A backlinks question
-
Hi all
Could do with a second opinion on this one if anyone has a moment please.
Recent Google updates have targeted overally optimised backlink profiles as they are clearly for seo purposes and not natural. The question I have is how does this relate to an ecommerce website?
If I sell 'blue 1980 aged cheese' (I know nothing about cheese so perhaps not the best example!!) and I have a url on my shop domain.com/store/blue-1980-aged-cheese with the product name as the page title along with the domain name. If I were to get backlinks pointing to this page using the anchor of 'blue 1980 aged cheese' (and other variations of that, blue cheese, aged blue cheese etc) would this be considered to be too optimised?
Given the page is about this item then surely it could be considered natural that people link using the product name, as well as using the site name and the domain url
Any thoughts please
Thanks, Carl
-
Hey, a couple of links to the top 100 products would likely make a big difference, just try to keep it natural.
You may do better with a highly scalable content + outreach campaign to bring in hundreds of links as manual link building for this many pages is just not practical.
Or, alternatively, some kind of competition or some such to try and stimulate natural linking to the product pages - obviously, idea needs fleshing out and not knowing your industry it's a total shot in the dark but... there is always a way.
Best of luck!
Marcus -
Marcus/Rod
Thanks for taking the time to reply. You make some very interesting points which I will take on board. I will take a look over the studies mentioned. You're right when saying the product pages on big retailers such as Amazon tend to have little to no backlinks. My website has about 85,000 products so one of the alternative strategies being considered is to seo just the root domain or the categories instead. It will take longer to see results this way but if I can get the overall domain authority much higher by working with just a few pages then the knock on effect should help the rest of the site.
Many thanks
-
Marcus/Rod
Thanks for taking the time to reply. You make some very interesting points which I will take on board. I will take a look over the studies mentioned. You're right when saying the product pages on big retailers such as Amazon tend to have little to no backlinks. My website has about 85,000 products so one of the alternative strategies being considered is to seo just the root domain or the categories instead. It will take longer to see results this way but if I can get the overall domain authority much higher by working with just a few pages then the knock on effect should help the rest of the site.
Many thanks
-
Hey Carl
There was a good study done on this by Distilled and published here at SEOMoz a while back.
As I remember, they looked at anchor text distribution for different types of pages and it was determined that product pages would have around 45% keyword anchors (varied of course). They then broke that 45% down so that 25% of it was an exact match anchor and then the rest was several varieties of that including branding etc.
The whole article is worth a read but the general advice was that you work to a 7:3 ratio and for every 3 (varied) keyword links you build you would add seven branded or safe links (URL etc).
Another point worth noting here is that product pages don't tend to get mega amounts of external links. I just checked a few well established products on amazon and they tended to have a low amount of links. Somewhere between 10 and 25. In fact, the main xbox 360 model only had 22 links so don't go overboard.
There is a lot more to what is considered natural with links than just anchor text though so be careful if you are asking this to help engineer the natural or create a supernatural set of product links.
Hope that helps.
Marcus
References
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/seo/anchor-text-ratios-and-link-building/ -
The anchor text from your link profile, will never penalize you. It might not be as great as a keyword based anchor text but it doesn't have a negative impact. On the other side, if you have 80% of your link's anchor text saying "blue 1980 aged cheese", Google will see that something's not right and you will not get the value that you would from a natural link profile.
If the links are genuine and are inbound from genuine websites and not link farms or spam sites, you should be fine. Penguin is about penalizing black hat tactics, for example, buying links from link farms.
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
-
Footer backlink for/to Web Design Agency
I read some old (10+ years) information on whether footer backlinks from the websites that design agencies build are seen as spammy and potentially cause a negative effect. We have over 150 websites that we have built over the last few years, all with sitewide footer backlinks back to our homepage (designed and managed by COMPANY NAME). Semrush flags some of the links as potential spammy links. What are the current thoughts on this type of footer backlink? Are we better to have 1 dofollow backlink and the rest of the website nofollow from each domain?
Link Building | | MultiAdE1 -
One or multiple backlinks from business profiles?
Hi, When building diverse backlinks to a website it's often possible to place one, or several, links in the business profile on a directory or social platform such as https://www.broadjam.com/Scambler, https://coub.com/scamblermusic, https://issuu.com/scamblermusic or https://soundcloud.com/scambler. Typically I would only add one backlink to these profiles (and that would be to the home page) but I often wonder if I should take the opportunity to add several links to internal pages and blog posts. Am I missing an opportunity to add more backlinks and spread out the link juice, or could multiple backlinks within short profiles be considered spammy? Any advice would be helpful. Thanks.
Link Building | | JCN-SBWD1 -
Where to buy high quality backlinks in 2018?
I am searching for backlink vendors, only english-speaking websites, financial topic. Another option is business, news, technologies, cryptocurrencies related sites. Only high-quality, active and developed websites, real traffic, no spam. If you have some contacts of vendors of such kind (or if you have access to the right website), please share emails - would really appreciate that!
Link Building | | g01110 -
Backlinks from ads on parked domains? Is this possible?
Hello Moz Friends, So as I was researching some competitive backlinks and I noticed a lot of backlinks that a clients competitor has are on parked domains and they appear to be google ads from some point. You know the pages that this page no longer exists, or hey do you want to buy this domain? and it has like 6 google ads on it? Yep those pages. My clients industry is construction and their competitor has links from zombie websites, foreign, websites and more. But the links are no longer on the page. Like when it was crawled, their ad was showing. Does this make any sense and is it usually temporary? Thank you for your thoughts friends!
Link Building | | asbchris0 -
Questions About Link Building .
Hello Moz Community, I am about to hire a SEO firm for my website ranking. I have few questions about their link building plan. http://priceperlink.com/SEO-Link-Building/ Their link building plan ! I have purchased package 4. I have noticed they will use same article and PR again and again . Is that acceptable ? This plan is not authenticated to me. I hope google will catch me for duplicate content. Anyone can clear it please ? Another question is , If i provide unique articles , will that plan be helpful ? Still i have confusion. As I read few days ago, google don't give any value to article submission and press release distribution without any news ! So, help me quickly and suggestion as well. Will i continue with them or not. Thanks
Link Building | | businessowner0 -
Backlinks from archived content? SEO penalty?
I'm curious, if I go to webmasters and suggest a change to an article in their archives (convincing them that the new link offers more value to their readers), how would Google look at that? It seems to me that if a two-year-old article all of a sudden gets a new link, it might look fishy, and might even bring penalties with it. Thoughts?
Link Building | | JABacchetta0 -
Backlink Building to Facebook?
Would there be any benefit to building some backlinks to your social media profiles (i.e. Facebook, Twitter), considering that you're linking to yourself regularly from them anyway? There are a few SEO companies that I would like to try out, but I figure why not try them out on my social media profiles first, before having them do any work directly to my site. Thoughts?
Link Building | | JABacchetta0 -
Yahoo Directory Link Question
Recently two of my clients purchased a listing in the Yahoo Directory, but they don't show up in the SEOmoz campaign analysis. Is there a reason why?
Link Building | | thriveseo0