How to detect which is a bad link ?
-
Hi..
Our Link Builders at office collects the lists for directories, social bookmarking websites and press releases, article directories.
But Im not sure, which all are good links, etc, since I dont get time to check.
Is there a way, I can train them to know, which is a bad link, so they can just ignore that link ?
-
This is a great tool, it will show you not only the sites they are linking to, but the sites that the sites they are linking to are linking to, if that makes sense.lol
This has false negatives, like "sussex" gets flagged for "sex" so you need to read between the lines, but it's extremely valuable to tell at a glance if the site you are interested in getting a link from is linking to bad places such as adult, meds or casino sites.
-
Great! Now, I have an idea to clean our lists then. Thanks.
-
How to detect which is a bad link ?
The first step is defining what makes a link "bad". Everyone can agree a link which violates a search engine's terms and has a risk of getting the site penalized is bad. Your link builder should be intimately familiar with Google's Technical and Quality Guidelines.Any site which violates those guidelines should be avoided.
Another thought is links which do not add any positive value to a site should be avoided. One strategy is to install Google's toolbar and any page with a PR of 0 should not be used. There is a strong change the site has been penalized. Toolbar PR is updated only once every 3-4 months so it is not a great tool, but it can still help.
If you use the SEOmoz search you will find there are articles which relate to link building published almost on a monthly basis. A good WBF on the topic: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-link-farming
In short, you know what good links look like. Links from reputable sites such as the New York Times, Time Magazine, government organizations like the FDA, authentic colleges such as UCLA, etc are great links to earn. You also know what bad links like. Link exchanges, paid links, penalized sites, spammy sites, low quality (most) link directories, etc. are bad links.
The challenge link builders face is their job is to build links but quality is always going to have a measure of subjectivity to it. A link builder is always seeking to boost their numbers, meanwhile if you do a bad job of link building you can cause a site to be penalized and removed from Google's index. You can also cause a situation where a lesser penalty is incurred meaning only particular pages or links are penalized. The client may lose a lot of traffic and not even realize it because the impact is not site wide. If you do realize the error, it can be difficult to fix because in many cases the link can't simply be removed so you need to bury it with good links (i.e. build 10 good links for every bad one).
Treat link building like marketing. When a link builder reaches out to the community and becomes a genuine part of it by becoming known in a positive manner, they have the opportunity to earn quality links. Spending time looking for blogs which do not nofollow comments, forums which offer followed links, article directories, free directories, link exchanges, footer links, etc. is mostly a complete waste of time. Links of such low quality that OSE cannot see them are mostly a waste of time. Clients want links which can potentially improve their traffic, and the link you just earned from a PR8 chinese web blog who allow followed comments isn't going to help with that goal. Google already decided before you found the blog site the link was of no value, but the link builder still builds the link and pats themselves on the back for their good "find', the client pays for the link, but receives no value.
How to detect a bad link? Put on your marketing hat and ask yourself if a search engine did not exist, is this a link I desire for traffic? If the answer is yes, it is a good link. If the answer is no, there is a strong likelihood you should look elsewhere for your link.
-
The easiest thing to do is to download a SEO plugin for Firefox or Chrome. SEOmoz actually has a really good. Once that is downloaded and they start looking into good sites to link build with, you need to explain to them the importance of quality. A lot of companies are not putting their time into finding quality and it will eventually down grade you. Maybe for a short term it will do well, but in the long run it will not. The ones I look at are inbound links, domain authority, linking domains, and domain trust. I make sure that they are all good. After I find a good site, I make sure that the site has follow links. If you have Chrome, there's an awesome really easy tool called SEO for chrome that allows you to click a button and it will highlight those that are not follow links. I have this permanently on. THe last thing I check is that the page where my link is going to go also has a good page authority/page rank. This is also really important.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ran a backlink competitor analysis and found that the competitor has their links coming from various linkedin and youtube posts but my client does the same thing and im not seeing any links coming from those sources for them?
Ran a backlink competitor analysis and found that the competitor has their links coming from various linkedin and youtube posts but my client does the same thing and im not seeing any links coming from those sources for them?
Link Building | | Stongex0 -
Internal linking dilemma
My company is running a submission contest. All submissions will live on the the main contest page. When clicked, each submission will open up into their own page (with a unique URL). Each submission will also have internal links pointing to a few relevant product pages. My question: Say we receive 1,000 submissions. Is it better to have internal links from 1,000 unique, lower authority submission pages? Or should we canonicalize each submission page to the higher authority main contest page and effectively have all those internal links coming from the main contest page? Is one better than the other? Are there link spam issues to worry about with either? Thank you in advance!
Link Building | | StevenLevine0 -
Removal of Bad Links
Before I started doing SEO for the company I am currently working in, they had an Indian company doing loads of spammy SEO work for their site. My question is as follows; should i try to remove the links that were inserted there. I am doing link building now in a natural way, which obviously takes days to get a link - not minutes. I'm worried that the link profile is full of years of spammy links and I can't dilute it as fast as I would like. Here are a few links to different sites that the company created links on: http://youdoze.com/ http://www.video-bookmark.com/ http://mylinkvault.com/ http://www.puplinks.com/ http://huzoo.com/ How do I go about this?
Link Building | | EcomLkwd0 -
Internal links
It can be bad for the site if I use various items to create links to a page that represents a specific keyword? The articles are relevant and anchor text is not only done on the keyword, but also by using words near the keyword in question.
Link Building | | otimizador20130 -
Which Links to Disavow!
We just took over SEO for a new client who is being penalized for a bad link profile. They've asked Google to reconsider multiple times, and Google still claims that the links are bad. Because of this, and because I don't have direct access (logins, etc.) to what the former SEO did, I am considering using the disavow links tool. The most obvious links to disavow are a group of almost 1000 links that come from the same forum. However, when viewing the links on this forum they actually seem natural. People are reviewing the product (ipod cases), both negatively and positively. While this could have been an SEO tactic for link building, I don't want to disavow these links if they're not the problem, even though this domain is the source of almost all the low-quality links. Another site that has more than 200 links is Askives. Do any of you have experience with links from Askives, or removing these links? Thanks again!
Link Building | | newwhy0 -
Are link exchanges bad for SEO these days? Also, is adding my site to free yet relevent directory sites a bad idea?
I operate a computer services company in Eugene, Oregon called "Eugene Computer Geeks". We do a lot of web design, and need incoming links to my site very badly. Lately I've been asking clients if they would link to me, but they almost always ask for a link in return. If we exchange links, does Google penalize my site? Would the incoming link be better for SEO if I'm not linking back to the other site? ALSO Is it possible that manually submitting my site to free, yet relevant web directories would hurt my rankings? It's not a big deal to me if it doesn't help my rankings, as I see a benefit to having my site listed, but wanted to make sure there wasn't a chance that it would hurt my rankings. As far as I know all the directories are free from SPAM, porn, warez, or anything like that. Thanks!
Link Building | | eugenecomputergeeks0 -
So I ran into a site that was not ranking 4 days ago and has over 2 million links to it on some keywords. My guess is this is a link bomb, but the issue is this is pushing one of my sites down. Does anyone know a good way to over come a bomb like this?
So I ran http://www.riogrande.com/ into this site not that long ago and wanted to see if any other SEO's have an opinion on it. I've seen a Google bomb before, but the amount of links going into this URL is insane. The thing is how does one over come a Google Bomb? Do you just wait to see what Google does or do you just hope to rank under that URL? I should also note that it appears that all the keywords to it are relevant to the sites content. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks
Link Building | | kateG12980 -
Link Building Question
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 🙂
Link Building | | allyteal0