Relevancy of backlinks for scholarship resource
-
Hello,
We want to build a niche scholarship tool for our Ecommerce site. It will sort through relevant scholarships for a certain demographic, say, Hispanic engineering students for example.
My question is:
If the tool's focus is Hispanic engineering scholarships, and we sell supplies that are in the same general category as products that engineers use, will the backlinks we gain from people linking to our tool be relevant.
The main reason I ask is that I think most backlinks will be from Hispanic sites, and I don't know if there will be enough relevance to make the links help.
What are your thoughts on this?
-
Hi BobGW,
I actually have experience in doing exactly this for one of my sites. I created a free academic archive - in the same niche as my site - as link bait. My results were mixed.I got quite a few new links coming back to the resource, and still do. The problem has been so far that the links are generally from low DA pages like blogs. There are exceptions as I did get a .mil and a few .edu links from it as well. Now, the traffic to the site definitely went up due to the new section as did social engagement. So, just for this it may be said that it was worth it.
But despite all of this, I have not seen any major changes in SERP (up or down) in the last 6 months since this section was released. It just seems like the "link juice" is not transferring in any meaningful way despite a pretty simply site structure. I have also not seen any marked increase in conversions on the site. So, while Google does not seem to be punishing the site for this section, it also does not seem to be giving it credit for this either (even though it ranks well for its own keyword).
In the end, it is as Andrew said, it depends on how much time and money this section will cost you. Based on the current success of this section on my site I would still say the 2 months to create it were worth it. I just hope that the SERP benefits will propagate to the rest of the site in the long term
Good luck.
-
Morning, BobGW,
It depends on the purpose of your question:
- If your question is: will these links help? Yes, they'll help if the links aren't spammy. They may even help you tap into new audiences, keywords, and referrals.
- If your question is: are these links worth your time/money? That depends on your parameters. If it's cheap for you to experiment, experiment. If it's NOT cheap for you to experiment, then it depends on your risk tolerance level. I'd recommend you go for it; you should try to explore the possibility of what those keywords do for your site.
Hope that answers your question!
--Andrew
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
-
Figuring out the topic relevance
Hello everyone, How can you figure out which topics are the more relevant for a specific query ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Are "feed" Backlinks an issue? - Vigorous Fickle in the rankings in past two months
Hi All! I have been observing a vigorous fickle in my rankings since past two months. Some first page keywords have moved to the second page. Some of my observations from the backlink audit rose below questions: Q1. Are large # of backlinks from "feed URLs" harmful in any way? If yes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ishrat-Khan
Q2. Am I supposed to get webmasters take these down or block their own feed URL?
Q3. The backlinks come in huge numbers from reliable websites. Do I need to remove the backlinks just because of the huge number?
Q4. What factors to look for if rankings started fluctuating in past 2 months? Note: these backlinks from "feed" are from the websites who posted our editorials. Backlink Example: http://xyz.com/categories/abc/feed/0 -
What to do about real backlinks spiraling out of control and affecting domain trust flow
I have a site with a few hundred thousand backlinks and many of these are are legitimate, but the source site of the backlink often has a low authority and is broken, causing a spiral of bad backlinks from pagination, comment replies, etc. For example one site may have 4 legitimate backlinks with a spiral of 400+ bad backlinks, this is happening across dozens of domains. My site is more authoritative than these broken backlinks and regularly receives highly authoritative backlinks, because of this would it be best to disavow these spiraling low authority domains, attempt to contact the webmaster and add a nofollow, or any other solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Couple questions: backlink bartering and getting backlinks in less developed markets.
How do you guys go about getting sustainable links from high authority sites? In some markets, like say SEO, it can be as easy as writing great content and "people will share it" because there are a ton of SEO websites on the internet and all of them are talking about SEO and want to share with you great SEO content. But as you guys know there are markets that aren't as well developed online - where do you look for backlinks for these markets? I'm working on a project and I'm trying to put together a good backlinking strategy. Part of it will be chasing backlinks from University websites (relevant to my market). What I'm wondering here is if its OK by Google to barter for links. Say you have an online store and you give the University a "student's discount" in exchange for a link (I don't know if this would be appealing enough but is it fair game as far as Google is concerned)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mack-ayache0 -
I should keep looking at the IP address location on my backlink prospects?
Hello Everyone, I'm doing a backlink research and we are considering how to define a strategy. My website is located in Spain and I am focusing on ranking my website on Google.es for public coming from Spain. The thing is that until now I used to look carefully at the IP address of my backlink prospects, to check if the website was really hosted in Spain. I know Matt Cutts used to say very long ago that hosting location of a website was important. But taking into account that nowadays with cloud servers, CDNs, AnyCast and such technologies it's no longer possible to accurately identify the location of a website, specially if the CDN of the websites uses AnyCast, so that an IP address can be used by different machines in different locations. Do you guys think I should keep looking at the IP address location on my backlink prospects?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | C.A0 -
Should I bother disavowing nofollow backlinks?
Hello! I am about to go through the list of backlinks in our profile and sort out what we want to disavow. A question I had is, should I both disavowing nofollow backlinks, even if they look spammy? Or should I just focus on cleaning up the dofollow's? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan_Phillips0 -
High PR Profile backlinks
High <acronym title="Google Page Ranking">PR</acronym> Profilebacklinks still worth for SEO ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity1 -
Do pages with irrelevant keywords hurt the domain overall for ranking for relevant keywords?
I have been doing SEO for the University I work at. We are optimizing our degree pages on a page-by-page basis. So hypothetically we have a page optimized for "online accounting degree" and another for "online marketing degree", etc. Although our focus is on specific page optimization, we hope the by-product is that the whole domain will start to rank better for "online degree". First of all, is this a reasonable expectation? Second, if this IS the case, will pages full of irrelevant keywords hurt the overall strategy? For example, our registrar and financial aid PDFs that are full of legal/financial mumbo-jumbo. Are these lowering our keyword density of relevant keywords across the domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SNHU0