What is left ethical? What is working for offpage SEO? Very long write up in here and my take on things.
-
Hello,
Please ignore misspells and grammar, this was typed quickly as I am spending my time researching not writing a perfect book on it.My goal is to find ethical very hard to get links unlike guest posts which are now dead according to Matt Cutt's blog here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/. My journey started with a quick message to Rand Fishkin, he responded the following
"Hi Matthew - thankfully, there's literally hundreds of link building methodologies that are still completely legit. Check out http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building and you'll find tons and tons of them. The key is that none are easy, none are particularly scalable, and all of them require doing work that will add value for searchers, for your brand, and for your overall marketing - which is exactly what Google wants to count.
Wish you all the best,"
Thanks Rand Fishkin!
So I started my search looking for links that are hard to get other than those that are directories, forum links that are dead and spammy, blog comments which are overused, guest posts, or any type of black hat link.
I figured I would start to check what other popular SEO companies were doing and that have been at the top through many of the updates.
After running an analysis on the term SEO services I found the following
Test 1. I analyzed Main Street Host to start with. If you type in SEO services in Google you can see they are rank 1 for it. After a quick analysis it's easy to see that they have 100's of footer links on clients that they have, some with exact match anchors and some without. My question is, is why is this a viable tactic?
Lets take for example the following. If you pull up their http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ stats and look at the inbound links you will come to an exact match anchor right away that says SEO Marketing Company. I went to the weebly link that they have and found that they have put their name at the bottom of this page.
Issue 1 - Why is it ok for this type of link, but it's not ok for a template link? Aren't these links suppose to be penalized?
Issue 2 - Nothing on the page is even relevant to their link at all. As we have read before, you need to have links surrounding relevant text.
Take a look at their backlinks you and you will find almost all of their high quality links are exact match anchors coming from their clients surrounded by irrelevant text.
Why is this working? How is this different than a network? What stops someone from just starting a network and dedicating 1 footer link to a full site and putting up dummy info... Anyone can go to Godaddy and purchase a DA 40+ site or so and throw up $20 of content and a footer link.
As I dove deeper into finding what is ethical and working I discovered many of the top SEO companies use this. Not just one, but over 20 of them use this same method.
Lets use another example. So I started to look at what they did for their clients. How did I know who they worked for? Simple I assume that since they have their link at the bottom of the page and claim that they do SEO for them, they are indeed working for them. So I analyzed the site we talked about a while ago on the Weebly that they had their link on. It's the Valley Art Weebly link if your checking yourself. I quickly found that they are using a network to rank up some of their clients as well. For example http://firesidebookshop.com/index.html Take a look at the link on this page leading to the art place. At first glance the site doesn't look spammy, but try to buy a book, or even order one. Who has an online book store, but doesn't sell books lol? Who also puts interesting links on their home page? This screams network to me.
I am willing to bet the following will happen - Matt Cutts and his spam team will ad something like the following to the algorithm or whatever you would like to call it "ignore link if total outbound dofollow links on full site = x amount or higher" = internal Google disavow tool = bye to guest blogging. So what is everyone going to do? Okay it's time to figure out what that number is right? Lets do some tests and lets say that magic number is 5 to 10 links on a whole site.
What does this do? This drives the price of quick SEO up again evening the playing field for others using ethical SEO like myself. How do I figure this? Lets face it black hat SEO will never end as long as someone is able to do it. Now since guest posts are gone, the quick link on quality sites surrounded by enough text to count is gone. This means that it will cost extra money, because everyone will be forced to put a max of x amount of links to be safe and for the links to get noticed on a website. So now they have to purchase an established domain that is high enough quality to pass the correct link juice through to a clients site that they want to rank up. Lets figure a few dollars for a unique IP, another few for the hosting, $40 to $100 for the domain if your lucky on Godaddy auctions, and then $40 for the content to make it look realistic if your getting it for $0.01 a word. Plus the time it takes to setup your site. This price of that $30 Odesk guest post backlink just went up to a min of $100 or so.
Diving deeper into what's working and moving past the networks, because I feel this will only work temporarily as well if you are brave enough to use this and I know I am not. It doesn't seem to ethical to me at the end of the day even though some may argue, you are just creating more relevant websites which can maximize your traffic streams.
The problem is I have stopped here and am stuck. Sure I have looked at http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building and read the most recent post where it talks about 31 types of links. Most of those links don't apply or are outdated and you shouldn't use them. Some of them talk about forum links,directories, bookmarks.. Those have been tactics for years and sure you may find 1 out of 1000 that are good, but the rest are just spam. I have been over to search engine land, and a handful of other sites. I have talked to many other SEO's as well. They are emailing me asking what they should do after guest posts, because they are unsure.
The question is, what is ethical? Let say you have a plumber, or a roofer, .gov links are nearly impossible for them and quite frankly that seems spammy to me to even post them on one.
I know what many are going to say, build links as if your not worried about Google and you will grow.. Where are you going to build the links to if everything is unethical? As we know clients will walk if they don't see improvements quickly. What's quickly? I would say around the 3 to 6 month period using ethical SEO. Sure there is onpage, a great blog, etc., but what is there left truly ethical for offpage SEO besides some good press releases, some social profile links like a pinterst, and the normal? I must be missing something! I am not looking for the easy way, I am not afraid to get my hands dirty and work hard.
If anyone can show me a quick example of a truly ethical link I would be grateful to see this. I can't seem to wrap my head around something that I can do that will last at this point. If you don't want to share it to the world, please PM me.
[edited for formatting by Keri Morgret]
-
WOW!! This is indeed a very long question!
Let me start with the bad news that Google is tightening the space for low quality link builders and website that are using low quality spam but they are not finished and you will see some websites here and there (even in some busiest niches like SEO) that websites are ranking on money making keywords on the basis of low quality spam.
The websites that are ranking for the terms “SEO Services”, “SEO Company” and related keywords sometimes contain hidden links in their link profile (not one or two but tons of them). If you notice these SERP positions over the period of time you will notice that these websites does not stay there for a longer period of time and results will change after every few months.
The website, I was noticing 5 months back is nowhere for the term “SEO Company” at that time it was ranking on the first page somewhere above the fold for this keyword.
Ok, so now your second question simply divides 2 type of SEO the unethical SEO and the ethical SEO. Both works well but one is short term while other is a long term game. Now it’s up to you, how you want to play!
About Guest Blogging, yes Mat Cutts said its dead but, I have my personal opinion on this and I still believe if you can create value from your guest posts, you should go for it! I shared the detailed review on my site: http://www.setalks.com/guest-blogging-dont-panic
What are the high quality links that required hard work?
There are actually tons of examples but I would love to share few of them!
- http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-get-on-national-tv This talks about how to get on National TV and obviously this much have given him tons of links as well.
- Here is the post that will talk about how you can get links naturally to your website: http://www.setalks.com/natural-links
- This broken Link Building guide links are hard to achieve but valuable: http://moz.com/blog/the-broken-link-building-bible
- Read this, where experts are sharing that best link building tip ever: http://digitalphilippines.net/link-building/
Hope this helps!!
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
-
SEO Links in Footer?
Hi, One of my clients uses a pretty powerful SEO tool, won't mention the name. They now have a "link equity" tool, which they are using on a lot of their client's sites, which include tons of fortune 500 companies. It involves add footer links to your site that change based on the content of the page they are on. The machine learning tries to figure out the most related pages and links to them with the heading tag of that page as the anchor text. Initially this sounds very spammy to me. But then, it seems a lot like "related products" tools that many companies use. The goal for this tool is to build up internal linking, especially for deeper pages on their site. They have over 10,000 currently. What are everyone's thoughts on this strategy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vetofunk2 -
Is toggle Good For seo
Hi there, I have Client Who dont want to show his content to publicly, So team decided to use toggle, So Google can also See Content, But i want bu sure. Does Google will really cache that Content?? Does it down my website Ranking?? Please any one can Help, I need urgent basis Thnx in advance Falguni
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | iepl20010 -
Ranking without SEO?
We have a client that we've been doing white-hat SEO for for over 3 years and they've always been number 1 in Google for all their targeted keywords. This year, their competition has been ranking above them and our client has been pushed towards the bottom of the first page. After thorough research, we discovered that this competitor is doing no SEO at all, just regular PR which our client is also doing. Our client is even spending money in Adwords and their competition isn't. Can anyone explain how a website that does zero SEO can magically be ranked at the top now and above our competitor who we're doing everything possible for?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOhughesm0 -
What sources do you use to keep on top of SEO news?
I want to try building an RSS feed of SEO news... but not wanting to find myself drowning in materials As such, looking for a short list of recommendations for keeping on top of SEO developments – the impetus is that I'm still discovering changes that happened 2, 3, even 5 years ago, and I want to try and catch these things as they happen. Thinking something actually from Google may be on the list, but some of these sources are pretty on top of things! Seroundtable.com also comes to mind. But what do you use to keep informed? Thanks 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ntcma1 -
How to save website from Negative SEO?
Hi, I have read couple of good blog post on Negative SEO and come to know about few solution which may help me to save my website during Negative SEO. Here, I want to share my experience and live data regarding Negative SEO. Someone is creating bad inbound links to my website. I come to know about it via Google webmaster tools. Honestly, I have implemented certain solutions like Google disavow tool, contact to certain websites and many more. But, I can see negative impact on organic visits. Organic visits are going down since last two months. And, I am thinking, These bad inbound links are biggest reasons behind it. You can visit following URLs to know more about it. Can anyone share your experience to save website from negative SEO? How can I save any website from Negative SEO (~Bad Inbound Links) https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxyEDFdgDN-iR0xMd2FHeVlzYVU/edit https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxyEDFdgDN-iMEtneXU1YmhWX2s/edit?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxyEDFdgDN-iSzNXdEJRdVJJVGM/edit?usp=sharing
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Google admits it can take up to a year to refresh/recover your site after it is revoked from Penguin!
I found myself in an impossible situation where I was getting information from various people that seem to be "know it all's" but everything in my heart was telling me they were wrong when it came to the issues my site was having. I have been on a few Google Webmaster Hangouts and found many answers to questions I thought had caused my Penguin Penalty. After taking much of the advice, I submitted my Reconsideration Request for the 9th time (might have been more) and finally got the "revoke" I was waiting for on the 28th of MAY. What was frustrating was on May 22nd there was a Penguin refresh. This as far as I knew was what was needed to get your site back up in the organic SERPS. My Disavow had been submitted in February and only had a handful of links missing between this time and the time we received the revoke. We patiently waited for the next penguin refresh with the surety that we were heading in the right direction by John Mueller from Google (btw.. John is a great guy and really tries to help where he can). The next update came on October 4th and our rankings actually got worse! I spoke with John and he was a little surprised but did not go into any detail. At this point you have to start to wonder WHAT exactly is wrong with the website. Is this where I should rank? Is there a much deeper Panda issue. We were on the verge of removing almost all content from the site or even changing domains despite the fact that it was our brand name. I then created a tool that checked the dates of every last cached date of each link we had in our disavow file. The thought process was that Google had not re-crawled all the links and so they were not factored into the last refresh. This proved to be incorrect,all the links had been re-cached August and September. Nothing earlier than that,which would indicate a problem that they had not been cached in time. i spoke to many so called experts who all said the issue was that we had very few good links left,content issues etc.. Blah Blah Blah, heard it all before and been in this game since the late 90's, the site could not rank this badly unless there was an actual penalty as spam site ranked above us for most of our keywords. So just as we were about to demolish the site I asked John Mueller one more time if he could take a look at the site, this time he actually took the time to investigate,which was very kind of him. he came back to me in a Google Hangout in late December, what he said to me was both disturbing and a relief at the same time. the site STILL had a penguin penalty despite the disavow file being submitted in February over 10 months ago! And the revoke in May. I wrote this to give everyone here that has an authoritative site or just an old one, hope that not all is lots just yet if you are still waiting to recover in Google. My site is 10 years old and is one of the leaders in its industry. Sites that are only a few years old and have had unnatural link building penalties have recovered much faster in this industry which I find ridiculous as most of the time the older authoritative sites are the big trustworthy brands. This explains why Google SERPS have been so poor for the last year. The big sites take much longer to recover from penalties letting the smaller lest trustworthy sites prevail. I hope to see my site recover in the next Penguin refresh with the comfort of knowing that my site currently is still being held back by the Google Penguin Penalty refresh situation. Please feel free to comment below on anything you think is relevant.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Does Anybody Know Who Interflora's SEO Company Is (Or Was)?
In light of the recent penalty put on the Interflora site, does anybody know who their SEO company is or was (or if they were doing it in house)? Also, do you think SEO companies that are responsible for things like this should be named and shamed?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jasarrow0 -
Big loss in Google traffic recently, but can't work out what the problem is
Since about May 17 my site - http://lowcostmarketingstrategies.com - has suffered a big drop in traffic from Google, presumed from the dreaded Penguin update. I am at a loss why I have been hit when I don't engage in any black hat SEO tactics or do any link building. The site is high quality, provides a good experience for the user and I make sure that all of the content is unique and not published elsewhere. The common checklist of potential problems from Penguin (such as keyword stuffing, web spam and over optimisation in general) don't seem relevant to my site. I'm wondering if someone could take a quick look at my site to see any obvious things that need to be removed to get back in Google's good books. I was receiving around 200 - 250 hits per day, but that has now dropped down to 50 - 100 and I fee that I have been penalised incorrectly. Any input would be fantastic Thanks 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ScottDudley0