that is not exact anchor links gives any boost for rankings? Example if lets say somebody links to my site http://domain.com/category/article with anchor: domainname or url link.

    | Rob_I
    0

  • Dear Friends, I just checked my backlinks in Ahrefs because my traffic has been dropping since the last 4 weeks. I have 2 questions is google penguin a part of Google core algorithm yet like Google panda is? I have backlinks of Payday loans which many webmasters claimed were the problem. The anchor text was payday loans. The sites hardly have any pagerank or anything. What is the way forward for me? So i contact the webmasters, and they dont reply then disavow the links or disavow them directly knowing that google hates pay day loans backlinks

    | marketing91
    0

  • Hi - excuse me if this is stupid question but I'm rather new to this. Currently the PA for the home page is 16 and the DA 28 and I have some concerns that my efforts are being diluted. When I use OSE on www.sassandgrace.co.uk I get different link results to sassandgrace.co.uk but there is a redirect in place to sassandgrace.co.uk and cannot run a crawl report, for example, on www.sassandgrace.co.uk. The PA and DA are identical for each but the number of links different With a smallish number of links pointing to each but with a redirect in place, am I losing some of the effect or is having the redirect in place giving me all the credit for links to both addresses? Thanks

    | Sassandgrace
    0

  • Found the answer no worry!

    | OliverNeely
    0

  • We launched a new page 2 weeks ago, and we want to know how much time should we wait to do Link Building and how many links should we try to generate to not get penalized by Google. Thanks! EDIT: Thanks to all for you answer! Very helpful!

    | carlostinca
    0

  • Hello Moz Friends, So as I was researching some competitive backlinks and I noticed a lot of backlinks that a clients competitor has are on parked domains and they appear to be google ads from some point. You know the pages that this page no longer exists, or hey do you want to buy this domain? and it has like 6 google ads on it? Yep those pages. My clients industry is construction and their competitor has links from zombie websites, foreign, websites and more. But the links are no longer on the page. Like when it was crawled, their ad was showing. Does this make any sense and is it usually temporary? Thank you for your thoughts friends!

    | asbchris
    0

  • Hello all, I have been doing SEO/SEM work on some sites I own for a few years but now I am in a position where I need to handle these tasks for a significant numbers of clients on a freelance basis. Obviously, this requires much more work and organization as well as some additional tools to help. I was wondering if the experts on here could help me with the following: Does anyone know of any online step-by-step guides or checklists that highlight a comprehensive SEO and digital marketing strategy? This could be helpful while trying to juggle multiple projects at once and provide a blueprint that I can follow and alter as I go. What free project management tools do you recommend? I was thinking of using Wunderlist, Trello or Evernote to keep track of projects, but there may be other suggestions I am not aware of. I have it in my budget to spend about $200/month worth of paid tools. Which tools are best for keyword research, backlink analysis, search rankings etc.? I am currently testing out Moz and SEM Rush, but would like a wide variety of information that helps me efficiently execute a plan but without too much white noise. What are the best paid (or free) tools to accomplish this? What are the best references for Q&As and reference materials on strategies, etc. for when I need to deep dive and do some learning on the fly? Besides this website of course. Thanks for any help!!

    | ccdispoto
    2

  • There is a site linking to me from ukraine (don't know the site) ... and they have a low DA of **52. ** **Is this something I need to be thinking of removing? Thanks:) ** **( I have a low DA myself, but rank well for my keywords) **

    | MissThumann
    1

  • I have a domain with a lot of content and it is an eCommerce site. I've just been told that we have another 12 domains that are inactive and do not redirect. I don't know what to do with them as they haven't been used for ages and do not direct or have any content (max of a DA or 4). Therefore which is better for SEO? To have really good content with perhaps a few regular blog posts on each of the 12 domains, or to redirect all of the domains to the one main domain? I would take 1 domain and put a lot of content on and optimise is.. spending a few weeks on one and then move onto another, all while posting on each blog on each domain. Thank you for any help! 🙂

    | schloeee
    0

  • I'm trying to build up our external links and am finding lots of opportunities, some of which are on older articles dating back to 2014, 2013 etc. These pieces are relevant to our site and have high DA, I'm wondering if the post date of these articles matter? Thanks!

    | Postable
    0

  • HI,guys,the free blog post still good for SEO?

    | smokstore
    0

  • I am starting to try to gain traffic for long tail keywords.  Does someone have a simple plan as to how to do this? I add them to blog posts naturally? OK but there are hundreds and hundreds so this will take alot of blogs?

    | Feily
    0

  • I have heard conflicting reports on this, so I wanted to double check. Will poorly written posts and articles affect my rankings in SEO regards. I'm just unsure because on some sites i'v been working on recently I have seen some drops thanks.

    | ilyaelbert
    0

  • We have a blog internally at kay-grant.com/blog and also created an external blog at ActiveRain.com Is it okay to post the same blog posts to both sites or should I have different content for each blog?

    | geoff8151
    0

  • Hi, I search in google but didnt find a proper answer for this! maybe search an incorrect keyword! The question is, How can I find out a website that I'm going to make a backlink on is a spammy website? For example I did this guest bloging on this good website: Best Sure-Shot Organic Pest Control Approaches Every Gardener Should Know | Balcony Garden Web But it seems to be spammy because I use SEO POWERSUIT software that shows this backlink is 20% risk of google penalty! Is it right!? So how can we rest assured for making a quality backlink? I can not think any other way 😞

    | Shervin
    0

  • Hi, I haven't been able to find a clear answer to this issue yet, so I'm posting here for help. I have just created a profile on the site Instructables - http://www.instructables.com/ as well as an article. The issue is that I could find most of the published articles there have follow links in them - e.g links under materials: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-a-Reclaimed-Industrial-Coffee-Table/ - however mine is attributed nofollow links. I simply don't know why this is or if there is a way around it to get the links followed. This question only relates to the links in the articles, not the profile links - which are followed. Anybody knows? Thanks, Alex

    | alexddseo
    0

  • We are conducting SEO and white-hat link building campaign for a client that is in the national (US) fertility/infertility niche. So far we've done outreach to potential websites that we found to be a good fit for the campaign, although the conversion rate for getting Guest Posts, even Sponsored Posts is quite low. Furthermore, the number of these potential websites is close to running out and it's getting harder to find other websites with relevant metrics that are outreach-worthy. Besides Guest Post/Sponsored Post outreach, we've done Link Reclamation, Resource Links and Broken Link Building. Also, we tried expanding the list of keywords to try and come up with some new leads (in sub-niches) but haven't had much success. One peculiar thing that is happening when we do start a communication with the blog/website owners is that they get interested in the topic at first, up to the point of asking us to send them a Guest Post article and then.. silence, no response from them. We do a couple of follow-ups, but in most cases we don't hear back from them. We realize that there could be some editorial changes that they might want to be done, which we would be willing to do, but they just simply do not respond at all. When talking to other people in the SEO business we get different opinions on how to proceed, ranging from creation of web 2.0 properties and linking them up with video content and the client website, to even creating SEO link wheels. We are quite committed to our client and would love to get their site ranking, but we're reluctant to use tactics that might yield only short term results and might end up hurting the rankings on the long run. Other part of our strategy is creating quality content on our client's blog (within their website) and doing outreach to bloggers to get them interested in the topics that we are covering. So far these efforts have also not been very successful. Basically, my question is when you are doing a link building campaign for a client, what is your next strategy when the link opportunities run out?

    | Ullamalm
    0

  • Hello, I'm analyzing a website with thousands of pages.
    I realized that on many of them they have empty links such href="#". I wonder if that will cause any SEO damage, or if Google will just ignore it as there isn't any link? I was reading about it and people seems to not be sure, although they recommend on forums to user the CSS pointer clickable instead of empty link. Let me know your opinion on this please! Thank you in advance!

    | prozis
    0

  • I've gotten some good links to my homepage recently.  How long until I'm likely to see an increase in ranking? Let me know, thanks.

    | RafeConnection
    1

  • Some of our competitors have SEO errors in the thousands, yet rank much higher than us for keywords that we're targeting. The SEO errors are duplicate content, titles, and 404 errors. We've successfully nailed down much of our SEO issues to a bare minimum, although not eliminated them completely, so we're at a loss as to why we aren't gaining much ground. From what we can tell, the difference between us and them is they have a large amount of inbound links to their site plus popular social media presence. Can it be inferred from this that an active social media presence and large inbound link count outweigh bad SEO practices? What else should we be looking for to help pinpoint why we're not gaining rank with the keywords we're targeting?

    | Closetstogo
    0

  • Recently, I've launched two websites. I want to make sure I'm doing a good job monitoring our link building efforts. I'm see a lot of tools out there to supplement my use of Open Site Explorer. What I want to know is what tools I should be using to monitor my links? My ultimate goal would be to have the data to track the number of links I'm adding a month so that I can use it for reporting. There is another layer. Because the sites are new, OSE is actually not reporting any links found. I can only find reported links through Google Search Console. Any advice? Is this something where I will just have to wait for everything to get indexed?

    | JasonKhoo
    0

  • A competitor is using a weird strategy, one I know isn't legit, however it's not only helping them, but doing in with a lot of speed. I've ran their info through ahref, majestic, moz, semrush and for backlinks they have 225ish, here is their breakdown. 169 follow links from their parent distributor site ( which is located in their parent's site's footer ) and then 3 to 5 links from sites that relate to SEO, marketing, unrelated things like pocket calling article and comment spam. maybe 5 of those links are from anywhere close to a related site, and those are from spammy directories from out of country. Why would these backlinks be helping them so much, and how can I get in front of them when these craptactics are working for them? They have 250 backlinks - 25 of them are follow We have 300 backlinks - 90 are follow and from relevant sites like EPA.gov, some EDUs and related sites to our niche. Some explanations or words of wit would really be helpful here, as I feel like something isn't adding up.

    | Deacyde
    0

  • Hi There! I manage the website for a law office that covers many geographical locations. For very specific niche content, we would prefer to create one piece of content and link to the various geographic locations where we would handle that topic instead of posting multiple variations of the same content for each specific geographical area. If we put a button on these pages that has links to each location, will that have the same "link juice" effect to the pages we're linking that linking directly in the text would? (example: the Where can we help you? button on this page : http://www.zdfirm.com/volkswagen-recall/) Thank you!

    | ZDAdmin
    0

  • I understand you 'Pro's' may fins this a silly question. But I'm a visual learner and I can't seem to grasp this. I've read the pages MOZ has provided on anchor text and external links and my question is, how are they different? And which one is more important to seo?  Can someone who has a great ability to simplify things, please help me understand this. They seem very similar to me but, I know there has to be more to it. External links: External Links are hyperlinks that point at (target) any domain other than the domain the link exists on (source) **Anchor Text: **Anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web. Thanks is advance, Lauren.

    | MissThumann
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, What does Google think about a press release, appearing on lots of websites (relevant websites) as part of a link building campaign. Does the fact that this press release content is duplicated across lots of sites have a negative impact? Thanks in advance

    | A_Q
    0

  • Having worked with quite a few firms and large partnerships I have always wondered a bit about how Google or Bing approach terms like attorney or lawyer, attorneys or lawyers. Having done a lot of KWA analysis I can tell you that in some states you will have a preference for one over the other and it is rather fluid. Even when you get into specific disciplines within the law, you will see searchers favor one over the other. So, for an example you might see in Texas that divorce attorney is searched more frequently than divorce lawyer but Criminal lawyer is more prevalent over criminal attorney. Does anyone know if search engines look at attorney and lawyer as interchangeable such that if you build a page and only use lawyer you would still be able to rank as attorney, etc? I have my opinions based on experience but just thought it would be cool to hear from others. Thanks

    | RobertFisher
    3

  • Hello, A few months back our website was hacked which we noticed quickly and got fixed. However, there still is a lot of dodgy backlinks, linking to the spam pages. They come up in Webmaster Tools, Moz and SEM rush. According to the Moz Spam tool, a few of them have been given 7 flags which Moz suggests gives a 30% chance of being penalised by Google. The website has great rankings (position 1-3 in most targeted keywords) so I am scared of doing something that will harm the rankings, however I also aware that Google may do an update which could take these spam links into account. I have no experience of using the disavow tool but from reading up about it, it should only be used as a last resort. So my question is - what would you do?

    | N2Digital
    0

  • I'm doing a bit of competitor backlink auditing and am curious how you view these domains? I also am doing this for others as a comparison and growing reference maybe of domains that they can crosscheck with their own backlink profile and make sure these aren't on there, in preparation for penguin algo release to core. Either chime in with known domains to be spam, and I will create a live list based on answers here. Domain                     Domain Rating directoryworld.net     64
    prlog.ru                     60
    torchbrowser.com     60
    jzip.com                    58
    localbiznetwork.com 58
    gimpsy.com               54
    pageonepower.com  52
    nashvillelife.com       49
    2thetopdesign.com   49
    seocounsel.com       48
    healthywealthyaffiliate.com 48
    hollinslegal.com        48 On a working Disavow list either in root domain or extended url form seocourt.com
    wldirectory.com
    onpaco.com
    lostdirectory.com
    ligginit.comligginit.com
    alivedir.net
    tiptopdirectory.com
    onemilliondirectory.com
    submittolinkdirectory.com I've read that sitewide footer links even from parent company sites will only count as one, regardless of how many links they have, I was wondering if that was true as well?

    | Deacyde
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.