How Many Natural Links Do You Earn?
-
Hello Mozzers,
This is a bit of an open ended question and I don't think any one person is going to be the same. I have recently seen the light in my link building practices and I am trying to get a feel for what to expect in terms of natural link acquisition in an effective content marketing strategy. My question is how many natural links do you generally find yourself earning after the first 12 months of content creation/placement with a new website/industry?
I know this is going to be a question with a multitude of different answers. I look forward to your valuable insight as always!
-
Hi there,
I hate to say this, because it's not a great answer, but it really does depend on a bunch of things.
Generating links naturally i.e. links as a result of someone linking to you without you asking, is generally quite difficult unless you have a very, very good piece of content. But when this does happen, I've seen content pieces get anything from 10 - 10,000 links with the majority of them being natural. On the other hand, I've worked on content pieces where I've had to work really hard to get 10 links using outreach.
Sometimes, you work really hard and get nothing!
If you're just starting out on this path, you're unlikely to get links naturally from day 1 and will need to work hard to get links via outreach. But you should find that over time, it becomes easier and eventually you get to a point where you're not having to scrap for every single link. It isn't easy, but certainly possible.
I hope that helps a bit!
Paddy
-
Hi Kevin and thanks for your reply,
I suppose a was a little vague in my question. In a fairly low-competition area, with outreach and manual acquisition being performed, how many links do you think are normally generated by users and interaction in around 12 months?
Thanks again for your insight!
-
It depends by what you mean by "natural links". If by "natural links" you mean that you don't do anything else except create content and sit back and wait for the links given users that like your content on a brand new website, then you might be hard pressed to get any at all. Now, if you created absolutely stellar content, and again, you just sit back and wait for links, you might get some over time. It depends on how competitive the niche is and how easy it is to rank for the keywords you are targeting.
Now, if you do some link earning by performing outreach to your stellar content, then the sky is the limit in terms of link acquisition over the course of a year.
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
-
Site Migration Question - Do I Need to Preserve Links in Main Menu to Preserve Traffic or Can I Simply Link to on Each Page?
Hi There We are currently redesigning the following site https://tinyurl.com/y37ndjpn The local pages links in the main menu do provide organic search traffic. In order to preserve this traffic, would be wise to preserve these links in the main menu? Or could we have a secondary menu list (perhaps in the header or footer), featured on every page, which links to these pages? Many Thanks In Advance for Responses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ruislip180 -
GWT app and link emulation
Hi, I have a gwt site - https://www.whatiswhere.com. I have tab control which emulates the menu. I am planning to put <a>links instead of text into tab labels to create internal links. I am thinking to add java script to stop onclick event of</a> <a>otherwise i will get to the new session of GWT site. What I want is to just change the tab but at the same time have a link for the crawler. Would my approach work? Will it be equivalent to non-follow link? Will it improve the ranking comparing to 'no link at all' case?</a> <a>Thanks, Andrei.</a>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anazar_20010 -
Link juice through URL parameters
Hi guys, hope you had a fantastic bank holiday weekend. Quick question re URL parameters, I understand that links which pass through an affiliate URL parameter aren't taken into consideration when passing link juice through one site to another. However, when a link contains a tracking URL parameter (let's say gclid=), does link juice get passed through? We have a number of external links pointing to our main site, however, they are linking directly to a unique tracking parameter. I'm just curious to know about this. Thanks, Brett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
When is Too Many Categories Too Many on a eCommerce site?
We all know that more and more people are increasing the amount of different categories that eCommerce sites have. Say for example, you have over 3,000 different products, all categories contain unique text at the top of each, all of the categories link to each other (so loads on internal linking) and no two categories contain the exact same products. My question is this, is there ever a stage that you could create too many categories? Alternatively, do you think you should just keep creating categories based on what our customers search for?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films1 -
Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
I got message in my Google webmaster tool: Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Does anyone knows the difference between "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" and "Unnatural links to your site" Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
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 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
Link Request Email on Site`s Link Pages
Hello I have assembled a list of web-sites that have "Links" section that has a list of persons` favorite tools. Those pages have a link to my competitor. I know my tool is just as good if not better and want to request a link. I`m thinking of sending an email asking for a link and offering a small amount of money for it. Questions: A) How much should I offer? Should I offer anything at all B) Is there an email style that someone can suggest that has been tested and proven to work for this type of situtation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hellopotap0