What are the lowest acceptable metrics for a link?
-
I understand there is a subjective, human factor when deciding to link to/from a site.
Nonetheless, what are the lowest Moz or Majestic metrics that are acceptable when building links. At what point do you say this site doesn't have the profile I would want?
I am looking to clean up the backlink profile of a site. Also, I would like to set a criteria for building links in the future.
I appreciate your thoughts on metrics when it comes to link building.
-
Like others have said, DA is just a number and in today's Googles eyes, it's all about relevancy of the page, rather than the page authority.
Also a site might have a high DA, but if the link juice doesn't pass down to the page where the link is, DA is irrelevant.
how about looking at links in a different way. Instead why not image Google doesn't exist and the only way to get relevant traffic to your site is from other websites talking and sending referral traffic (through a link). You would then only place links where you know you would get decent traffic and sales - think like this and you will get the relevant links and rank nicely. DA and numbers are irreverent then, it's all about relevancy
-
While I understand you are looking for the lowest metrics that are acceptable, I think that is the wrong way to go about it. The focus should not be on the metrics and instead on the users and the relationship. In fact, if you hone in on only authoritative sites, your link footprint will appear very unnatural. Basically, it is unnatural to have ALL authoritative links and that does not look good to the search engines.
There was a great post by James Finlayson on moz last year. This post will hopefully do a better job explaining this than my brief answer:
http://moz.com/blog/how-guest-bloggers-are-sleepwalking-their-way-into-penaltiesAlthough the post was about guest blogging, it definitely pertains to your situation as well. Imagine you arbitrarily decide that the lowest DA you want is 30. Your link graph will look a ton like the unnatural one under the Link Quality section. Instead, just focus on building relationships and links where it simultaneously profits users and your brands and the outcome is guaranteed to be good.
-
All of the numbers are borderline arbitrary. I would simply state; "Don't be stupid." That will get you further than anything.
-
Chasing the domain authority for links is not really as straight forward as that.
- Domain has DA of 50 but not really related, is starting to crack with poor content etc
- Domain has DA of 15 is spot on in terms of directly related content and quality. It's a new site and looks like it will develop.
- A good link profile will have a natural mix of low to high DA, with an upturn for the most common 30-50 DA. This will include a good sprinkling of no-follow. When researching I tend to filter 25+ but keep an open mind on everything.
For cleaning up a profile you can't look at those measurements, you need to go into each site and manually check out it's content and history, its own link profile and make a judgement if you are in the right neighbourhood. Of course directories, 'comments' links and badly placed 'articles', thinly veiled paid for (do-follow) are much easier to weed out.
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
-
Avoid too many internal links
My site is being flagged in Page Optimization Score for "Avoid too many internal links", but the warning doe snot tell me how many internal links are on a page. How can I find this?
Technical SEO | | Zambezikid0 -
Unnatural links from your site
Hi, 24 February got this penalty message in Google webmaster tool. Google detected a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links on pages on this site. This may be the result of selling links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. Already removed all the link on the blog and sent reconsideration request to Google spam team. But request is rejected. Please help me on this or share link with me on same case. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Transferring link juice on a page with over 150 links
I'm building a resource section that will probably, hopefully, attract a lot of external links but the problem here is that on the main index page there will be a big number of links (around 150 internal links - 120 links pointing to resource sub-pages and 30 being the site's navigational links), so it will dilute the passed link juice and possibly waste some of it. Those 120 sub-pages will contain about 50-100 external links and 30 internal navigational links. In order to better visualise the matter think of this resource as a collection of hundreds of blogs categorised by domain on the index page (those 120 sub-pages). Those 120 sub-pages will contain 50-100 external links The question here is how to build the primary page (the one with 150 links) so it will pass the most link juice to the site or do you think this is OK and I shouldn't be worried about it (I know there used to be a roughly 100 links per page limit)? Any ideas? Many thanks
Technical SEO | | flo20 -
Link building question
ok so we paid the top firm in seo to help us build an seo strategy and i think we have a good one. We are changing our link building tactics and making more Pr related links and creating awesome content on blogs or our own site to generate traffic and links to our site. We have data from our engineer which should be interesting and we are going to sponsor events, do some link baiting with some of our articles, get a pr firm to get us some good articles on major sites and go to events around phily where we will have unique content and a unique perspective such as car shows ect. The problem is even though all the content will be linked to our site how do we link them. We got hit by penguin but in these articles or blogs should we use the anchor text for the word we are using. The company says dont do it right now bc we got hit with penguin and should only use the brand. I have no idea how only using the brand and not the keywords will magically make us rank for certain keywords. Anyone have an opinion. Thank you and we do pretty well with seo but we did get little bit of a hit with penguin that we are eliminating links and making a new way of thinking when it comes to link building. We also just hired a designer so we are going to build 100s of pages on the site to increase seo with unique content and that is also a goal of ours for the year. We have two marketers on staff and 4 programmers so we are able to do anything. Our urls are terrible but the rest of the site is pretty good
Technical SEO | | goldjake17880 -
Link Structure & Duplicate Content
I am struggling with how I should handle the link structure on my site. Right now most of my pages are like this: Home -> Department -> Service Groups -> Content Page For Example: Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> IT Support Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> Managed Services Home -> IT Solutions -> IT Support & Managed Services -> Help Desk Services Home -> IT Solutions -> Virtualization & Data Center Solutions -> Virtualization Home -> IT Solutions -> Virtualization & Data Center Solutions -> Data Center Solutions This structure lines up with our business and makes logical sense but I am not sure how to handle the department and service group pages. Right now you can click them and it just brings you to a page with a small snippet for the links below. The real content is on the content pages. What I am worried about is that the snippets on those pages are just a paragraph or two of the content that's on the content page. Will this hurt me and get considered duplicate content? What is the best practice for dealing with this? Those department/service group pages have some good content on them but it's just parts of other pages. Am I okay doing this because there are not direct duplicates of other pages just parts of a few pages? Any help on this would be great. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | ZiaTG0 -
How do you take down a link
Salut from Sunny wetherby UK 🙂 Having just watched a whiteboard fri clip all about the "Penguin Update" i want to know how to take down a link. I feel a site ive been working on has been pecked by the penguin. I did build inbound links on a specific commercial term and shiver me timbers is dropped oof the SERPS from top 5 to ziltch, yiles!! So my questiuon is please:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
if you find an inbound link using a target term how do you kill it? Thanks in advance :_)0 -
Too many links on your blog?
In all of my campaigns, I have a lot of URLs with too many links on the page (defined loosely as around or over 100 links per page); these links are virtually all found on blog pages. The link count shoots up quickly when you start using things like tag clouds, showing all the tags/categories a post is in, in addition to all the cross linking thats typical of blog posts. My question is: Does this matter? Do you work to get blog pages down under that 100 link limit, or just assume most blogs are like this and move along? If you think it does matter, what strategies have you used to cut down the number of links while still keeping popular elements like tag clouds?
Technical SEO | | AdoptionHelp0 -
What link tracking solution do you use?
What solution do you use to keep track of links that you have acquired or purchased?
Technical SEO | | qlkasdjfw0