Listings, paid profiles and directories
-
Hi,
In the industry I am working in (education), we do have a lot of portals offering paid listings (for example profiles featuring a school, the courses you offer, sometimes with reviews etc).
Almost all big competitors and big names normally do have these kind of listings.
Besides from having to decide if these sites really bring the relevant conversions, I am wondering about their impact on SEO.
An example for an offer:
Our Top Picks listing is a 40 word listing and logo we put on any 30 pages of our web site, example.com for 12 months, for $595 US. You can choose the pages you want, or we can put you on all our [category] pages, or certain continents/countries you want to target.Now, I am wondering:
- Do I have to worry about my linking profile ? (All of sudden a bunch of links with the exact same anchortext and content embedding to our site?)
- Or can I just decide to go with a paid listing based on the link value the page offers me?
Looking forward to reading what you think!
Nicole -
They don't use nofollow, so this would be all regular links.
If we have a huge partnership, we would suddenly have links from more than 70 sites
all using the same anchortext. -
Ah, I see. Many of those school review sites and forums charge users to access them, and I see they want to charge you to post your profile. If this is the case, you might want to check to see how other links show up to search engines. Just try a few searches with the exact anchor text seen in these sites to see where the pages come up in SERPs. This would be a good way to quickly gauge the value of your links from this site. Make sure you're logged out of Goolge, Yahoo, Bing, etc. before searching.
Now these are not paid links per se. You can read up about nofollow at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=96569 and then judge for yourself if these sites are breaking any rules, so to speak.
-
Hi Kevin,
thanks for your answer.
You write that I should focus on pages where relevant visitors are likely to go.
I think I can assume that these kind of websites are at least somehow relevant concerning the topic (since this is for example all about school reviews or helping students finding the right school)? Therefore the links are at least to some extend "justified".
But I think that these are kind of "hidden paid links", so I am not too happy about them and afraid that they will rather hurt our website in the long run.
-
Hi Nicole. Really, you should focus on whether or not those links will bring traffic to your site. I would rather spend that kind of money on an adword campaign that targets visitors much more effectively than that offer you posted above. I assume by "embedding to our site" that you mean linking to your site, and when a bunch of sites start linking to your site with that anchor text, this tends to bring up the key words within that text in the SERPs, granted these sites are legitimate and of value. You're in a very competitive industry, so I wouldn't recommend chasing pages like this. Stay focused on the business and target the sites that your visitors are more likely to go to. It's far more time consuming, but the results will show to be far more lucrative than higher numbers here on SEOmoz.
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 do i create a natural link profile in a niche thats competetive?
how do i create a natural link profile without buying backlinks or spamming the search engines with useless links in a niche that is similar to payday loans? I cant get guest posts i cant create private blog networks i cant trade links i cant spam with useless links and web 2.0 dont work. so how do i get traffic without buying adwords.
Link Building | | swekredit0 -
Why don't directory backlinks show up in Open Link Explorer?
Why don't we see linking root domains like yelp, google, yahoo, etc? Is there any way to get a more accurate list of links to a domain where webmaster tools are not an option?
Link Building | | ScottM0 -
How to Check if a Sites Backlink Profile is Penguin Friendly?
Post penguin I am of course very wary about which sites I proactively solicit links from. Here is the scenario. Let's say for example I found a blog relevant to my business sector, had good domain authority/moz rank and noticed that they accepted guest posts. Sounds great? Well on the surface it sounds like it would be worth reaching out to the blog owner - but what if that blog had been involved in some really shady link building practices in the past and the reality is that I could end up damaging my own site by association. Can anyone share any useful resources such as articles or tools that will help to understand how to qualify if a sites backlink profile is shady and should be avoided as a link prospect?
Link Building | | Luia0 -
What's Angela/Paul link profile?
Hi, Very new to this and appreciate your time to read and answer my question. What's Angela/Paul link profile? and what should I look out for if someone is offering to provide this type of link building to me?
Link Building | | nojan0 -
Which Article Directories are still relevant?
Hi, I know Article Directories are not valued as high as they once were and many took a hit from Google. But are there any Article Directories that are still worth posting content on? Thanks!
Link Building | | MasonInteractive0 -
I wish to know how can I track users via what keywords they are searching and coming to my site exactly. These are non paid keywords.
There is a list of non paid keywords which is showing up but is that all ? I wish to know all the keywords people are searching and coming to my site? How can I accomplish the same.
Link Building | | shanky10 -
"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 -
Can someone give me criteria with which to judge the quality of submission directories.
The general advice is the SEOmoz community is not to bother with low quality submission directories. Makes sense to me as there existence seems solely to manipulate search rankings, which google doesn't like. So what are some clear and actionable criteria to distinguish between a directory worth spending time on and one that is not worth spending time on?
Link Building | | JesseCWalker0