Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Forum Profile Links
-
Are they really important?
Many preach they are, and there are tonnes of services out there who give you thousands of forum profile links in no time.
I strictly believe in genuine links built the hard way, and definitely don't want to get into anything which is black hat.
Please suggest if building several Forum Profile Links is an appropriate way of building links?
-
You can try Ontolo's link building query generator tool:
http://ontolo.com/link-building-query-generator-V2
Citation Labs also has great link building tools for finding prospects:
-
Thanks Keri. I will do so right now.
-
Have you read the Link Building category of the SEOmoz blog? Take a look at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4 and you might also get some more ideas for building quality links (both for forums and in general).
-
I have been actively looking at the option of guest blog. Can you help me with where to start? I need help with finding blogs that allow guest blogs, or how to approach them etc
-
Building links on highly relevant sites would be a good idea if you're willing to put in the time to make a useful post. If the forum allows do-follow links, that will help you a little. As part of a balanced link building strategy, they could be beneficial.
Any site that sells you thousands of links will be using an automated tool. This is considered very spammy because the links have no value, they'll be on trashy sites, and on sites that there will be thousands of other links on as well. The value a service would provide you wouldn't be worth the money.
-
I would not buy any forum-links but as long you provide relevant content and add to the discussions then you will be fine. If you have the resources and time, then perhaps it might be an idea to guest blog instead?
-
Test them on a dummy site if you have the budget, or on some pages that already link to you.
-
You won't get any referral traffic but Forum profile links (the dofollow ones) do pass link juice. Not much, but some.
Although I wouldn't trust mass-outsourcing services, in my experience forum profile links can be used as supplementary to content-based strategies without any risk of penalty.
-
Those services you mention which give out thousands of forum profile links are usually not worth your time or money, you see the same thing with generic directory listings, they are useless. Unless the forum topic is relevant to your website and they are do follow then don't waste your time.
I've found that signing up to 3 or 4 popular forums and being really active in them is a lot more beneficial in the long run.
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
-
Hreflang tags with link to redirect loop
Hi guys, I'm having a bit of an issue on a client site that I'm hoping someone can help me with. Basically, the client has two domains, one serving users in the Republic of Ireland (http://www.americanholidays.com), showing Euro prices, and the other serving users in Northern Ireland (http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/) showing £ prices. The issue I'm having is that the URL for the Northern Ireland page has a 302 on it and goes through another 2/3 301 redirects until it resolves as http://www.americanholidays.com, however it does then show the £ prices. You can see the redirect chain here: http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/?page=single&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanholidays.com%2Fgb_en%2F&useragent=1&typeProtocol=11 The homepage is using the Hreflang tag, and pointing search engines to serve the http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/ page to users using EN-GB as their language. The page is also using a self-referencing canonical, which I believe may negate the whole Hreflang tag anyway? My main question is - is the fact that the Hreflang for the gb_en page is pointing to a chain of redirects negatively affecting it? (I understand too many redirects are never good). Also, is the canonical negating the Hreflang? Any help/info would be great as I just can't get my head around it! Thanks guys Daniel
Technical SEO | | DanielKiely60 -
Direct link vs 302 redirect
So we have recently relaunched a site that we manage. As part of this we have changed the domain. The webdesign agency that built the new site have implemented a direct link from the old domain to the new domain. What is best practice a direct link or a 302 redirect? Thanks
Technical SEO | | cbarron0 -
Noindex user profile
I have a social networking site with user- and company profiles. Some profiles have little to no content. One of the users here at moz suggested noindex-ing these profiles. I am still investigating this issue and have some follow up questions: What is the possible gain of no-indexing uninteresting profiles? Especially interested in this since these profiles do bring in long-tail traffic atm. How "irreversable" is introducing a noindex directive? Would everything "return to normal" if I remove te noindex directive? When determining the treshold for having profiles indexed, how should the following items be weighed Sum of number of words on the page (comprised of one or more of the following: full name, city, 0 to N company names, bio, activity) (unique) Profile picture (Nofollowed) Links to user's profiles on social networks or user's own site. Embedded Google Map Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thomasvanderkleij0 -
What is link Schemes?
Hello Friends, Today I am reading about link schemes on http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 there are a several ways how to avoid Google penalties and also talk about the low quality links. But I can't understand about "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links" Is there he talked about low page rank, Alexa or something else?
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Self-referencing links
I personally think that self-referencing links are silly. It's blatantly easy for Google to tell and my instinct says that the link juice for this would simply evaporate rather than passing back to itself. Does anyone have information backing me up from an authoritative source? I can't find any info about this linked to Matt Cutts, Rand or any of those I look up to.
Technical SEO | | IPROdigital0 -
Does Yelp pass link juice?
This is probably a profoundly obvious question, but I can't seem to find an explicit answer on the internet, so I'll ask it here: Yelp's links out to local business websites are not nofollow'd, but they go through a javascript-based redirect. My understanding is that javascript redirected links do not pass link juice, so a link from a yelp profile will not directly impact my page authority; however, it looks like yelp does use nofollow judiciously for internal links, so I don't understand why they would allow follow for these "useless" outbound links. Do yelp's javascript-redirected links pass link juice?
Technical SEO | | tvkiley0 -
Does the Referral Traffic from a Link Influence the SEO Value of that Link?
If a link exists, and nobody clicks on it, could it still be valuable for SEO? Say I have 1000 links on 500 sites with Domain Authority ranging from 35 to 80. Let's pretend that 900 of those links generate referral traffic. Let's assume that the remaining 100 links are spread between 10 domains of the 500, but nobody ever clicks on them. Are they still valuable? Should an SEO seek to earn more links like those, even though they don't earn referral traffic? Does Google take referral data into account in evaluating links? 5343313-zelda-rogers-albums-zelda-pictures-duh-what-else-would-they-be-picture3672t-link-looks-so-lonely.jpg Sad%20little%20link.jpg
Technical SEO | | glennfriesen1 -
How to find links to 404 pages?
I know that I used to be able to do this, but I can't seem to remember. One of the sites I am working on has had a lot of pages moving around lately. I am sure some links got lost in the fray that I would like to recover, what is the easiest way to see links going to a domain that are pointing to 404 pages?
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0