Low value link building to sitemap.xml
-
During some competitive research recently I discovered one of my clients competitors sites had an interesting backlink profile.
Looking at the top-pages report in Open Site Explorer the home page was the #1 page (as you'd expect) with 2.5k links from about 500 linking root domains
The second page was the sitemap.xml (~1.5k links, 400 linking root domains) and the third was their /feed page (again, ~1.5k links, 350 linking root domains).
Links to these two pages aren't something that would happen naturally (particularly the sitemap.xml).
There's a whole load of evidence for nasty low quality link building such as over-optimised keyword rich anchor text, comment spam, and even some blog/article based link networks.
It's a pretty nasty niche with lots of cut-throat affiliate marketing.
My guess here is that someone may have made a mistake using an automated link building too, but I'd be interested in what you might think? Have you seen this before?
(Sorry, I can't reveal the domains in question as I'm bound by an NDA.)
-
Thanks Matt, Andy,
Looking at how they've had automated link building done to every page on their domain it does look like it's automated link building gone wrong.
You don't normally see so many boring product pages getting as many links as they have!
It wouldn't surprise me if were trying to supply the sitemap.xml or rss feed as a list of target URLs to build links to and ended up building links directly to these.
-
Hi Doug,
I have never seen this done before and as both you and Andy say I can't imagine that it has been done on purpose - more automated link building.
-
Hey Doug,
Never seen that myself before and can only imagine it is either a mistake, or someone has been misinformed that there is some benefit to this.
Like you said, these aren't links that would appear naturally, so something odd has certainly happened.
-Andy
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
-
My affiliate links are being crawled by Google. Is this a bad thing? Also, should I add rel: nofollow to affiliate links?
Hi All, I have an issue on Google Search Console. It seems all my affiliate links are being crawled. Is this a bad thing? The reason I found out is that all but one link was flagged with a warming. It goes on to say that it was blocked by robots.txt. The strange thing is that I've not set any links to be blocked in robots.txt. Also, should affiliate links be nofollow? I'm asking because I was recently sent this article by Yoast on how to properly cloak my affiliate links without using a plugin. https://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/ In the method, they apply the nofollow and noindex rules to the links. I'm just a little confused on how to go about affiliate links the SEO friendly way.
Affiliate Marketing | | nomad_blogger0 -
Spent months creating links but Webmasters not picking it up
Hey Guys, I've been working on Blast My Deals.com an affiliate site which i have an issue hoping you guys can help with. For the past year and a half we created loads of links from multiple domains at-least over 700+ which Webmasters did pick up since then we've created even more links however when we go in to our Search Console "Links to your site" it shows 214 domains. It seems like our old links are being removed and our new links aren't being added. All the links we created have an average of DA40+ For the past 2 weeks ive noticed a significant drop in organic traffic and loosing our positions on our main keywords. Our DA has also dropped from 33 to 29 in a matter of 2 weeks. I checked everything including robots.txt, sitemap.xml but Im unable to find the reason for it.
Affiliate Marketing | | kazirahman0 -
Does Google look at Domain Registrar owner information when counting links into a site?
Question: If the domain registrar owner info is the same on two websites, will Google/other search engines discredit any linking between the two sites when calculating page rank? We have two company sites. One is our main ecommerce domain which we have been linking into from information domains in the past. We recently cut ties with the company that hosted them for us and wish to host them ourselves to preserve the inbound traffic. We are worried, however, that the traffic will be discredited now that we own both domains. Thanks for looking!
Affiliate Marketing | | tennisexpress0 -
SEO and Affiliate Links
Hello, We run a travel related website and we started to run our own affilate newtwork to promote the sales of our products. At the moment the affilate links pont to a spacific affilate url in order to tack conversions : abcweb.com/affiliate/nameqaz I'm wondering how is the best way to run a private affilate programm considering SEO: Is there a way yo benefit from those links ? What are the best strategies to do this? If yes, Is there any benefit from redirecting 301 those links to the original page (the one accesible to google and the one we want to rank for) or is it better to use a king of canonical method. Thanks a lot for sharing you experiences , giving your opinion and indicate resources. Best Regards Daria
Affiliate Marketing | | stereo690 -
Affiliate code in urls? affiliate link landing pages?
Is it considered a good or bad practice to have the affiliate code present in your affiliate link url's ? (as opposed to disguising them with something like phpbay) Does the general public not scour the hover-over url's of links they click? Also, is there any way of keeping customers on site when they click affiliate links? (via frames or something more modern) Or is that frowned upon by advertisers?
Affiliate Marketing | | Mozzin0 -
Link Building Intricacies
I'm about to embark on link building campaign. I have several key phrases that I want to develop such as "health & fitness products" and "vitamins & supplements". My site is specifically targeted at Australia men. Should I also aim to include the words "Australia" and "men" in my link anchor text? Or should leave the qualifiers to the title tag for my destination url? I'm also wondering, by having "health & fitness products" as my link anchor text and the same text in my title tag for my destination url, will that build value for the various keyword variations in my keyword phrase such as "health & fitness" and "fitness products"? Thanks!
Affiliate Marketing | | B-man0 -
Gaining juice from affiliate links
Afternoon Mozzers, We run a basic affiliate program whereby we distribute banners and tools to affiliate sites who then link back to our homepage via these, often through a tool that incorporates an HTML link with our primary keyword term embedded. This banner/tool/link heads to our homepage, and will then incorporate that particular affiliate's unique code in the URL, eg. www.example.com/1A-265-GNH Seems pretty standard practice so far? So, considering this, that we include our primary keyword term in HTML in some banners, some also link to our homepage via an embedded image (and others then just work off cookies as per usual), can anyone hazard a guess, or know for certain, the beneficence of this as a link building means? I ask in terms of trying to determine whether to continue punting our tools and banners as a decent link building opportunity, or concentrate more on other link building means. Hope I've been clear enough, but am happy to elaborate if need be. Cheers
Affiliate Marketing | | Martin_S0 -
Link juice from my affiliates to my site
I'm setting up an affiliate program through 1shoppingcart. Even though I run 3 different websites, the way their program works is that I have to have 1 domain name that my affiliates get as their affiliate link, with their unique id attached at the end. I can give them multiple links that will redirect to various places on my 3 websites, but those original links that they put on their site will all be to just 1 domain. I'm wondering if I still get link juice to my sites even though the links are obviously being redirected? Does it depend on the redirection method? I was just thinking that getting hundreds of affiliates who run related sites could be a very good seo boost if they're all linking to my site, but I feel like it's going to be wasted because of this redirection thing. Hope this made sense. Thanks very much,
Affiliate Marketing | | philraymond
Phil0