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.


  • Somehow we ended up getting hundreds-of-thousands of links coming from our .au (Australia site) to our .com (America site). We believe that something happened during a change that turned a handful of our example.com.au navigational and footer links into back links pointing to example.com and sub-domains of the American version. We are currently fixing this, but we are wondering if this could potentially be problematic in terms of a penguin penalty due to an unnatural linking campaign or back link scheme. Could this error create major problems for us in the near future if we have corrected the issue? Your thoughts are welcome! Thanks!

    | tdawson09
    0

  • Are keyword rich breadcrumbs still a beast practice when setting up navigation and internal links within the website?

    | OxfordDigital
    0

  • Hi - newbie question I have a customer who's had previous versions of his website. Previously it was known as "princess-interiors.co.uk" (been around for a few years) and is now "princess-design.co.uk" (been around also for a few years). New site is WordPress - what would be the best way to redirect (I have access to the previous version of the site which is still hosted). I expect it's to use 301, but how would I do that (step by step), and does www. versus non-www need addressing (and how). Really concerned, as this site has gone to zero organic visits!! Hoping somebody can help. Thanks

    | Gokart
    0

  • We cannot change the content on our website.And we have a lot of it. Where would we get the most bang for our buck: Adding lots of fresh content; Linking Content Internally in ways that make the relationship between the content more clear; Creating schemas and metatags for the content. Or something else that we haven't thought of. Our content is not really conducive to social. It is legal information. We have a Domain Authority of 61 / 100 Your help and experience is appreciated.

    | SamD1234
    0

  • I am very new to this site and need some help.  I have two spammy backlinks in my report that were done by my host provider as I hired them for SEO.  When I click on the web site there is no where to contact them.  I can only subscribe to their group and I sure don't want to do that.  Is having two ranking as an 8+ awful.  I don't know if I should do the Disavow route or not.

    | kelkolkta
    0

  • If an external site links to one of my non-indexed pages, will that still pass link juice and help with my domain authority? Thanks!

    | mztobias
    0

  • There is a individual/company that is creating lots of spam sites in my niche. It doesn't seem that they are trying to rank for any keywords, so I'm a little confused as to their purpose, but here's what they're doing. They scrape the top 10 Google results for each keyword and create a page - so if the niche is "widgets", they scrape the top 10 ranked sites for 'widgets', 'blue widgets', 'red widgets', and so on. A 'results' page is created for each keyword, which is linked from a home page. The results page always contains 10 websites - text is the site metadescription or similar. Each website gets a nofollow link back with the page title used as the anchor text. The host sites all have the keyword in the domain name - e.g www.widgetsxyz.com. The sites are thrown together but interestingly have a very crappy but individual logo (like 90's clipart). The host sites all have high DA/PA due to some very extensive link spam pointing to the sites, with very targeted keywords. There is seemingly no purpose to these sites that I can see - no other 'followed' links on the page or site. Whoever is doing this is churning out tens, if not hundreds of these sites. Any ideas what might be going on here, and whether I should be disavowing these sites (even though no follow). The fear is that they could switch the links to do follow, and get all the major players penalised in one fell swoop. ???

    | johnohara
    0

  • Hello Mozzers! Couple of days ago I received a request to start optimizing a wordpress website, the domain itself has been around for around 10-12 years so it's it can be considered as one that has real history behind it.  The page has been moved from HTML/FLASH to wordpress about 3 - 4 years ago and hasn't been any SEO maintenance on it. The site used to rank for first position with several keywords, but now understandably, it has greatly decreased. My main question would be, that when I've checked the root domain's and the subdomain's metrics with MOZ Open Site Explorer, the sub domain (with "www.") showed a PA 40 and 90 external links while the root domain (without "www.") only has 27 PA and 6 External links. I know that the 301 or server redirects only transfers about 90% of the link juice to the targeted URL but the difference between the 2 results seem way too big for me. What do you think? Is this normal?
    During future link building is it more beneficial to target the root domain so the page won't lose that "10%" by redirecting the new link from sub-domain to root domain?
    Is it possible to get more juice transferred? Thank you very much,
    Adam

    | adamdankhazi
    0

  • Long-time Moz user, first question ever! When our company is mentioned in the news, we add a blurb to our In the News section on our site. If we link to the article, is that 2-way link canceling out the benefit of the inbound link from the publication? It's a two-way link, but we aren't trading links with SEO intent or doing anything malicious. Thanks, Sean

    | Virtru
    0

  • Hi…We noticed a huge number of “fake” links to our site a couple of months ago through Webmaster Tools.  After identifying that, we tried to disavow the links, but it hasn’t worked.  It looks like a registered domain that has duplicated our entire site.  All links are coming from worldstudy.concretecorp.com.br and when you go to it, it redirects to our site.  These crazy links keep increasing (over 637,000 now!). What would be our options to get rid of them?  Thanks

    | tango123
    0

  • Hi Guys, I've got a linkpage at it has quite a high spamscore on opensiteexpolorer. The high spamscore is so high because of lots of outgoing links. The link site has do-follow links to relevant pages. My question is: Will my spamscore descrease when i set some links on no follow? Thanks!

    | Happy-SEO
    2

  • Over the past several months I have definitely received inbound links to my website ( none of which are no follow). I have HubSpot as well s Moz and none of the links are showing.  My competitors with the same link sources are showing though.   I am completely dumbfounded. Why are my inbound links not showing and how much time does it take for them to show if they show at all? Thank you!

    | NPatt
    0

  • While looking over a client’s monthly analytics, I noticed some oddities in the Links- competitive metrics.  Although my clients leads in every category, they were still trailing in “total Links” to a competitor.  That competitor has 25K links to our 1.9K. So I ran OpenSiteExplorer on the competitor and found that they had 25, 636 internal links.  This is a very basic website, with only about 50 pages.  It appears the links started building in January and just keep increasing. Anyone seen this before?  Any ideas why they would do this?

    | masonrj
    0

  • Scenario 1: I earn a link on exampleblog.root.com/example-page/. The DA is 90, but it's a brand new page so PA is 0. Subdomain is also new, zero backlinks. Scenario 2: I earn a link on root.com/example-page/. The DA is 90, PA is still new so 0 for now. My assumption is that PR will flow from the homepage through the subdirectory then ultimately to my domain. If the subdomain doesn't inherit any of the root-level metrics, then should I even be worried about the DA in scenario 1? What are the seo implications between the 2 scenarios?

    | mcelano_compassknowledge.com
    0

  • Hi Mozzers! We're a web design and dev agency in Kent, UK who don't really provide SEO services (tend to outsource and focus on our core competencies!) Have never really bothered putting 'Powered by...' or 'built by...' anchor text links at the foot of our client sites that link back to ours.  Obvs we have a huge back catalogue of opportunities to add this to various sites which, if clients agree of course, would push our backlinks above our key competitors overnight (according to OSE). Good idea or Spammy/back hattie??? Cheers guys.

    | mjs_adr
    0

  • Hey everyone, I am gathering responses from the SEO community regarding the two questions below. I will feature your (legitmate) responses as part of a study for current SEO backlink methods being used by the SEO community. There are no wrong answers. I look forward to seeing your responses and make sure to add your social profile details. 1. What is your number 1 method of acquiring high authority backlinks?
    2. What platforms/ software do you use or recommend as part of your method? Thanks, Kirk Bowlen

    | kirkbowlen
    0

  • Will adding tooltip text to al my links improve my rankings? I read some article, but it's a hell of a job to add tooltip text to al my links. i was wondering if it's worth the time: A tooltip text appears if the mouse hovers over the image or a link and is provided by using the TITLE attribute. A description of the image or the link then appears in the tooltip in a small yellow box (Internet Explorer). The TITLE text (tooltip text) gives a short description of a link or image. The difference between an ALT text and the TITLE text is that the ALT text is a short description that replaces the image if the image does not load. The number of links (internal and external) and images must be equal to the number of tooltips for every page. The number of TITLE text can be higher because ALT text can also be used for other HTML elements. Add Title texts to links or images for those which do not have them yet. Thanks!

    | Happy-SEO
    3

  • Hi there, I was wondering when asking for a link, does where on this page it is? For example will someone's high traffic website (e.g. example.com ) provide more page authority than another link on this site ( e.g. example.com/blog ). If this is the case, is it best to get links from multiple pages if possible or will this not effect SEO? Thanks

    | charliedavi
    0

  • When analyzing backlinks and trying to get the same one for another site there are a ton of backlinks to go through. I know that if the DA of the link is then pages on the site might be a good choice like adding an article or something of the sort to the site but as far a the same page goes you can typically only do this with a comment on the page. My question is, given a huge list of backlinks from multiple sites, is there an easy way to analyze the links and determine which ones I can copy without manually checking hundreds of links?

    | spyke01
    0

  • We have noticed that our competitors have links with equality from sites like this: http://www.groupon.com.au/ Scoopon type sites like this can be an effective way to generate sales for a business, I'm just wondering if these types of sites also have added value for SEO as sites like these do have a strong Domain Authority? Any thoughts on this subject would be most appreciated. Thanks!

    | Gavo
    0

  • Hi I've been studying about seo for quite a good time. I have learned about linking building, on page optimization, and so on but I in the real word all these fundamentals seems not be followed but google's algorithm and here is an example. On google.com.br (brazilian google) I'm trying to rank for the main keyword "airsoft" and its variation for the website www.qgairsoft.com.br. But the the top 1 os SERP is: http://lojaairsoft.com.br/index.php But this website doesn't follow almost any seo advice: 1. It has almost no backlinks at all 2. It has no good content (both on pages and doesn't have a blog) 3. url's are not user friendly 4. It doesn't have a mobile website 5. It has almost no presence on social media, with almost no interaction 6. It doesn't have H1 7. I doesnt have any "canonical" set 8. It has a lower DA 9. It has a lower PA 10. Moz metrics are lower 11. It is not as old as my target website... 12. .. I think you got the point. And dispite all that the website do better than my website and also better then other websites with theoretically better 'seo'. What is wrong? What I am missing? Does all these principals really matter for ranking?

    | qgairsoft
    0

  • Im about to make a deal with another site. We are going to exchange some links from some blog posts. In order to make a fair deal, I assessed some metrics for our posts. Basically, this site have better Domain Authority than my site (30 vs 25), but the page authority of their blog post in which they want to insert their links pointing to my site is 1 for each of them. On the other hand, the page authority of my blog posts they are interested in is 13. My dilema is about being resonable to set a good deal for both of us. So, my question is, which one matters the most when it comes to external links? page authority or domain authority? My intuition is that I’m in a better position than my counterpart. Thanks.

    | Autofact
    0

  • Hi, Please see the target URLs on the links in this article: http://www.nextgov.com/technology-news/tech-insider/2015/07/government-hacked-yet-again-its-time-make-government-cybersecurity-national-issue/118561/ As you can see, there is a redirect in place, presumably for tracking purposes. Do these links carry full SEO value?

    | mikekeeper
    0

  • I have an acquaintance/customer, who is a politician in Italy, he had a website under his name as domain firstnamelastname.it (where firstname and lastname are the firstname and lastname of the guy). He used it during his campaign, then he forgot about the existance and didn't pay the bill to the isp. I don't know what happen exactly, I assume someone registered it after it expired and started using it for some fraudulent purpose, because checking the backlink profile I can see the first backlinks from 2013 are legit and coming from relevant sources (local newspapers), but all the following 300+ links are spam, using keywords like "louis vuitton", "ralph lauren", and so on... Right now the domain is in status "deleted", so I could just register it again, disavow the spammy links and had recycle it. But I am scared as hell. I never had to disavow a single link in all my life, and I don't know if it is going to really clean up the domain from any possible google penalization. Is it?

    | max.favilli
    0

  • I have been using the moz open site explorer tool and glancing at my competition. I noticed most sites if not all in the linking domains section have a link to there own site. How do i do this? On my site i have no established links and my score is only 1/1. Even with lower ranking sites that have there own site linking to there self have a 16/16. Any help would be appreciated I am pretty new to all of this. thanks

    | unlimitedairbrush
    0

  • Hi Guys. Just wondering about this idea that links from Charities are particularly good.  I've heard people say that links from .org sites are particularly strong.  But anyone can get a .org domain, it's just that charities tend to use them more often.  Right? I just don't get the logic. Can anyone give more detail about this?  Is it a myth?  Is there quality info on this topic I can check out? We're working with several charities at the moment, and they all seem happy to blog and link to us...so I just wanted to know a little more. Isaac.

    | isaac663
    0

  • So, I get the smoothie that is page authority and domain authority and the link metrics that Moz uses to predict how well a page will rank for a certain keyword. I can look at a specific search term where we are on say, page 2 or 3, with a page authority of 1 and domain authority of 26, I get why competitors rank above us. But then I look at a keyword that is much more competitive, where we rank #2, which is awesome, where the landing page is also showing a page authority of 1, and domain authority of 26. How can we rank higher than competitors with a page authority of 56 and domain authority of 65? Their onpage optimization for the keyword is no worse, and sometimes better that ours but we maintain this ranking. By the way the competition also have hundreds if not thousands more linking root domains than our page. Any ideas why one keyword is a rockstar and one is a dud, with the same poor PA and DA?

    | seo-lab
    1

  • Just noticed a huge spike on one of our How To articles and found that a Lifehacker article used our article as a reference and linked back to it. Is there anything I can to to maximize the link juice from this backlink?

    | mr_w
    1

  • Hi everyone, I have a wedding blog I submit posts to on a monthly basis for a link back. One of the staff said to change the first 200 character and I can post it on my own blog with no duplicate content penalty. Any thoughts? Best wishes. David.

    | WallerD
    0

  • There are numerous "Ultimate Guides" to linkbuilding, outreach, etc., and they are all written to teach you the art of linkbuilding. The only thing these guides don't tell you is that following them takes a massive amount of time and doesn't guarantee to get good links at all. We're all in online marketing, and maybe we online marketeers are familiar with linking to other websites, posts that we like, etc. and maybe that's why we can write these guides but in other niches it really doesn't work that way 🙂 I'm wondering what techniques/tactics/strategies you guys are using in less straightforward niches to get quality links to your blogposts. To give you an idea, we launched an article a couple of weeks ago targeting a very competitive keyword. The article got shared over 100 times on LinkedIn/Twitter/etc. and already ranking pretty good, but REAL backlinks are still missing. How to get people to link to that article?

    | jorisbrabants
    0

  • Hello All - I'm working on a content strategy for a large natural products company. In general it's difficult for articles about the natural products industry written written on commercial company sites to show up in the SERP. Most of the results come from large educational sites and blogs with no obvious affiliation (or products for sale). This company also owns an educational site - one that would be much easier to get content on the first page of the SERP for. The 2 sites are hosted on the same server. My question is - does this website relationship look fishy? Is it a grey area to create content for the educational site - content where the purpose is #1 education, but #2 - to promote products from the main site and send traffic to the main site. I do think it's important to note that the main company site does not actual sell any products there (products are sold on Amazon and on shelves in stores). I appreciate your thoughts!

    | JBMediaGroup
    0

  • i have two web site same subject but two different name how can i direct ?

    | fabric-fabric
    0

  • Hi All, I post coupons on coupon sites a month ago and when I checked backlinks of my website I saw approx 1000 links coming from coupon sites on my Brand Name. IMO it is quite natural please share your views. *All the big brands listed on that coupon sites e.g amazon, dell etc Thanks

    | Alick300
    1

  • Hi All, Just wondering when Moz shows the number of inbound links to a site - does it count links which have been disavowed? Thanks guys! Laura

    | Citybase
    0

  • Link building is the hardest aspect that we, and I'm sure most SEO companies, deal with. I've been looking into a company called Linkredible (https://linkredible.com) that provides link building services that are supposedly pretty "natural." Their explanations and service descriptions all seem to make sense, but I definitely don't want to do anything that could cause link penalties for my clients. Has anybody used this company or any similar services that could give me some input?

    | garrettkite
    0

  • We have recently updated all our product page titles on our website to something more descriptive for our Google Shopping campaign. This was what was recommended we do by the folks at Google. Doing this causes all of the URLs for the products to reflect this change. The structure is as such: https://ourwebsite.com/bulbs/product_id/title. Now when Moz provides us with our weekly crawl report we see a load of duplicate page content errors (roughly the same amount as the number of product pages). I don't quite see this as a coincidence so it must be a consequence of having updated the titles. My question is why is Moz still crawling our older links? We no longer link to any of the pages with the older URLs so why are they conflicting?

    | TrueluxGroup
    0

  • Hello I want a question about forum signature backlink. Suppose I join a forum having following categories: A B C and the C category is relavant to my niche like for example the C category is about SEO and I want to build a website about SEO and want to put link in the signature for that webiste. So can i consider it as relevant category for my niche??? although the category A and B are not relevant to my niche and also I will not post in them???

    | tanveerayakhan
    0

  • I find it hard to recognize unnatural link patterns when the links to my site are so familiar.  It can be hard to see the wood for the trees!  How many links from one site is too many?  Does it depend on the size of the site?  Thanks for your advice on this.

    | T0BY
    0

  • Hi guys, I've been scouting the web and the SEOmoz forum to look for a way to check the Mozrank and/or Moztrust of urls in Google docs or Excel. I know Chris Le wrote a post about this but I want to check ~ 2000 links. Is there a way to do this easily in a spreadsheet? Regards.

    | StephWeigert
    2

  • Hello, My website using SSL . My root domain : example.com is permanent 301 redirect to https://example.com via .htaaccess Question : 1 - If i want get backlinks from other websites is backlinks should point my https domain or non https domain. Is there any difference for ranking? 2 - if someone give backlinks to my non https domain Is there any value for https for ranking? 3 - Before i begin use SSL , backlinks in the past which i get for ** Http**, Is there a value for https ? Thank you, Sorry for bad English

    | livecam
    0

  • Hey all, I'm in need of some serious inspiration and I'm hoping one of you generous people can help. We're looking to do a spot of link building for an eCommerce site which I would describe (without putting it down too much) as 'boring'. This isn't our fault per se as the site sells printer cartridges and there's only a certain amount of excitement such a product can create. As a result natural linkbuilding is quite tricky, especially when it comes to creating links to anything other than our homepage. For the past couple of years we have focused on creating good content and indeed have a thriving database of hundreds of helpful articles and videos on the site. These are generating decent traffic (and rank #1 for many different help related search terms) but the problem with these articles is that they don’t convert in to sales at all well. I’m also conscious that it will ultimately end in us developing a link profile which would classify us as a printer repair resource rather than cartridge sales website. I have read numerous guides on Moz but they all tend to focus on products which are a little sexier than those that we sell. Getting someone to share and link to a truly unique product would be incredibly easy compared with asking someone to engage, share and link to the latest Epson cartridge. I started writing articles on some decent quality business blogs however the links given don’t look particularly natural and the link would always be to our homepage. We have the staff and the time but we built a whole host of rubbish links back before Penguin and I want to ensure that we are going to head in the right direction before embarking on something new. If you had a site which was really dull how would you devise a link building strategy that was relevant and, most importantly, natural? Thanks for your help. Chris

    | ChrisHolgate
    1

  • We have a relevant external website that is linking to our site through an image. What ideally should the alt text of this image be? Should it just be non-commercial as generally advised with the anchor text of an external link? Or should it include where suitable relevant keywords? Keen to know people's thoughts here! Thanks.

    | Gavo
    0

  • Hi pals, like the title says I know an author of the huffington post that will write a related article to my website and give me a genuine permanent link. But... he wants me to pay him $1000 for the link and the article. Do you think it's work it? Would YOU pay that price for a link like this??

    | ptiworldmoz
    0

  • Hi everyone, Hope you are all doing well. If a company owns several different websites that are supposed to be different brands but are part of the same niche/sector is it OK to link between them? Or would this be seen as violation? Thanks

    | National-Homebuyers
    0

  • Hi I'm a little curious as to what the lastest guidelines are for sponsored posts by Google? The writer blurb at the bottom of an article is of course ok, but what about companies who pay money to another company to have a fantastic piece written "with a link" but with no evidence who the writer is?! Thanks Gary

    | GaryVictory
    2

  • Hi all, Google has made it clear that it considers links built through press release sites as manipulative link building and one can assume that they refer in this context to press release sites that exist only for SEO reasons. But it is also possible to receive a link in a press agency dispatch such as Reuters, afp etc. In this case, a site might receive dozens or even hundreds of links that have many characteristics of spammy links because they are from pages with identical content they have identical anchor text, which might even be a money keyword there are usually no canonical tags on the referring pages they appear in a matter of hours or a few days On the other hand of course, the links will appear on very reputable sites, as these are regular media sites. Do you know any case studies that look at this issue? Did you experience it yourself? It just happened to me. I got even two links (both to my site's homepage) in a dispatch the first link has a four word expression as anchor text that is not really related to the topic of my site. The linked page now is search result #24 for this expression the second link has my brand name as anchor text, which does include a money keyword No warnings in Webmastertools so far. Should I worry or even go as far as disallowing these links? Thanks for sharing your experience and opinion!

    | gstlt
    0

  • Hi, I have been doing SEO on my business website for about 4 years now. And it ranks #1-3 for my desired keywords and i always try to add new backlinks and keep uploading new content to a blog on the site as this is where nearly 100% of our customers come from so its important to me to rank high for the keywords related to my industry. However the last few months a competitor has taken over me for a certain keyword, i have researched their backlinks and site and from what i can see they have less content, and less backlinks, onpage seo isnt that great, and alot of the backlinks arent even related where all mine are in the same industry and i always research my backlinks to make sure that site has good backlinks also (i currently have about 48 root domain and 12,000 page backlinks for various pages of my website). The only thing they have over me is domain age, their domain is about 10 years old. I am also trying to target another hard to get keyword that im currently on Page 3 for, im sure over time i will rise to the top and its something i have to keep working at however i feel i wont get to where i want to be because im running out of ideas on where to get backlinks. After 4 years of building backlinks i feel like i have hit a brick wall, i started out by directory submission, then just links from other related sites, then i did a few article submissions and then i started finding it hard to get links so i started buying related links, however i seem to just keep buying and buying because im running out of ideas and it feels easier just to buy them, the only problem is its getting expensive and im now probably spending $80/month on paid backlinks! Although considering im not paying an SEO company its still a lot cheaper! I have gotten to the point where im researching sites that arent even in my industry (however still automotive related) and getting links on sites their on which was going really well,  but now even that feels like its coming to an end and im back to submitting to directories their on. So other then directories, paid links, articles etc. what else could i be doing to build quality backlinks? I stopped doing articles because they were so time consuming and i felt like i was only getting backlinks from them that were worthless and held no authority. I have about 4 blogs (all on different IPs) would it be worth blogging on them and building content and dropping links from those to mine or is it not worth the effort when i could just submit articles to article websites?

    | defyet
    0

  • Hi SEO Mozers, As I structure my link building campaign I come across alot of directories some of which are located on the same server. If I am to place links on these sites is this is negative signal for big G? The reason I ask is because I see that a competitor has used these various directories and is ranking on the no 1 spot for a moderately competetive keyword. I am able to place links on the sites with almost no effort at all therefore even if it does not pass alot of link juice is it still worth it for me. But if this is seen as a negative I would not persue it. What is your thoughts on this? Thanks in advance, Ross

    | rtavs
    0

  • Hi, All! This is for any foreign language SEOs where articles or prepostitions such as "the" "to" "in" or anything else are actually part of the word they are modifying and not a separate word, as in English: How does Google understand those words on-page and in anchor text?  If you want to optimize for the word "house", and your content/anchor text says "the house" or "in the house" (again, all one word) - what does Google count that as?  Does it count toward "house"?  Does it count toward "in the house" only?  Does it count toward "house" but not as much as if you had just put "house"? I end up sometimes writing slightly grammatically-off content because I want to optimize for the keyphrase - but is that necessary? Obviously different languages might be different, but you can probably project a little from one to the others. Thanks in advance!

    | debi_zyx
    0

  • Hi, I've recently changed domains and have redirected all traffic from the old site to the new one. The problem is that none of my built links for the old domain are showing up for the new domain (I use moz.com/researchtools/ose/) I've read a few articles saying it's best practice to get in touch with the people that are linking to your old website to let them know the address has changed. When I search for my old domain using moz.com/researchtools/ose/ it says there is 0 established links. I know this isn't the case as I've visited one of the sites that does still list this domain. Is there a way of getting a list of my old domain's backlinks so I can contact them? I didn't make a list before redirecting. Thank you.

    | charliedavi
    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.