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Category: Link Building

Chat through link building best practices and outreach techniques.

  • Hyrule


    I'm currently using OSE to find out where some of my competitors are getting links.  The intention is to find new link opportunities. What i'm finding is A LOT of directories. It seems like for every 1 good link opportunity I'm getting 9 directories. These directories are easy links, but my main worry is quality. Should I be obtaining these links or skip over them?

    | Hyrule
    0
  • TRCCommunications


    Sorry if it is obvious, but I can't seem to figure it out. I'd like to be able to run a report that will list all of the back links on every page of my site.

    | TRCCommunications
    0
  • itrogers


    I have a prospective client looking to do SEO- they are a charity and have a fixed one time budget. (The budget is surprisingly high) They are looking to have their site ranked for "charities in (our city)" and "dental charities" and any keyword variations. Adwords shows significant search volume and ranking difficulty is moderate per SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool. On page will be fairly simple and well handled, but am looking more towards the authority and link building. I am going to tackle 3 top quality directories, Yahoo, BOTW, and Business.com (as well as DMOZ but i've never had luck). But was wondering if there were any other nationally recognized sources that mozzers know about that would be a good place to start to get some links to the site. The organization is a clinic that provides free dental work to veterans. I have never handled SEO for a charity before, and my first instinct is that getting a link to the site will be much easier to get than if I ask them to give money to the foundation, so they would be glad to do it. Any other guidance would be appreciated. And I can give more details if necessary. Any other tips and insight would be appreciated. Thank you! Ian

    | itrogers
    0
  • waynekolenchuk


    I've been using spreadsheets to track my link-building efforts and am looking for a better way to do this. Does anyone have suggestions?

    | waynekolenchuk
    0
  • Team


    Hi there, I would like to compare the current volume of inbound links to our website with the past, to see the growth. Is there a way to do this? Thanks, Heath

    | Team
    0
  • MWM3772


    Any thoughts on using companies like Text Link Ads (www.textlinkads.com) to do link building?   Seems a bit dangerous to me, but if the articles are decent and relevant -- can it hurt you? Any thoughts would be appreciated.   Thanks. MM

    | MWM3772
    0
  • allyteal


    Hello, Here is my situation - i'm number 10 for a moderate keyword and i want to rank higher . Using the Open Site Explorer i studied the links of 12 competitors and noticed the following : There are only 2 sites that are doing 100% white hat - one of them is on first page only because has a big,big domain autority, the other because is a brand name. The rest of my competitors are on first page using  directory submissions (i discovered 200+ directories - and not counting those that are not indexed.), buying links (for ex check these 2 :http://www.dentistsburbank.com/links , http://www.dentistinaustin.com/links/ - there are 50+ more sites like this), spam forums and article submissions. For my site i tried to get only quality links, tried link bait, quality articles - etc(and this for more that 18 months). Unfortunately it seems that my efforts are not enough(seems that links from military.com are not enough to beat 200 low quality directories) and i want to ask the community what should i do. Shall i invest in directory submissions (it will cost around $1500) ? If not in directories in what shall i invest the money ? Are there any companies able to create successful link baits ? Shall i report the paid links hoping that Google will take action ? Any other ideas 🙂

    | allyteal
    0
  • visionnexus


    I know traditional link exchanges aren't very valuable and Google doesn't respect them as much, but what about 3-way link exchanges?

    | visionnexus
    0
  • JeffFerraro


    Hi everyone, I love this community and have a question: I recently read the textbook Art of SEO which was written by some of the creators of this community.  In that book, there is a chapter on link building.  Within that chapter, they discuss social media sites and how to leverage them. In that section, they refer to this article: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/22-dofollow-social-media-sites-offering-profile-links.html. This article gives 22 social media sites that it says if you simply sign up, make a profile, and have your profile point to your web site, there will be a benefit because these sites profile sections DoFollow links. My question is: Is there a tool that can tell me whether or not these 22 sites still DoFollow links?  Or at least if there profile section does pass link juice?  Any advise is greatly appreciated. Sincerely, Jeffrey Ferraro

    | JeffFerraro
    0
  • joemas99


    Does anyone know of situations i can look up where Google penalized a site because of press release pages (hosted on a non owned major site like prweb or whatever), where the prweb page obtained back links from a group of sites that Google felt was part of a "farm"?

    | joemas99
    0
  • simon-145328


    Does anyone have any knowledge/thoughts on how leading newswire sites have been effected by Google's latest updates, i.e. Panda? To date this has been a method (alongside others) I have sucessfully used to build links, but the results of late have not been as good for some clients and I'm beginning to question how effective this is - so I would be very interested to hear anyone else's experiences in this area?

    | simon-145328
    0
  • petersen


    Regarding link building, what counts the most in terms of PR and relevance(topic). Is it whether, the link comes from a domain/page with high domain/page rank or that the link come from a domain with similar/relevant content? I know, we should always aim to get links from domains with both relevance and good page rank. But which is most important? For example: If we have a web site about swiss made watches. Should i focus on getting links from other domains with information about swiss made watches. Or can i achieve just as good link juice, by getting links from un-related web sites with high PR? We will of course get more qualified traffic from related domains. But from a pure search ranking, what plays the biggest factor?

    | petersen
    0
  • WCR


    Is there still any SEO value of paid press releases services, such as PRWEB which let you embed keyword text links? Or would the associated cost be better spent elsewhere? Thanks

    | WCR
    0
  • diguno


    I am working on optimizing a client site that was launched in January of 2011. A number of back links are starting to show up when I do a competitive link analysis, however in Google WMT the only IBLs that are showing up are from the non-www of the domain, even though I have a 301 redirect from danwilson.ca to www.danwilson.ca (and has since the site launched). I also have verified the non-www version with WMT and declared the perfered domain as www.danwilson.ca. Any ideas why the non-www domain links are being shown as inbound links by Google WMT rather than internal links. This likely means the site is getting dinged for duplicate content...

    | diguno
    0
  • robertrRSwalters


    I am sure most of you have asked yourself the question I'm asking right now.. Where have all my links gone? I am starting to get twitchy now. I would estimate we have lost around 60% of our links in the past 3 weeks. Does anyone have any comeback stories? Feel like I am back to the start again. I have made a number of changes on the site not least removing a reciprical link page.. that had over 200 links on it but from reading one of Rand's tweets is it true that linking out could be good again?

    | robertrRSwalters
    0
  • seanmccauley


    If I write an article on Ezine Articles, it has a page authority of 1. I guess this is to be expected until that page is crawled, but is it actually worth writing these articles? Does the DA 'count' for anything here? Can I ever expect the PA to increase? (unless I build links to the article - in which case I may as well spend that time building links to my site)

    | seanmccauley
    0
  • ecnic


    Hi, In the industry I am working in (education), we do have a lot of portals offering paid listings (for example profiles featuring a school, the courses you offer, sometimes with reviews etc). Almost all big competitors and big names normally do have these kind of listings. Besides from having to decide if these sites really bring the relevant conversions, I am wondering about their impact on SEO. An example for an offer:
    Our Top Picks listing is a 40 word listing and logo we put on any 30 pages of our web site, example.com for 12 months, for $595 US. You can choose the pages you want, or we can put you on all our [category] pages, or certain continents/countries you want to target. Now, I am wondering: Do I have to worry about my linking profile ? (All of sudden a bunch of links with the exact same anchortext and content embedding to our site?) Or can I just decide to go with a paid listing based on the link value the page offers me? Looking forward to reading what you think!
    Nicole

    | ecnic
    0
  • dunklea


    Like many of you, I've spent a lot of time in Open Site Explorer analyzing our links and our competitors, and looking for more linking opportunities. Recently we've been focusing our SEO efforts on gaining links from high value .edu domains and so far we've been very successful. The DA of these links are high (80+), but the links are also coming through on low PA pages (typically 10-35). Are these links still worth while? When does a link not become worth it?

    | dunklea
    0
  • joemas99


    let's say I own 20 sites, all non duplicate content and Google sees that some of them has linked to sites that they consider a "farm" or other violation. So they give penalties to those sites. What happens with the other sites and how can I keep sites the most independent? For ex: These are my questions... Will google follow no follow links to see that they are connected to the good sites and penalize them? If they are all part of google anaylitics with good and bad sites, will google attack them all? Will google look at the owner of all the sites and connect them that way/ I need to know the extent Google connect site owners for penalizing. please only answer with knowledge, and if you can supply specific links, that would be great too, thanks.

    | joemas99
    0
  • SparkplugDigital


    If a site has a Google toolbar PR of 2 and a Mozrank of 5, does that most likely mean that the site is penalized and a link would probably provide little value. I know that Google rarely updates toolbar PR so I suppose the site could have also earned a lot of quality links since the last update. Thanks Mozzers!

    | SparkplugDigital
    0
  • superTallDan


    I used to see URL's in the signature part of discussion forum posts covering various topics but it does not seem popular anymore.  It seems like a good way to build links and I am wondering why it is not used. Suppose I ask a question about proper tooth brushing technique on the forum at "toothbrushingforum.com" and user "ToothBrushWizard" is nice enough to answer my question.  I used to see signatures like this: Good luck,
    ToothBrushWizard
    www.ToothBrushWizard.com Is this considered poor taste or are these links discounted by the search engines?  Is it best to keep an updated profile with your URL and hope that forum users click through to it?

    | superTallDan
    0
  • SparkplugDigital


    If you badge program becomes really successful, can too many badge links hurt your rankings? Since they are image links that are often placed in the sidebar of blogs, could Google mistake badges as do-follow ads and apply a penalty?

    | SparkplugDigital
    0
  • modparent


    Without giving all of your secrets away, what are your basic link building tactics? I'm trying to do everything legit, but man is it tough to get links from legit sites. This is the first time I've truly had to go out and build links. I am trying to partner with bloggers in my industry to post a review of our site and submitted to some of the major paid directories and stuff like that, but I'm curious to know what the pro's do.

    | modparent
    0
  • TKIGWebTeam


    The title of the question asks it all. One site I currently work on has a handful of blog posts that rank really well in the SERPS for certain "long-tail" searches. Would it be worth the time to, when I have it, to go back and edit the blogs little by little to help with SEO and building some links throughout the site to get people where we need them to go? Basically "sprucing" up the blog posts to make them more readable, more engaging and help some link building efforts within the domain. Thoughts?

    | TKIGWebTeam
    1
  • aafpitadmin


    We're hoping to restructure the Past Issues pages for the online version of our twice-monthly medical journal.  Right now the Current Issue page (sort of a truncated table of contents) gets replaced twice each month, when a new issue is available. The current location of for our past issues page is shown below: Home Page > News & Journals > Journals > American Family Physician > Past Issues Under Past Issues, there is a page for each year. 2011 - 2010 - 2009 - etc (back to 1998). Is there an advantage to putting all of the Past Issues on a single page? This would be 24 issues per year, which is just over 250 links on a single page and it would grow by 24 each year. I'll attach a couple of screen shots of ideas I'm considering. One is an expandable navigation using jQuery for each year, listing all Past Issues on a single page. The other is making the links to the 3 most recent issues available in the left nav across all Past Issues pages. Do you have other suggestions for how we might structure this? cydxG.png PDXT9.png

    | aafpitadmin
    0
  • EGOL


    I've been waiting for Matt Cutts to talk about this for a long time... finally a YouTube video! "Should you syndicate your articles out to sites such as ezinearticles.com as a way to build links?" He discussed this from an SEO perspective and does not recommend it.  I thought that he was way too polite about it... but if you are a guy like him it isn't good to talk trash about the specifics. One topic that he didn't address was how article marketing can impact your competitive position.  It feeds existing competitors and creates new competitors.  You write twenty articles and they are each published by twenty sites, now there are 400 pages with your keywords out there competing against you.  Not smart, IMO. Here's the link to the video... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xP-pTmlpY&NR=1

    | EGOL
    4
  • inhouseninja


    Does anyone know if it is still worth it  getting a link from a page on a site with a really low Page Authority  - say a news page on a site that has an SEO Moz tool bar PA of  just 1 or 2, but the domain of the site has a high DA like say 83 Is this worth getting?? Thanks

    | inhouseninja
    0
  • MarieHaynes


    I'm looking at a competitor who outranks me and I see that some of their top links are several links from different dmoz categories.  Is it common practice to get into several dmoz categories?  I always thought you could just have your site in there once!

    | MarieHaynes
    0
  • SparkplugDigital


    I came across a website that at first looks like an informational site, but they also have a directory. On their directory page, it says that if you would like a link placed in our directory email [email protected]. Do you think Google would consider this a purchased link or a directory link? Can people get away with selling links on your site if you framed it as a "directory"?

    | SparkplugDigital
    0
  • waynekolenchuk


    I use a social media plugin to link my blog to my social media profiles, and there is an option to make these links nofollow. I'm not worried about losing link juice to my social profiles. Is there any advantage in this case to using nofollow?

    | waynekolenchuk
    0
  • gregster1000


    For a link profile to look natural what percentage of all root domains should link to your homepage compared to deep pages? Thanks

    | gregster1000
    0
  • anand2010


    I never used link exchange yet in our link building practices i want to know is after Google Panda updates etc. is link exchange with good SEOMOz rank good niche sites still effective or not ? If yes what shall be the points which i shall remember while doing the start link exchange.

    | anand2010
    0
  • RiceMedia


    A client owns around 10 different domains, each a slightly different version of their company name.  The main site is itself a new domain, therefore they'd like to know what the implications of redirecting the 10 other domains to the main one would be. Any thoughts?  I have never done this before, so interested to know whether a) there's any benefit and b) if there is a penalty for implementing too many domain 301s. Thanks.

    | RiceMedia
    0
  • Store21


    I currently have a Wordpress blog set up on a subdomain i.e blog@ etc.  I wanted to know whether the links from the blog to my main site carry any value.

    | Store21
    0
  • Falconberg


    I'd like to get everyone's thoughts about the minimum quality/authority thresholds that you look for in link-building. What is the minimum PA/mR/mT/DA/DmR/DmT that you like to see before investing time in acquiring a link? At what point is the link not worth the effort (or, in the case of a directory listing, the cost) of acquiring it?

    | Falconberg
    0
  • Francisco_Meza


    When the last linkscape update happened, I saw a new incoming link from USA Today Travel. SeoMoz rates the link as a 9.5 for DA and PA is 24. The article was written by someone from Demand Media. I tried contacting the author to work out a deal. Since I did not receive a response, I investigated Demand Media myself.  They are a large group of content writers. I have finished building the site and now I'm in the link building process for highly competitive keywords. My 2 Questions: I can write articles all freakin day about what I do. I NEED to build links. Should I become a freelancer for Demand Media? I don't care about the pay because I am well paid. Is there anything to be concerned about with the Panda Update? All responses are appreciated. Please give me a thumbs up if you found this question interesting (because apparently some other post says nobody gives thumbs up)

    | Francisco_Meza
    1
  • Jeepster


    "... an image link with no alt tag is useless to search engines..." according to a Nov 2007 seomoz blog post. Is this still the case in 2011? I ask because I'm about to obtain a banner link on a high-traffic site (chiefly for the clickthrough value) but I notice the site uses neither "title" nor "alt" tags.

    | Jeepster
    0
  • TRICORSystems


    I currently work for a contract manufacturing company so when I think about building links it seems as if it's going to be a daunting task. Mainly because any kind of content that you can come up with is rather dry. When I go about searching for links I usually run into a lot of directories that charge anywhere between $25-$50 for a listing. I've had a hard time convincing marketing that we should start a blog which may be a good way to build some links if we come up with quality posts but those posts may be few and far inbetween. Does anybody have any recommendations for building links for this type of company or subject matter? Also, and I'm sure we have all heard this. When I mentioned the fact that we should be building some quality links to the site marketing first asked why and then commented "Well that shouldn't take you too long". Why is it so difficult to get management to accept the fact that managing a website is an ongoing and constantly changing process that involves research and experimentation?

    | TRICORSystems
    0
  • jmansd


    If pages get moved and 301s are in place is it still important to update the anchor text links to the new page url? For example would it be optimal to go through old blog posts and change the urls for the anchor text if the old anchor text url redirects to the new page url.

    | jmansd
    0
  • qlkasdjfw


    Hi, Is a natural link profile a ranking signal? What is the value in a natural link profile? What is a (natural?) link graph? Is Majestic SEO the only company capable of visualizing a link graph? (I know the answers to these questions but I want to hear what SEOMoz has to say in the quasi-official standards of SEOMoz Q/A) Regards,

    | qlkasdjfw
    0
  • DavidKonigsberg


    Do "Sponsored Posts"  links get discounted by google? A feture post that is tagged by the site as "featured' or "sponsored" are they discounted as paid links by google?

    | DavidKonigsberg
    0
  • JessicaCox


    If you only had 8 hours to work on an SEO project... How would you spend your time to get the fastest results? On-page optimization, or link-building? Context: On-Page Optimization: "A" grade (SEOMOZ On-Page Report Card) Keywords: "moderately competitive" (SEOMOZ Keyword Difficulty Tool) Domain Authority: 33 (SEOMOZ Competitive Link Analysis)

    | JessicaCox
    0
  • GAZ09


    Hi there, I am looking to build an array of links inot my website so help with good google pressence. Does any one know of any good and reputable linking companies that are really good at building links? Any help would be great Thanks guys Gareth

    | GAZ09
    0
  • espenjo_mamut


    Hi all, I'm managing the seo for a hosting company. We have a lot of parked domains with a parked domain page. This will now be updated to promote our products. When this page is updated it will give 50k+ of low quality links to specific pages almost overnight. We curently don't have a very good seo ranking for our keywords, so there is little risk on the downside in the short term. Do you have any suggestions as to how I should go about this? Some alternatives off the top of my head: 1. get the page up an focus all the link equity on relevant pages with keywords in anchor text 2. add noindex / nofollowto all pages or only part of them to avoid puishment 3. add noindex /  to the majority of the pages and "release" a percentage every week or so to avoid a "link bomb" Thanks for any and all input!

    | espenjo_mamut
    0
  • musillawfirm


    So I'm doing a lot of link building but my question is how do search engines treat different link titles to the same page. For example, my main page is www.musillawfirm.com If I have 20 links from 20 sites linking to it as Melbourne FL DUI Lawyer and 20 more linking as Melbourne FL immigration Lawyer  and More linking as Cocoa FL DUI lawyer etc... what happens? Do the search engines just rank me higher for all the terms or would it be better to always just link to separate landing pages? Thanks in advance

    | musillawfirm
    0
  • onlinemediadirect


    I Use Blog roll links all the time but recently they seem to be having a lower effect on listings. Is there a limit on Blog roll links you place on a blog. Internal blog roll links and external blog roll links. Also do you rename your blog roll to something such as popular links like we do ?

    | onlinemediadirect
    1
  • monetize-266006


    Our company has a blog "feature" or "theme" that we'd like to publish every week at least. Should we create a subsection of our current company blog? Or should we register a new domain specifically for the feature? The latter would allow us to do some linking back to the main website, and would probably be good in terms of future career flexibility / personal branding for whoever writes it. Things to keep in mind? Anyone have any suggestions? Best practices? What should I do?

    | monetize-266006
    0
  • AppNeta


    Right now our site has a score of 0 for domain link analysis and i dont know how to fix this. Please let me know. Thanks!

    | AppNeta
    0
  • hareedy


    I know it's strange but this what happened : i had like to 3500 Backlinks from 600 different domains and in one week it droped to 700 backlinks from 260 Domains .. I believe these huge backlinks was there for just 6 or 7 weeks from directory submissions where i was nearly in all the directories sidebar as a new link .. Now my ranking droped from 1st position for more than 6 keywords( for more than a year ) .. to the 5th and 6th page where its just jumbing in the different positions for more than 10 days now and this for all Keywords .. and my question is it a google dance cause i used to has a good ranking with this few number of links and this huge number was there for just 6 weeks .. or shall i go wild to come back to this number of backlinks again ..

    | hareedy
    0
  • EricVallee34


    I'm working on a wordpress blog, /www.athleticfoodie.com, and I'd like to change the names of the categories so that I include keywords. If I change the current category name of "Healthy Recipes" to "Recipes for Athletes" will I lose the inbound links associated with the category and/or posts?  Is there a way to prevent this?

    | EricVallee34
    0

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