Do links hold there value after 12 months?
-
Hello, We need to find out if links that we setup, which are older than 12 months hold any value? Do new links hold more value than old ones and therefore should we let the old links become inactive? If we do let the links become inactive after 12month will that effect the PA/DA of the site?
-
Andrew, to answer your question in simple words, yes...aged links help. Now, the way I am looking at it, there's also this bigger problem. Imagine scenarios below. Website A.com has 10,000 natural links. You add 50 Rented Links. Now, 1 year later, "naturally" your natural links should grow. Also, with the nature of the Internet, some of those 10,000 links will be lost...sites expire...people loose interest in their websites/blogs, clean-up efforts and other reasons. So gradually you are both gaining and loosing links on a regular basis, which is natural. So if the 50 rented, essentially 50 anchor text links are gained and lost after 12 months or so, they give a clean indication of something going on. The risk is there...on a scale of 1-10 of affecting your link profile, the risk maybe 3-4. Imagine the above scenario for Website B, which only has 100 total natural links. And you add 50 Rented Links and those links disappear after 1 year...that's a much higher risk compared to the above scenario. The risk in both situations is 2 fold. A. Loss of PA/DA B. Potential Issues with Link Profile. Does that make sense ? I hope this helps you make decisions.
-
There is no research that cites that links lose or gain value with age, but I believe both are equally important. A lot of people who buy links will lose it after a certain period and if a lot of such links are lost, Google can detect something (if it hadn't already!) and would remove juice/ demote accordingly. As the links age, the trust to those links increases as well.
New links are very important as well as it gives signals of 'freshness' of the quality of the content/page that it hasn't become obsolete with time.
-
When you talk about letting the old links become inactive, do you mean these are paid/rented links that you are letting expire? If you could define what you mean by inactive, that'll help us answer the question better for you. Thanks!
-
Hey Andrew,
In fact, the more a link has aged, the better. It's a sign of stability to have a wide range of dated links pointing to your site. It shows that your site is continuously and consistently sought after by others (people referencing your material, etc.).
It is still important that you continue to build links though, as you don't only want to have old links. If you haven't gotten any new links to your site in a long time, it can be a sign that your site may have gone stagnant.
So, the old links are good, but keep building them.
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
-
Nofollow links on our site menu
Hi Our site's front page has almost 900 internal links on it (it's an ecommerce site with about 25,000 products). A lot of these are on a pretty involved dropdown menu, which is on every page. I can't really do anything to get this figure down (its outside my remit), but one thing the developers have done is make all the menu links nofollow on the mobile version of the menu (site is responsive) - otherwise there would be even more links! My question is as to whether doing this for the mobile menu is a good idea, in terms of SEO?
Technical SEO | | abisti21 -
Disavowing links, Is it effective?
Looking for your experiences with disavowing back-links? We've been flooded with new clients who need spammy link removal services and wanted to hear more about your experience with the disavow tool. For sites that have been penalized, how long did it take for them to come back using the disavow tool? Did you see sites come back after the next algo update? Here's the basics of our services for link deletion: 1. Find all the spammy links
Technical SEO | | Keith-Eneix
2. Contact webmasters to delete them
3. Disavow all spammy links that are part of an obvious network
4. Implement a content plan for new quality links to get the site healthy again.
5. Report on all links removed and new links attained Just want to make sure our processes are in line with what everyone else is doing?0 -
Do bad links to a sub-domain which redirects to our primary domain pass link juice and hurt rankings?
Sometime in the distant past there existed a blog.domain.com for domain.com. This was before we started work for domain.com. During the process of optimizing domain.com we decided to 301 blog.domain.com to www.domain.com. Recently, we discovered that blog.domain.com actually has a lot of bad links pointing towards it. By a lot I mean, 5000+. I am curious to hear people's opinions on the following: 1. Are they passing bad link juice? 2. does Google consider links to a sub-domain being passed through a 301 to be bad links to our primary domain? 3. The best approach to having these links removed?
Technical SEO | | Shredward0 -
Rel=nofollow for affiliate links?
Hi, For a holiday/travel website including hotels and holiday packages from affiliates I am currently using the rel="nofollow" attribute to link out to the affiliate's website and wanted to know if this is the right way? To be more precise: there are distinct pages for each city and on a city specific page there are ~50 available hotels listed with some other information such as price and address, etc. Each of these hotels have an outlink to the affiliate's hotel website which uses private branding and as such is running on a subdomain hotels.mytraveldomain.tld. So in order not to pass on the link juice to the affiliate's website I thought I would simply use rel="nofollow". Would you also use nofollow? or are there any other opinions out there about that?
Technical SEO | | socialtowards1 -
Check large number of links
How can I check a link to see if there are links going to it (internal and external)? How can I check a large number of links to see if there are any links going to them? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
How do you find bad links to your site?
My website has around 900 incoming links and I have a Google 50 penalty that is sitewide. I have been doing research and from what I can see is that the 50 penalty is usually associated with scetchy links. The penalty started last year. I had about 40 related domains to my main site and each had a simple one page site with a link to the main site. (I know I screwed up) I cleaned up all of those links by removing them. The single page site still exist, but they have no links and several of them still rank very well. I also had an outside SEO person that bought a few links. I came clean with Google and told them everything. I gave them all of my sites and that the SEO person had bought links. I gave them full disclosure and removed everything. I have one site that I can't get the link removed from. I have contacted them numerous times to remove the link and I get no response. I am curious if anyone has had a simular experience and how they corrected the situation. Another issue is that my site is "thin" because its an ecommerce affiliate site and full of affiliate links. I work in the costume market. I'm also afraid that I have other bad links pointing to my site. Dooes anyone know of a tool to identify bad links that Google may be penalizing me for at this time. Here is Google's latest denial of my reconsideration request. Dear site owner or webmaster of XXXXXXXXX.com. We received a request from a site owner to reconsider XXXXXXXX.com for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from XXXXXXXXXX.com may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality
Technical SEO | | tadden0 -
4XX Broken Links
I am attempting to fix the issues SEOmoz found when crawling my site. I have a list of 4XX errors that I am attempting to fix. Basically I know one option is to redirect them to another page, but I would like to have the option to remove the links completely. The only problem is I can not find where the links are located. Does SEOmoz provide where on my site these broken links are? Or do they only provide the url that is linked to?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0 -
Why would you remove a canonical link?
Currently, my client's blog makes a duplicate page every time someone comments on a post. The previous SEO consultant told the developer to not put a canonical link directing it to the main blog post. Did taking out the canonical link result in these duplicate pages? My question is why would she recommend this action? Is it best to now add in the canonical link in or should we implement a 301 redirect or insert a index: no follow? Would adding a canonical link keep duplicate pages from happening in the future?
Technical SEO | | Scratch_MM0