High domain authority for shady link directories
-
Hi there,
First of, I'm new to the moz community and I love it already! So much to learn and to do for getting better and better at SEO. Really helpful!
Okay, my question. If I analyze (top 5) sites with the open site explorer some of them have a link profile consisting just of link directories. How come they rank so high with just link directories backing them up?
The directories often are just ongoing lists of links without any form of content. But the authorities of the directories (page and domain) are often between 40-60 or even above! How come they get such high authority? And do I have to use them for my linking profile or will it hurt me?
On moz I learned not to use those directories because it's quality > quantity these days. But it almost seems as if this is not true because only half of the top positions in my keyword-market actually make use of more then just link directories.
I must say that I operate in the Dutch markets so maybe different rules apply in the Netherlands?
Thanks in advance and kind regards,
Luuk van Dongen
-
Great to know! Thanks Dr. Pete
-
It's important to keep in mind that DA and PA are measures of the strength of a link profile and, to some degree, a site's/page's raw ranking ability. Our authority metrics don't have built in spam-detection, though, and they aren't always aware of sites that Google may have devalued. Spam analysis has been in the works for quite a while now, and it's a complicated problem (as Google has proven). We're hoping to improve DA/PA in this regard over time, but for now there are going to be some situations where a site doesn't really have the ranking power that it's DA suggests. If your gut feeling is that the bulk of the site's links come from bad directories and low-quality sources, you may very well be correct.
-
You also have to consider whether the company has disavowed these directories. If the website has had SEO done on it for many years then there is a good chance that directories formed a major part of their strategy, however, with the disavow tool in play now, those directories may well have been disavowed recently and they will still show up on their linking profile in OSE. Just a thought for you to consider.
It is true that some local and niche directories are still beneficial even in today's SEO market so don't discount a directory straight away without looking into it further.
-
No by content rich links I mean links from good informative sites/blogs instead of sites with no content or little articles about a strange variety of topics that don't relate to each other.
I will try using majestic SEO and Ahrefs. Thanks for the help!
-
That may be so. The way you say "content rich links" comes out sounding like "spammy back links" and Moz does try to keep its crawl focused on higher quality links. Again, as Matt said, Ahrefs and Majestic are good additional sources for back link research.
-
So actually you're saying that possibly only the really good link directories are indexed my moz and the more content-rich links are not shown in the open site explorer? If so, do you have any idea how to retrieve those other links?
-
In addition to what Matt said, some directories are very good resources for links and some niches have more than a few well curated directories that are worthwhile. Don't dispel all directories straight off.
-
One thing to remember is that Moz only catalogs a VERY small portion of links pointing to a site (compare to Ahrefs or Majestic and THEY only catalog a small portion of the internet.)
So you may be looking at 5-10% of a site's actual profile. It's hard to say what else they have, what is really ranking a site, etc.
http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/experiments/backlink-checker-tools/
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
-
Linking .com and .co.uk
My client has an online ecommerce store which he is due to launch later this week. He owns both the .co.uk and the .com - the site is hosted on .co.uk and the .com domain redirects to the .co.uk The client wants anyone who visits the site from the .com to see permalinks when later going through the site as .com as opposed to .co.uk permalinks. Is this possible/any suggestions? Thank you!
International SEO | | jamiericey0 -
Are my hreflang and canonical link tags set correctly?
Currently we have a website in english but over time we will roll out parts of the whole site in different languages for different countries which will also result in country specific English versions of the website. The goal is that Google shows the country specific version of a page in a native language or English if available or falls back to the default English version of the same page otherwise. I listed below how we plan to use hreflang and canonical link tags to achieve this and was hoping to get some feedback from the Moz community if this will work as expected. (1) A page (www.mysite.com/page1) exists only in English as default. Users should be able to find it in every country unless there is an English version specifically for this country. We would use the following tags: (2) A page exists in English (www.mysite.com/id/en/page2) and Bahasa (www.mysite.com/id/id/page2) for a specific country (Indonesia in this case). Users in Indonesia searching in English should find the country specific English page. Indonesians searching in Bahasa should find the Bahasa version of that page. We would use the following tags on the English version: and therefor the following tags on the Bahasa version: In this case there wouldn't be a default English version available for the page. (3) If a page exists in English global, English for Indonesians and Bahasa for Indonesians we would use: on www.mysite.com/id/en/page3 on www.mysite.com/id/id/page3 on www.mysite.com/page3 If www.mysite.com/id/en/page3 and www.mysite.com/page3 are very similar we would risk google picking the page they want to rank for an english keyword searched in Indonesia, correct? (4) If a page in (1) and (2) can be reached with a different URL, we would only use a canonical and don't specify any hreflang tags e.g.: www.mysite.com/en/other-url-to-page1 or
International SEO | | ddspg
www.mysite.com/id/en/other-url-to-page2-english-indonesia (5) If a page that exists as global English page becomes available in English for a specific country as e.g. www.mysite.com/uk/en/page1 we would use the following tags: and also add one more hreflang to www.mysite.com/page1: The assumption here is that Google would rank the localized page instead of the global page after crawling our site again. But since this will be a new page, are we going to lose traffic because www.mysite.com/uk/en/page1 won't rank as well in the beginning (e.g. no offsite optimization)?0 -
Targeting an Specific Country Audience - Domain Q
Hiya everyone! I know this might entail a novice SEO question, but i am having some doubts. Hope you can give your opinions. Its kind of technical question regarding domain and country targeting. I have a Steel Construction company targeting only the audience of the particular country. Last year, i bought the targeted domains for my brand (company name), as in domain.country specific TLD, Should i use these domains, redirect them, or something? Would that help?. I currently use domain.com, but i am constantly being beaten down by websites with domain specific with overly thin content, no PA or DA, and 0 links to their site. Should i use my country specific domains, would that make a difference? Note: I also run some marketing campaigns for charitable foundation i started, and i used country specific domain and server, and with little effort i ranked top 3 in most of the desired terms. Any help or comment is appreciated, Thanks!
International SEO | | JesusD0 -
Change domain from .es to .com
Hi all, we have a website with 2 domains name to point to it: -hacerfamilia.es -hacerfamilia.com We used to take .es like the default domain, so the .com redirected to the .es with a 301 header. But now we decided to change to .com because it is more international. So default domain would be .com. We made a multiple redirect to .es to .com with a simple htaccess rule, with a 301 header. The hosting it is the same, and the address too, for the two domains. Should we take any other steps? Thank you.
International SEO | | seoseoseos0 -
Delaying Redirection - Possible loss of Domain Authority?
Hey guys, I was hoping somebody might be help with my current dilema. We have a international website due to go live soon which has changed its brand name. The organisation whom we are working for want to leave the old site live for around 6 months after the new site goes live. The reason for keeping the site live is for users to be able to access many of the resources which will not be transferred over in time for when the new site goes live.The plan is to have a message on old site letting visitors know we have moved site. I'm concerned about this approach in terms of loosing some of the domain authority if the sites bounce rate starts increase due to people clicking over to the new site. Then in 6 months time when we finally redirect to the new site we might loose out on some of the domain authority. Is this something to be concerned about?The site currently has PR of 7 and Domain Authority score of 70.Cheers,Rob
International SEO | | daracreative0 -
Does penguin update affect all sub-domains?
A UK sub-domain of a big US site got hit by Penguin last week. The two operations are completely separate apart from sharing a parent domain. The US site also run a multitude of other sub-domains in the same marketplace. Their link profile is not squeaky clean. The question is, could the actions of the US site, either in bad links, or poor on-site issues, have caused Penguin to hit the UK sub-domain? Unfortunately I have no access to the US Analytics or rankings data to know if they were hit by Penguin too. Thanks
International SEO | | BeattieGroup0 -
Reciprocal Links between my own sites ?
Is is ok to have Reciprocal Links between sites you really own ? We have a website that has been regionalized to 5 countries, using 5 different domains. The content is exclusive for the country but the keywords used might be similar. We have all the domains under the same Analytics account and all of them share the same Adsense code. Can I be penalized by Google for making reciprocal links between them ? Is something usefull for improving the SEO rank or I should avoid doing it ? Thanks in advance
International SEO | | martincad0 -
Link Building in russian speaking countries
Hello, We are an international company, based mostly in Romania and Hungary, but we also launched some websites in Ukraine. The interesting thing in Ukraine that we are facing heavily, is how they are doing link building. Basically the only link building that they do is buying links through a platform: sape.ru (http://www.mainlinkads.com/ this is English version). Local SEO consultants also advice to buy links. It wasn't so much a problem, but when you have a good site with good content, but have competitors that are buying links and then overcome our good keyword positions, we started to questions whether to start buying links ourselves. What is your opinion on this? Is it possible that Google will penalize a big bunch of sites, now in sape.ru there are: 487 069 sites? Can we adopt the same strategy as our competitors as long as it is working? Thanks, Irina
International SEO | | InformMedia0