Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Are Sidebar Backlinks worth for SEO?
-
Hello!
Let's use the following example:
I have a blog (let's call it Blog A) and I find another blog in the same niche (this will be Blog B) that has higher DA and PA than mine. Will Google penalize me if the Blog B puts a link to my blog in their sidebar?
Remember, the Blog A and Blog B are from the same niche.
I ask this because Google says that links on sidebars appears in every page and in some pages the link may be useless. But if both blogs are from the same niche, there won't be pages where the links will be from different themes and with less relevance.
So, is my thought correct: we can use sidebar links without caring about penalization ONLY if the blogs are from the same niche?
Thanks in advance!
-
Hi Kelvin,
Thank you for posting this question! I have recently look up into Moz Resources and these are some insights.
1. Focus on "Natural" editorial links, those that are editorially given by other website owners. This would be much more efficient than having to contact someone and ask them to link to you. (Provide them a good reason for them to do so. Making them aware of that reason.) - Cons, it takes time but nevertheless is HIGHLY VALUED.2. Manual 'outreach' link building - most common which involves manually contacting website owners and bloggers to get linked.
An important note from Moz Res: Google has been devaluing and even penalizing 'self-created, non-editorial links' which often fall in line with black-hat practices that aim to fool the search engines into thinking a piece of content is relevant and important when it isn't.
Non-editorially given link, inherently carry less weight than other types of links. Focus on tactics that give you editorial links that add value to your website and business.
**What you should do in my opinion:
-
Look out for blogs with great evergreen content (**with good rankings, good links, seeming decent traffic, etc) and link to a relevant page on your site.
-
Look out for more active sites(usually have better overall quality, search performance, and a more active audience) - with a more active audience, potentially increase your chance to attract more decent traffic to your page.
Whether or not you succeed, it is crucial that you have a structure towards link building, which is very much dependent on a combination of your available assets and resources.
Hope the above insights have answered to your question applying to all kind of links. Different kind of links brings different impact to your business (whether or not this bring awareness to the potential audience).
You can visit my blog at https://www.corsivalab.com/blog and have reference to how I am actually backlinking the necessary stuff. Marketing is all about learning and sharing, the blog too has tips and ways you can better strategize and do links for marketing purposes.
Let's learn more as a community!
Cheers!
-
-
Thanks, Bryan!
I am already looking for Guest Post opportunities to build more High Quality Backlinks. The articles recommendations are very good also! Thanks.
-
Hey there! I agree with Justen, sitewide links offer little to no value and could potentially do more harm than good. I would find somewhere else to place the link(s).
Not sure if you've already read this but here is an article that can help you learn more about MozTrust & MozRank Score
Although this article is from 2011, Dr. Pete does a great job explaining thin content.
Hope these help!! Cheers
-
Thanks for the answer, Justen!
I ask this because I've got a Spam Score 7/17. I will show the flags and what I am willing to do to remove them. We are an e-commerce and have a blog too.
- **Low MozTrust or MozRank Score **(?????)
- **Large Site with Few Links **(look for more partnerships to build a more consistently Linking Building strategy, one way I thought was Sidebar Backlinks that was a strategy used before)
- **Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Subdomains **(maybe start using more nofollow in the links from our blog to the store?)
- Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Domains (since the beginning we only used Do Follow)
**- Small Proportion of Branded Links **(here I think in using the brand's name in the anchor text when the bloggers post something about my store)
- Thin Content (this doesn't makes sense to me)
- Low Number of Pages Found (Google has almost every page indexed, so again, this doesn't makes sense to me)
Are my actions correct? Is this the proper way to solve this Spam Score problem?
-
You might want to consider having the link placed elsewhere. Linking from Blog A and Blog B in the same niche seems only natural because it's highly relevant. Sitewide outlinks however are not great. If it was my site, I would rather have the owner of Blog B mention me in one of his blogs. A page called "link partners" or something like that is also not great.
Overall, I would say more relevance = higher value of the link.
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
-
All backlinks not showing on my website
hey folks, i am fairly new to SEO and i have noticed that i have backlinks that tools like ubersuggest or SEM rush are nothshowing my product is lazyapply.com. -> It's an automated job search application can anyone suggest me what should id do ? PS - for example i have backlink from crunchbase.com but my website is not showing me that
Link Building | | viveklazy0 -
DA not increased as backlinks generated...
Hi,
Link Building | | p4pakao
I would like to discuss my issue as my site's some backlinks are generated but DA is still there. Can anyone make me understand the reason?0 -
Value of Links? What is each link worth?
Morning Everyone, I just had this thought and wondered what everyone's opinions were in terms of link value in monetary terms. We'll assume for the purposes of this that the links come from contextually relevant sites and that the sites in question have got the Moz DA from being high quality and have a good quality incoming link profile. Its a bit of a theoretical question, but i guess imagine if the only way you could get links was to pay for them, what would they be worth to you. This is link value for SEO purposes, they will have in addition value from traffic from good sites, that no doubt varies wildly depending on topic. I assume everyone also agrees on: The first link from a domain is the most valuable High DA sites are worth more than low ones. So could anyone who has an opinion on the link value suggest a monetary value for links. Its really just using a monetary amount to see how best to target my time. Here is my example of what might be expected, but I am hoping people with more knowledge will perhaps correct it. DA Rating First Link 2nd-5th Link 5th-10th Link 10Plus Links 5 $5 $2 $1 $0 15 $7 $3 $2 $1 25 $25 $10 $5 $2 35 $45 $20 $7 $3 45 $65 $30 $11 $4 55 $95 $45 $19 $5 65 $200 $100 $45 $6 75 $350 $120 $65 $9 85 $700 $240 $95 $15 95 $1100 $450 $200 $30
Link Building | | wellandpower1 -
Backlinks and SPAM
I was doing some back link review of competitors and I have noticed that many of our competition have 300+ do follow back links from Justia.com and an additional 300+ do follow links from law.cornell.edu (they share the same database). The links on Justia are from different pages and they are all going to the root of our competitors site. So the questions are as follows; 1: For the purpose of SEO is this considered SPAM 2: If not SPAM, then does it have a positive effect on the competitions website and should I attempt to emulate for my client. Thanks in advance. -Jeff
Link Building | | FriedmanSimon10000 -
Backlinks embedded in posts or backlinks in sidebar?
What's better? A backlink to my site, embedded into a blog post/article? Or a hardlink in the sidebar? The problem with links embedded inside articles, is that when the blog linking to me, gets updated, the articles disappear from first page and I lose the link from home page. How do you deal with this? I also read this: "The best link you can get is from a site ranking #1 for the keyword you want to rank for. It would be great to have the #1 site for a desired keyword linking me even if they are a PR 0 site." Is this right? Thx in advance.
Link Building | | BloggerGuy0 -
Creating A Scholarship For SEO
My client is a Law Firm just outside of Tampa, and I am trying to get her keyword phrase: "Tampa Car Accident Attorney" in the top 3. One of the strategies I want to use is to create a scholarship for "Tampa Area Students and how a car accident impacted their life" or "Tampa Area Students and how they think they can decrease car accidents." (that's still be worked on). Once the scholarship is created, I want to put it on our Tampa Car Accident Attorney page, and get other companies to link to that page. My question is what links should we go after? Because that will tailor it to who we give the scholarship to. We could give it to a University of South Florida student, and get one .edu link. We could do the same thing for the University of Tampa, or Stetson Law School, but we'd only be getting one link from each of them. If we set it up for high schoolers, we can get more links from the community and schools, but I'm not sure high school .edu links matter all that much. Is 10 high school .edu links as important as 1 college .edu link? I don't know. If anyone has had an experience with this or any insights, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks!
Link Building | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Where I can find a backlink community exchange?
I know is difficult but it's worth to try. I am looking for a community eager to exchange links. I am in the venue rent for weeding and conferences in London and I would be delighted to find other people to exchange the links. At the moment my page is PR4 I have seen communities for games where they exchange anything, why don't link exchange!!!!
Link Building | | lnietob0 -
Why do we need proxy to so Backlinks?
Does Google knows the IP addresses that the backlinks are created from? if i create 200 backlinks for my site without proxies will google ban my site because it will look like i a the one who create all the backlinks? May i ask how many proxies do you guys need to create around 200 backlinks per day? If i already use the proxies today Can i use the same set of proxies to create backlinks tomorrow? THanks
Link Building | | locoto00071