Where do I start with cleaning up our link profile?
-
We have just taken the steps to start building links to www.towelsrus.co.uk, I am concerned about the state of external links to the site created by previous companies, i.e are they OK, or doing us harm, could I get more out f whats already in place or should we focus purely on getting new links?
We also have about 25 pages that have 302 errors and contain external links to the site. What should i do with these. try and get them re-directed to our site with appropriate anchor text or simply put a 301 re-direct in place?
In essence where I start, We want to build and increase traffic in particular for towels, bathrobes, dressing gowns and bolster our position as our positions are fluctuating a little but steadier than they have been.
Any help appreciated.
-
Hi Marcus,
OK I can tell you what I know as I only got involved on this the summer, some 12 months after the SEO contract finished with the old web provider, nothing actually happened thereafter.
I don't think we are working off a penalty, however we did have a lot of problems when the new site was launched last november with duplicate data 1000's of 301 redirects, 2500 pages 404'ing etc. This has only resolved it's self int he last 4 to 6 weeks after a lot of heart ache and dropped revenue. 404's are at 840ish and dropping daily now, duplicate content is down to 28 urls and dropping too. All because of bad advice hence why we are now looking after things in house.
Competition are your Amazons, Marks & Spencer, towels.co.uk, Christie Towels, Linens limited. I think we can better some of these for sure.
In terms of link build previously I have no idea how this was done. There was no blog, no social media (still none but looking at this) so I guess normal linking building routes.
There link profiles are massive in comparison to ours and i wonder how many we have lost because of all these bad 404 pages etc. So i would like to capture and re-direct anything that got value before the fall away for good.
I have tried signing up to link detective but they are not send a authorisation email so can;t gain access frustratingly.
Any more info i can provide let me know.
Thanks Craig
-
Thanks Irving you comment are much appreciated.
-
Hey Craig
The problem with any kind of question like this is that there are just so many moving parts so to provide any kind of valuable guidance we would at least want to know the following.
1. What is the history here? Are you working off a penalty?
2. What does the competition look like? Who are they?
3. What were the previous people doing with the link building?
There is some good data out there now about how your link profile should look and I have reviewed a lot of the best information at the link below:
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/seo/anchor-text-ratios-and-link-building/
This does not take your competition into consideration though so you need to get an idea of what you need to do to move the dial. How many more links do your competitors have? What type of links? Can you do better? What types of links do you have?
If you have a pro account here then grab your link profile and run it through Link Detective and do the same with your competitors. Get a better idea of how they are ranking and build yourself a strategy around that.
Also, if you have penalty problems, make sure they are resolved and you have normalised things before just wading into link building. Again, there are a few good guides on how to diagnose and recover (or attempt to) from Penguin and Panda now so your time may be better spent there at the moment.
If you can answer the other questions maybe we can provide some more targeted advice.
Hope this helps!
Marcus -
Always look at your backlinks and try to remove bad ones. You sites link profile doesn't look too bad though at a quick glance.
301 the pages that are 302'ing to their most relevant pages.
I would go for longer tail keywords targeted on specific types of towels and robes IE "terry cloth towels"
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
-
Internal nofollow links
Hello, We have a blog and at the end each blog post (and from the sidebar) we link to one main product page (tagged with a particular query string). Now Google will see from every blog post all of these internal links pointing back to this page. Do you think this would cause a problem and that these links should be nofollowed? I think Google will kind of detect that these is kind of a "navigation" as the code will be the same across all webpages. Most of all, doing them nofollow I think it is worse because it may trigger some sort of pagerank sculpting algo filter, if it still exists. Thanks, Conrad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conalt0 -
Spam Links? -115 Domains Sharing the Same IP Address, to Remove or Not Remove Links
Out of 250 domains that link to my site about 115 are from low quality directories that are published by the same company and hosted on the same ip address. Examples of these directories are: -www.keydirectory.net -www.linkwind.com -www.sitepassage.com -www.ubdaily.com -www.linkyard.org A recent site audit from a reputable SEO firm identified 125 toxic links. I assume these are those toxic links. They also identified about another 80 suspicious domains linking to my site. They audit concluded that my site is suffering a partial Penguin penalty due to low quality links. My question is whether it is safe to remove these 125 links from the low quality directories. I am concerned that removing this quantity of links all at once will cause a drop in ranking because the link profile will be thin with only about 125 domains remaining that point to the site. Granted those 125 domains should be of somewhat better quality. I am playing with fire by having these removed. I URGENTLY NEED ADVICE AS THE WEBMASTER HAS INITIATED STEPS TO REMOVE THE 125 LINKS. Thanks everyone!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Internal Linking for better seo
On our site http://villasdiani.com we have a blog called Kenya news, which is a category where we regular post articles. I am always creating external links to the category Kenya news so as it would pass juice to the posts in it and the posts have back links to category. There are no internal links among posts in the category. As our main target is to rent beach villas and boutique hotels, each of that posts in the category Kenya news has only a link either to category with beach villas or to category with boutique hotels. My question is, if this is good practice?, is it just not too much links going to categories to beach villas and boutique hotels form the Kenya news?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca1
Thank you very much for any thoughts Iris0 -
Links how long do they show?
How long do links show for in software such as Majestic ect once the link has been removed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Is the Tool Forcing Sites to Link Out?
Hi I have a tool that I wish to give to sites, it allows the user to get an accurate idea of their credit score with out giving away any personal data and with out having a credit search done on their file. Due to the way the tool works and to make the implementation on other peoples sites as simple as possible the tool remains hosted by me and a one line piece of Javascript code just needs to be added to the code of the site wishing to use the tool. This code includes a link to my site to call the information from my server to allow the tool to show and work on the other site. My questions are: Could this cause a problem with Google as far as their link quality goes? - Are we forcing people to give us a backlink to use the tool? (in the eyes of Google) or will Google not be able to read the Javascript / will ignore the link for SEO purposes? Should I make the link in the code Nofollow? If I should make the link a Nofollow any tips on how to make the most of the opportunity from a link building or SEO point of view? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MotoringSEO0 -
SEO from links in frames?
A site was considering linking to us. Their web page is delivered entirely via frames. Humans can see the links on the page, but it's not visible in source. I'm guessing it means Google can't detect the links, and there is no SEO effect, but I wanted to confirm. Here's the site: http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Example links are the Princeton Review and Kaplan on the right sidebar. Here's the source code: view-source:http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Do those links have any SEO impact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
Does Google WMT download links button give me all the links they count
Hi Different people are telling me different things I think if I download "all links" using the button in WMT to excel, I am seeing all the links Google is 'counting' when evaluating my site. is that right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usedcarexpert0