Value of certain directory links
-
I am looking at the links to a competitors site and they have a ton of links from things like this http://www.directoryws.com/ Is it worth submitting to something like this? It has a 58 domain authority from Moz.
-
Two things:
1. While it's a a good idea to reverse engineer your competition, you don't always want to duplicate them. Has the site been ranking highly for a while? If not, you may not want to copy their links.
2. In my opinion there are literally 10-20 directories worth the time and effort. Remember: it's all about looking natural. And nothing looks LESS natural than getting 100s of directory links.
Here are some of my favorite directories:
Free:
DMOZ (good luck)
Paid:
Yahoo! Directory (expensive but worth it)
Hope that helps!
-
How Sites Obtain Authority
To obtain authority (long-term), you need to silo your website (google that term for a complete description) with keyword researched content. The best strategy is to build links (niche directories and communities) to those inner pages that have specific types of content that cannot be featured on the home page. That content should be very engaging with a strong click to action for the reader. They could opt-in further to your content, if ecommerce a discount on a product, etc.
How To Build Directory Links
The biggest deal to building manual links to directories is to be random! Post Penguin 2012, you want to avoid duplication and automated link building and exact anchor matches. If you do decided to do some exact anchor text, only do it a few times a month. Also you don't need a ton of the same type of links featuring exact anchor either. This year and in the future "semantic" will eventually determine what your site is about and hook your content up with the correct searches.
Tips For Link Building With Directories - What To Do
With that said, hand pic the top directories (some free, some paid, some premium, local, and niche related). Make your self a road-map for the first three months and configure a good mix of each with intent to submit up to 5 or 10 depending on your niche and try to use your brand name as the anchor. Also when you do your keyword research and decide on the top seed keyword (two keyword terms usually), come up with 100 (if you can) different variations (should also try to match your website's message or content, goes for the home page and all inner pages) variations of that "seeded" keyword. Use those anchors in rotation and you should be fine.
Extra Tips
*also try to start with premium directories first
*this strategy is long-term and if you add this with good content development and syndication services or software to help distribute the content; you'll get the links that will carry your website long-term.
Hopes 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
-
Moz bot not discovering important links (high DA sites link)
Moz bot is unable to crawl and discover my links on the high authority websites like microsoft, linkedin, pinterest, etc. Where is the problem?
Link Building | | TechG0 -
Links from my Own Blog to my Own Website and Link Scheme
Hi There, I use my own blog to give advices and offer information related to my business service. Of course in terms of SEO my blog is useful not only to expand my brand presence but also to acquire long-tail traffic. I use to insert a maximum of one link with a relative matching anchor text in every article of my blog pointing to my own webpage. Said that, the questions are as follows: Am I involuntarily participating in a Link Scheme with my blog? And If so, how many links can I send to my own webpage ? Shall I limit the number of links to a minimum? Thanks a lot for your advices.
Link Building | | Midleton0 -
Many high value links to printer-friendly versions of our pages
First, forgive me if I miss something obvious. I'm a user experience designer who handles all SEO efforts for our organization in my spare time. This question is about our patient / health education website, http://familydoctor.org NIH's Medline Plus ( http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ ) has linked to http://familydoctor.org for a very, very long time, before we had advertisements on the site. To get an idea of where Medline Plus links to familydoctor.org, visit http://goo.gl/1yaofC or use the following query in Google.com: site:www.nlm.nih.gov inurl:medlineplus American Academy of Family Physicians After we redesigned and started putting ads on FD.org, I think these two things happened simultaneously, we received a contact from someone at NIH stating they could no longer link to our site because of the ads. NIH is a highly-trusted and ranked domain, so we agreed to let them link to the printer-friendly versions of our content to avoid the ads. A few years later, we restructured the content. For an article about depression, instead of having one page with all of the content ( http://web.archive.org/web/20090215071258/http://familydoctor.org/online/famdocen/home/common/mentalhealth/depression/046.html ), we broke it up into many shorter pages ( http://familydoctor.org/familydoctor/en/diseases-conditions/depression.html ), such as Overview, Symptoms, Causes, Diagnosis, Treatment, etc. I don't know if NIH crossed anyone's mind until go-live day, when we noticed a high number of referrals to the error page coming from NIH.gov. We wanted to fix this quickly, so Medline didn't stop linking to us and Google didn't de-value the relationship because of the broken links. We redirected all of the printer-friendly links from the previous site to the printer-friendly whole article (lets you see all the information on one page) on the new site. We did this because there is no way to move between now split up content pages in the split up printer-friendly versions of the site. Even if there was, we didn't think NIH would take too kindly to this. There is a return to the web link on the printer-friendly whole article page. This is a followed link and I realize the anchor text could be improved. We added the following on printer-friendly pages in an effort to not get penalized by search engines for duplicate content. Are we doing all we can to take advantage of these high-value links? Is the meta robots tag necessary, helpful, or not?
Link Building | | aafpitadmin0 -
Link Pharming
My company has been using an SEO company for a while and have built up our pagerank to a 6. However, we have noticed that they're involved in link pharming - they're buildng extra websites and linking to our site on them. We are not happy with this as we know it will only be a matter of time before Penguin hits us. The contract with the SEO company is coming up for renewal soon and we're thinking of cancelling it. However, we are not sure if the company will delete all our backlinks, which will probably decrease our PageRank too. Has anyone here ever had a similar experience? What did the SEO company do when you cancelled the contract? Does anyone here work for an SEO company and what do you do when someone cancels your service?
Link Building | | AAttias0 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | | CobraJones950 -
"gimme links" = easy to fill out profile/personal reputation links that offer a do-follow anchor text flexible link
I'm doing some SEO for small niche service sites...and aside from niche directories and some light article marketing and local search directories (yelp, etc) there really isn't a budget for content generation. I really only have a budget for profile/submission links. What are some sites where you can quite easily fill out a personal profile with an anchor text variable link that may not be THAT juicy but will stick (i.e. not a spam/fake profile type of link, but something like Linkedin). I'll start with giving away 1 www.istockphoto.com Any others that aren't obvious?
Link Building | | ilyaelbert0 -
Beaten to death but still have to ask, low comp area spammy directory links
I have a client that wants to rank for low comp local keywords (i.e. service + suburban area). Would several well written blog posts on relevant blogs be more effective than 100's of low level spammy directory links? I just want to give him an initial base of a few links, aside from submitting to the local search engines such as those in whitespark citation finder..... please keep in mind this would be a low competition area where on-page would probably rank in the middle of the 2nd page.
Link Building | | ilyaelbert0 -
Do image links with no alt tags pass link value?
"... an image link with no alt tag is useless to search engines..." according to a Nov 2007 seomoz blog post. Is this still the case in 2011? I ask because I'm about to obtain a banner link on a high-traffic site (chiefly for the clickthrough value) but I notice the site uses neither "title" nor "alt" tags.
Link Building | | Jeepster0