Is irrelevant backlinks real? And does anchor text affect all keywords?
-
I ask because I see many of my competitors with irrelevant backlinks still ranking at the top, despite what SEO say about it. I have a Web Design business, most of my competitors have their backlinks from sites they built ie "website by _____" and thats how they rank at the top.
Should I keep getting backlinks from my clients (with permission)?
Also does anchor text on backlinks affect all keywords in your website? Example is if you provide multi services ie plastering and decorating. You have 100 links pointing to your site with anchor text of "plastering". Technically your site still has 100 backlinks, will that also help boost the onsite optimisation for the keyword "decorating"?
-
Hi there
Technically, for the time being I would imagine, Google views that as a relevant link, since they are a web development company and developed those sites.
I am not the biggest fan of links like this. While most are good hearted and natural, it just always seemed a bit gray hat. The plus side of this is that they tend to be in the footer and low value, especially when trying to rank for phrases outside of "website development". They aren't really worth it, especially if they are sitewide, it looks shady. I would let them do what they're doing - I always thought one link on the client's homepage or an "About Us" page was more natural and effective.
Outside of that, I would look for different query and keyword opportunities that tend to be low competition and higher volume, those could be areas you're missing out on. Check out SEMRush for competitive rankings and search opportunities, your Search Console Top Queries for areas you may not know you have, and Keyword Difficulty to gauge what areas you need to work on to possibly see higher rankings (the SERP Analysis report is amazing for this).
Here are some good resources as well:
Why We Can't Do Keyword Research Like It's 2010 (Whiteboard Friday)
The Illustrated SEO Competitive Analysis Workflow (Moz)Beyond that, when it comes to anchor text, I would focus more on branded anchor text and focus your efforts on the content of your website being based on what your audience is searching for. That way, your content associates your brand with the topic and when Google crawls it can understand that your content associates your brand with a topic and relevant variations. If you do this with your anchor text, you run into the issues of overoptimization, and that can possibly lead to issues down the road.
Keep your link building and content development natural, and you'll be on the right side of history.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
How To Optimize A Page For Multiple Keywords
Hi Guys, In this video by Brian Dean he talks about how to go about optimising for multiple keywords. He basically said the main factors for optimising a page for multiple keywords are the following: Identify other keywords with same search intent as your primary keyword. Add them to title tag strategically, don't stuff them in there. Add as many of those keywords as h2 tags into the content, again when it makes sense. Are there any other more advanced ways you can use to optimize a page for multiple keywords with same search intent that could be good? Any suggestions would be very much appreciated! Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts110 -
Irrelevant blog contents negatively affect ranking for main keywords?
Hi Moz Community, I am working at a branding company. Currently, we found our ranking for main keywords (branding company) is dropping a little. I am suspicious of the new blog posts that we published lately. We wrote different kind of stuff, such as company culture, how to inspire employees, the importance of leadership and some other stuff that is actually not as related to our main keyword - branding company. My question is, will these irrelevant posts hurt our ranking for main keyword, to some extent? Thank you. Best, Raymond
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raymondlii0 -
Will buying a competitor negatively affect keyword ranking?
Hello All; After reading a lot of great info on Moz, I wanted to ask my first question. We are thinking about buying a competitor. It is a smaller ecommerce site that sells a subset of the products we already sell. The main value of the site is good ranking for a small set of keywords. For example, if we acquire this site, we would now have up to 4 listing on page 1 for some targeted keywords. We plan to operate the site separately from our own with its current name and technology. We plan to be transparent with the domain registration info, change the contact info on the new site, etc. Will the fact that both sites are owned by the same company negatively affect keyword rankings? Instead of having 4 listings for some terms will one of our sites be lowered since one company operates both sites? The site we are buying does not have a high MozRank, MozTrust or Domain Authority score. But it does have a domain that has been around for a long time. In addition to the keywords, there is value is using this new site to do marketing tests and experiment a bit. Thanks for any input. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulgerst0 -
Bolding Keywords
A client has just switched from us to another provider and I have been checking up on the work done and the only change they have made is to bold lots of keywords on each page - I thought this was a practice that did not work - is there any evidence of this working or not working? Any articles/proof that we are not using out dated practices as we stopped doing this ages ago and yet the new provider is doing this. Who is right or wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Optimising a page for multiple keywords
I remember reading a question a while back about seo for a page targetting multiple keywords but I'm blowed if I can find it now.... I have a page which is optimised for one phrase and want to add 5-6 phrases/keywords... obviously I can't stuff the all the keywords in the page title or the header 1 tag. So I have written the content to mention the other keywords trouble is not wanting to compromise the quality of the page so of the keywords/phrases I have only been able to use once in the content. I assumed as the phrases are all on the same topic/area that this should not really matter. Apart from link building with the correct anchor text is there anything else I should be doing? The other option is to create custom pages for the keyword but again I am not keen on this idea.... Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Natural Backlink
What is a natural backlink? is it a backlink that someone gave a site for their great content? (this is what my common sense tells me) and this is what someone else's opinion is: No, quality backlinks are the one which are highly relevant, is from a high <acronym title="PageRank">PR</acronym> page. However, a natural backlink is the one which is within the body of the page, which is surrounded by relevant text, you can also call it a contextual link. Except links which are placed on a resource page which have no content in it and links which are placed under blogroll etc. this dosent even make sense to me : )
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
What to do with keyword specific domains
I have a few domain names with the keywords I'm trying to target for my website. My website currently has been in operations for a couple years, and while not hugely authoritative, has built some value. Now, are these domain names with keywords any use to me? Is there any point to forward them to my site? Do I try to build up a page (or a few of content) and then have a link to my main site? Any insight would be mucho appreciated! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregalam0 -
Image Links Vs. Text Links, Questions About PR & Anchor Text Value
I am searching for testing results to find out the value of text links versus image links with alt text. Do any of you have testing results that can answer or discuss these questions? If 2 separate pages on the same domain were to have the same Page Authority, same amount of internal and external links and virtually carry the same strength and the location of the image or text link is in the same spot on both pages, in the middle of the body within paragraphs. Would an image link with alt text pass the same amount of Page Authority and PR as a text link? Would an image link with alt text pass the same amount of textual value as a text link? For example, if the alt text on the image on one page said "nike shoes" and the text link on the other page said "nike shoes" would both pass the same value to drive up the rankings of the page for "nike shoes"? Would a link wrapped around an image and text phrase be better than creating 2 links, one around the image and one around the text pointing to the same page? The following questions have to do with when you have an image and text link on a page right next to each other, like when you link a compelling graphic image to a category page and then list a text link underneath it to pass text link value to the linked-to page. If the image link displays before the text link pointing to a page, would first link priority use the alt text and not even apply the anchor text phrase to the linked page? Would it be best to link the image and text phrase together pointing to the product page to decrease the link count on the page, thus allowing for more page rank and page authority to pass to other pages that are being linked to on the page? And would this also pass anchor text value to the link-to page since the link would include an image and text? I know that the questions sound a bit repetitive, so please let me know if you need any further clarification. I'd like to solve these to further look into ways to improve some user experience aspects while optimizing the link strength on each page at the same time. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abernhardt
Andrew0