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
-
Blog post outreach for backlinks
Hi all, My understanding of obtaining backlinks by way of blogpost outreach is that it's best to include several outbound links to related high domain websites within blog post copy (as well as a link to the website you're marketing, obviously) such as this post https://www.scoopearth.com/why-should-you-use-royalty-free-music-for-youtube-videos/ or this one https://small-bizsense.com/how-to-create-quality-content-for-your-business/. However, I've recently read a few articles that suggest that from a human perspective only having one clear link in the copy, such as this post https://www.clichemag.com/entertainment/movies/the-benefits-of-royalty-free-cinematic-music-for-your-videos/, increases the chance of the reader visiting the site in question. I guess the thinking is that if there's only one link to be clicked on it increases the chances of click-thru, as opposed to the reader possibly clicking on another external link that's only there because of current SEO advice. So is it best to follow SEO guidelines and include several outbound links within guest blog posts, or is it better to only have the one link to your client's site (to focus the readers attention on it)?
Link Building | | JCN-SBWD0 -
Does iframe itself count as a backlink?
Our situation is similar to YouTube. We have an original content on every subpage that is genuinely useful when embedded as a widget on 3r party websites. That is why we offer an embeddable widget that shows slightly simplified version of the content - exactly like a YouTube video embedded on your blog. The embed code is simply an iframe sourcing from our subpage: <iframe src="wikibudgets.org/subpage"></p> </blockquote> <p>1/ Does the iframe itself pass any link value at all to the subpage?</p> <p>2/ If yes, what would be the equivalent of anchor text in iframe?</p> <p>3/ If not, will any link in the subpage pass link value from the 3rd party website to my domain/subpage?</p> <p>4/ If not, will I be punished/rewarded if I ask users to put a visible, unobfuscated link to the subpage below the iframe?</p> <blockquote style="background: #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace;"> <p><iframe src="wikibudgets.org/subpage" /><a href="wikibudgets.org/subpage">rich anchor text</a></p> </blockquote></iframe>
Link Building | | wikiBudgets0 -
Backlinks through dofollow commenting
I'm interested in building backlinks to my photography business site by leaving good, engaging comments on other photographers' DoFollow blogs. Is this a good idea? Is it worth the effort? Through a little research, I've managed to locate more than 40 dofollow photographer blogs that have a domain authority of 35+. The idea is to take an hour or so a week to leave 10-20 comments on their blog posts. Would you consider this a good strategy? I rank on the first and second page of most of my keywords that I'm working on, but I want to rank 1st or 2nd on them. I used the keyword finder tool on google adwords to find the keywords that are the most searched for in my area. Surprisingly the competition is not large, so I'm fairly comfident I can get there. I've already optimized my site substantially and I'm looking into link building. Thoughts?
Link Building | | studio35design0 -
Ways to remove spammy backlinks
Hello everyone, I got hit with an algorithm penalty and need to start removing old backlinks ASAP. Does anyone have any good resources on how best to ask webmasters for removal? Are there any other ways to remove bad back links besides the disavow tool? (An SEO consultant I talked to said that they had a proprietary software that can remove them - is that possible?) Thanks all,
Link Building | | CleanEdisonInc1 -
Trading Backlinks a good idea?
New to the "backlinking" party. Wondering if its 'good practice' to trade links with other websites within a like-industry. We've been receiving a lot of emails from other websites asking us to trade links. Is this a good link building practice anymore? Thanks!
Link Building | | asa-php0 -
Adding backlinks in old articles?
I am trying to get a few more links to get a few of my pages to rank and I am thinking about adding some more backlinks on my own site on some of the old blog articles as well as some of my other related blogs. My question is - is it still beneficial to link from these articles that are say 1 year old or more, or would it be far more valuable to write new articles on the blog containing those same links?
Link Building | | bloggingyourpassion0 -
Listly and SEO
We use listly quite a lot. A few of our lists get embedded in other sites. A lot of the embedded lists have links back to us. Is there any seo benefit on this, or will just one of the sites count ? Isn't this just duplicate content ? Wondering what your thoughts are.
Link Building | | MarkQJones0 -
Quotations about importance of social media and backlinks
Hi all, I'm looking to put together a presentation on SEO and I'm wondering if anyone knows any good quotes that relate to the importance of having content on your site that people want to use and share. I'm looking for something like this: “Today’s marketing success comes from self-publishing Web content that people want to share. It’s not about gimmicks. It’s not about paying an agency to interrupt others.” David Meerman Scott “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” but ideally something that illustrates in terms of numbers how much more traffic and seo benefits a site can expect from having good guides, pdfs and news stories that people want to share. Thanks so much for any helo you can offer. thanks, David
Link Building | | AnthOrange0