Can you link build without adding any content to the website?
-
I am an agency-side SEO who has a few different SEO clients. A couple of them absolutely refuse to add any content to their site - no blog, no articles, no link bait, nothing.
They have resisted efforts for any content to be placed on their site - whether it is written by us, them, or a third party. They just don't see the value in it, despite my attempts to persuade them.
As a result, these websites are just brochure websites.
What are your options for link building in this situation? If content is the foundation of white hat link building, what do you do if the client refuses to add content to their site?
All help gratefully received!
Thanks
-
Without any content you're also setting yourself up to get hit by the next monster Google update. I would make sure you lay out all of these reasons to add content and the risks of not having any and make sure they are aware of it. If they still won't budge, then just do the best you can and when the day comes when they realize they aren't seeing results they'll already know why.
-
wise words of advice!
-
The biz in question sounds like they are shooting themselves in the foot and I'd have to agree that I would not want to work with them.
If the education of the client has been done correctly the decision to create content should be a no brainer as long as that content is intelligently thought out by the consultant.
-
You can always get some benefit out of building links, but without content it can be an uphill battle. Will they do any on page optimization at all? If not, then this will be very difficult.
I hate to say this because it is not an SEO comment, but on the business side, some clients cost more than they bring in. It is up to you, but politely ending a relationship with an uncooperative client can be better than saying you can do it and not producing results.
-
I think the best option to be linked is write relevant content. If your client doesn´t want to create content on his web, you can create a subdomain, an external blog or another domain to do a SEO job. A place to create landing pages to pull traffic to your site.
Nobody is going to link you if you exhibit a little piece of nothing.
I'm sorry.
-
I have always been able to overcome client objections on this topic. If you can work with clients to produce a single, high quality article and then demonstrate the traffic it generates, that would help them to understand the value of content.
If the above suggestion is not workable, the next step is to find sources who would sincerely be interested in the site's existing content.
Another possibility, the client may not be willing to add content to their site but might consider guest blogging on another site which could raise the level of awareness about their site.
In the end, there are two sides to this coin. On the one side, people are free to choose what is best for them. On the other side, as a professional it is your job to help clients understand the benefit on adding quality content to their site. If you fail to do such, you have not done your job well. It's the same idea as a sick patient who visits a doctor but wont take their medicine. It's the doctor's role to present options and the patient to make the choice. On the other hand, a better doctor (think Dr. House) is able to push the patient into doing the right thing.
-
You can link build and it will yield some benefits, make sure you go for the yelp, yahoo directories etc at the very least.
Naturally the better the content, the more opportunities for social sharing, links, mentions etc
I assume you have already done the on-page seo?
What is the customers reason for refusing it, is it cost? If so you are prob banging you head against a brick wall and may be worth focusing your efforts on new receptive clients as opposed to those that don't want to know... as they say, you can lead a horse to water....
Maybe not the answer you wanted, but hope it helps!
One footnote to the link building post penguin, make sure that the quality of the back links are good and legitimate and be careful with the link anchor text, make sure you don't try and link for the same phrase/keywords
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
-
How can I use the images to improve my SEO?
Hi there, I am starting to work on my web and I have a question regarding the featured images of the articles. How can I work with them to improve the SEO of my posts? Thank you in advance! 🙂
Content Development | | lucywrites0 -
Need advice on internal links
I run a couple of gadget/technology based blogs, which essentially has news based articles and long form articles such as reviews, tutorials, and tips. Looking for some advice on the strategy for internal links: We have been using internal links in the following ways in articles so far: Links to the category pages at the end of the article (we call it related topics) Links to category pages wherever relevant preferably in the first paragraph. The logic here was that if we can add the link to a category in the first paragraph, which appears on the home page and category page, it will pass the link juice to the category page. Link to relevant articles, mostly by using the full title of the post as we thought that it stands out. Issues with the current strategy: In the case of the 1st strategy, it doesn't seem that natural, so we are not sure if people actually end up clicking them. In case of the 2nd, we have couple of concerns: it could result in linking to a category page twice. One within the article, and the second at the end of the article because of strategy 1. Because the first paragraph also appears on the category pages, it would mean that in some cases we will be linking to the same category page (recursive). In the case of the 3rd strategy, the problem is it does not appear natural so we are sure if it increases the value of the content. I was wondering if we should adopt the following strategy: Get rid of category links at the end of the article. Avoid linking to the category pages in the first paragraph, instead link to the category pages after the first paragraph, so we don't end up with the issue mentioned in b. i. Alternatively, we could remove the excerpts from the category pages so we don't hit the issue of linking to the category page from the category page. Add links more naturally. So have a sentence which talks about the related article and link to it using partial match (keyword phrase) or exact match. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Content Development | | Gautam0 -
Knowledge base for seo, announcing new articles on blog (dupe content)
Hi all, Im thinking of creating a knowledge base with all many asked questions in my company. This could be a great Link-bait source but also nice ranking opportunities i think. But sometimes some new articles are so actual that i also want to blog them.
Content Development | | mdkay
Can i for example double post them (or post a big excerpt) on the blog and canonicalise it to the KB article?
Will links to the blog have equal value to KB links? And will this work?0 -
Same content but translated. Penalization?
Hi There, I’ve got a question. There are two website that are under the same proprietor but must stay not related (different brand, different IP, different country, different language). The question is: Does google penalize one of the site if I entirely translate the content from site 1 to site2? Thank you very much for you input 😉
Content Development | | Midleton0 -
We used to sell links ...
We used to sell text links on our site WebDesign.org , I told about that via Twitter in public, Google penalized us and here’s the history of the issue in more detail. I write it here to ask if you guys know how to sort out this issue coz I’m not exactly sure at this point. Before I tackle the issue itself, here's some background. OUTBOUND LINKS ISSUE Jun 22, 2013 We received an Unnatural outbound links penalty (Manual spam action message in our Google Webmaster Tools account) from Google July 1, 2013 We nofollowed all homepage links and submitted a reconsideration request July 10, 2013 Google replied that we still violate their quality guidelines July 15, 2013 We removed links to low quality and irrelevant sites (such as Chinese stores, etc) and submitted another reconsideration request July 22, 2013 Manual Spam Action revoked INBOUND LINKS ISSUE November 8, 2013 We got a message from Google about Unnatural links to your site - impacts links (Message in our Google Webmaster Tools account) November 27, 2013 We Submitted a Disavow file with Deadly Risky links (found via generating a LinkDetox report) and submitted a reconsideration request December 15, 2013 Manual Action revoked (main keyword ranking got from 41 to 4) February 6, 014 And here's the actual issue: OUTBOUND LINKS ISSUE (Again) I told via Twitter in public that our site sells links. Matt Cutts noticed that and we got another Unnatural outbound links penalty (Manual action). Main keyword ranking decreased from 9 to 65. We removed all outbound links on the homepage and submitted a reconsideration request. April 15, 2014 Google replied that we still violate their quality guidelines. We nofollowd all outbound links with JavaScript (wrong move because Google did not take it as nofollowed) and submitted another reconsideration request. April 19, 2014 Google rejected our reconsideration request and said that we still violate their quality guidelines. April 23, 2014 We nofollowed properly this time (with PHP) and submitted another reconsideration request. May 4, 2014 Google replies that we still violate their quality guidelines. So, at this point I’m kinda lost in terms of what to do next because we've nofollowed all our outbound links (both paid and natural ones). What would you recommend?
Content Development | | VinceWicks0 -
Are reciprocal internal links weaker than one way?
Hi guys I have an eCommerce site and a blog. the blog is on a suddomain. I am writing content about our products on the blog, I.e. Full in depth reviews and top 10 lists etc. These blog posts link back to the main product page. It would also be nice for customers on the site to a "blogs about this product" section. However, would a link from the product page to the blog weaken the internal link from the blog to the product? Thanks Paul
Content Development | | TheUniqueSEO0 -
Marking our content as original, where the rel=author tag might not be applied
Hello, Can anyone tell, if it is possible to protect text –type content without the rel=author tag? We host a business listing site, where, apart from the general contact information, we have also started to write original 800+ character-long unique and original contents for the suppliers, where we expect visits, so rankings should be increased. My issue is that this is a very competitive business, and content crawling is really an everyday practice. Of course, I would like to keep my original content or at least mark it as mine for Google. The easiest way would be the author tag, but the problem is, that I do not want our names and our photos to be assigned to these contents, because from one hand, we are not acknowledged content providers on our own (no bio and whatsoever), and on the other hand, we provide contents for every sort of businesses, so just having additional links to our other contents, might not help readers to get what they want. I also really do not think that a photo of me could help increase the CTR from the SERP:) What we currently do, is that we submit every major fresh content through url submission in WMT, hoping that first indexing might help. We have only a handful of them within a day, so not more than 10. Yes, I could perhaps use absolute links, but this one is not a feasible scenario in all cases, and about DMCA, as our programmer says, what you can see on the internet, that you can basically own. So finally, I do not mind our contents being stolen, as I can’t possibly prevent this. I want however our original content to be recognized as ours by Google, even after the stealing is done. (Best would be an ’author tag for business’, so connected to our business Google+ page, but I am not aware, this function can be used this way.) Thank you in advance for all of you, sharing your thoughts with me on the topic.
Content Development | | Dilbak0 -
Duplicate Content - Video
I recently noticed a drop in rankings for my site shortly after the new algorithm update. I'm not sure exactly why rankings went down, but would like to know if it has to do with having videos on our site that do not belong to us. We have a few videos on product pages that the manufacturer of the product had created. I was wondering if Google maybe thinks we are maliciously stealing these videos or something and penalizing us for it. And if stuff like this has anything to do with the recent algorithm update. We make our own videos, but some of our manufacturer's videos are just better... and they work with us and are glad for us to have their videos listed. Thanks in advance
Content Development | | poolguy0