How do I know if my SEO person is creating solid links vs spammy links?
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Please see question
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Some good suggestions above, try some back link checking tools, check their Domain Authority, etc. However, in my opinion, the best way for you to ensure your SEO person is building good links is to learn the basic difference between a good and bad link and actually check them yourself (the bigger your site and the more links you build, the less feasible this is, but the concept that you should be able to look at the links being built and understand what is a good or a bad link is still applicable). Obviously if you are building massive numbers of links, this is difficult (although there are tools that can help), but if your SEO employee (I assume it is singular) is building good links, they shouldn't be building massive numbers of them unless they are coming organically (through creating content or a product that is so popular that high quality links are appearing without traditional link building). Also, how are you measuring success? Ranking growth? Number of links? Quality of links? If you ask your SEO person to report on the links being built and ask he/she to include measures like Domain Authority, Page Authority, etc and then just try and audit the links periodically, you'll start to learn enough about SEO to measure their performance yourself (seriously, try Googling "audit my back links," there's some great tools out there, as well as reasonably simple explanations of the major things to look out for.
I also agree with those mentioning that outsourcing SEO is a dangerous (if somewhat necessary) strategy. In my opinion, learning about SEO basics is one of the single most valuable things a small business owner can do, since it will both improve your ability to market online, as well as protect you against hiring a bad employee.
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SEO is too important for the small business owner to outsource it to anyone. Learn to do SEO yourself and you won't have to worry about all these shady practitioners.
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I've never used LinkDetox, like trung.ngo mentions below but if they have a free version where you can just see if your backlink profile looks spammy to them at least you'd have one opinion on the matter. How many links are you looking to have reviewed?
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You can hire someone, but you need to trust that they'll do a good job reviewing.
Have you asked your current SEO for a list of links that have been built?
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You can check out http://www.linkdetox.com/. It's a link auditing tool that will at least at a high level provide some information about whether or not there are spammy links pointing to your site. I'd recommend reviewing the "toxic" links that they report back on manually though to determine if they're actually spammy links or not.
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Is there a third party that can review the links for me?
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This all depends on your purpose for SEO. Are you trying to rank well or are you trying to draw referral traffic through these links? Personally, I would shoot for the latter. Once you have your purpose down you should be able to work with your SEO and have them be totally transparent with you about the links they are building for you. If they aren't transparent with you or they give you excuses as to why they can't show you the links they have built that should be a potential red flag for you.
As for determining whether a link is quality or not, that really depends on who's eye is on it. I like to take a look at the websites that I have links on and determine if the site is real first off, then I ask myself if this is the type of site that people I care about are on. That's not to say that I don't have a few links on random sites that aren't necessarily spammy, but aren't really that quality either. What really matters is that you have a variation of links to your site.
It's ok to have a bunch of semi-quality links to your site, just make sure that you have more quality links that actually generate traffic and eyeballs. These are the links that are going to get you visitors and get you bumped up in the rankings. Just have a healthy diet of various links across the web. I hope this helps.
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The first question I'd ask is where are you getting links from? If the sites are not relevant to your business or the article/page in which the link exists is not relevant to your business, I would say it's time to reevaluate your relationship with said consultant. I would also ask the SEO if they're requesting specific anchor text or not? I'd opt for no specific anchor text requests to keep the links more editorial in nature--having too much specific anchor text can get you in trouble with algorithm filters like Penguin.
Hope that helps you get started in evaluating your links!
-Trung
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