Relevancy of backlinks for scholarship resource
-
Hello,
We want to build a niche scholarship tool for our Ecommerce site. It will sort through relevant scholarships for a certain demographic, say, Hispanic engineering students for example.
My question is:
If the tool's focus is Hispanic engineering scholarships, and we sell supplies that are in the same general category as products that engineers use, will the backlinks we gain from people linking to our tool be relevant.
The main reason I ask is that I think most backlinks will be from Hispanic sites, and I don't know if there will be enough relevance to make the links help.
What are your thoughts on this?
-
Hi BobGW,
I actually have experience in doing exactly this for one of my sites. I created a free academic archive - in the same niche as my site - as link bait. My results were mixed.I got quite a few new links coming back to the resource, and still do. The problem has been so far that the links are generally from low DA pages like blogs. There are exceptions as I did get a .mil and a few .edu links from it as well. Now, the traffic to the site definitely went up due to the new section as did social engagement. So, just for this it may be said that it was worth it.
But despite all of this, I have not seen any major changes in SERP (up or down) in the last 6 months since this section was released. It just seems like the "link juice" is not transferring in any meaningful way despite a pretty simply site structure. I have also not seen any marked increase in conversions on the site. So, while Google does not seem to be punishing the site for this section, it also does not seem to be giving it credit for this either (even though it ranks well for its own keyword).
In the end, it is as Andrew said, it depends on how much time and money this section will cost you. Based on the current success of this section on my site I would still say the 2 months to create it were worth it. I just hope that the SERP benefits will propagate to the rest of the site in the long term
Good luck.
-
Morning, BobGW,
It depends on the purpose of your question:
- If your question is: will these links help? Yes, they'll help if the links aren't spammy. They may even help you tap into new audiences, keywords, and referrals.
- If your question is: are these links worth your time/money? That depends on your parameters. If it's cheap for you to experiment, experiment. If it's NOT cheap for you to experiment, then it depends on your risk tolerance level. I'd recommend you go for it; you should try to explore the possibility of what those keywords do for your site.
Hope that answers your question!
--Andrew
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
-
Backlink from same domain but different subdomain? any juice here?
will i be able to get the link juice from same domain but different subdomain, if I have a backlink lets say there is a website, which is featuring my topic on multiple subdomain any benefit? or it will considered one link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL0 -
Please Guide me - Is this good or bad backlink? Website have all same type of backlinks.
Website niche - Animation and 3D Rendering Studios Backlink from - http://www.adamfrisby.com/create-home-design-and-interior-decor-in-2d-3d.html the anchor tag is image URL from one of the many images in that post. Please let me know such types of links were good for bad?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | varunrupal0 -
Page dropped after backlink
This is a bit of a odd one... I put two new pages on to my website. And built one backlink to each page (each from separate domains). The pages and backlinks have indexed quite quickly. The odd thing is that one of my pages has dropped significantly in ranking but the other has boosted significantly in ranking! The 1st page has come to page 1 of google, the other pages dropped to page 3 of google. Prior to building the links the ranks was stable. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Any Ecommerce Content Marketing Training and Resources
Hi guys! Was wondering if you can help me out finding training/courses/resources that you could recommend for content marketing for large retail ecommerce sites. Particularly interested in editing product and category pages though open minded for any of your support. Any suggestion is welcomed. In advance I appreciate your time and help! Best, Finn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | insite3600 -
Are This Site's Backlinks Hurting Us?
Google WMT reports more than 198,000 backlinks to our site (www.audiobooksonline.com) from http://dilandau.eu/? We have never been notified by Google of any penalty, malware notification... but continue to struggle to get our page 1 Google ranking back since Panda. Could these backlinks be hurting our Google ranking? Should I implement a disavow rule for http://dilandau.eu/?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen0 -
Please let me know how to improve this email backlink request
Hello, How can I improve upon this email request: Your "Links" section contains a lot of good websites, and we would like our site to be added to the list. Our pagerank 4 website, which carries (Here I said what we carry) You have similar sites located in the "Other" Section on your link page. We would greatly appreciate being added to this list. Sincerely, BobW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW
Webmaster
Our Site Name Here
Email Address Here
Phone Number Here0 -
301 Redirect - What happens to backlinks
Hello... One of my sites is losing rankings in G. I received the webmaster notification of unnatural links... My question is, should i do a 301 redirect of every page on my site to a new domain? If so, do the backlinks (which i believe are causing my rankings to drop) carry over? How about the good backlinks? Also, what would happen to the rankings i currently have on page 1? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
Can your site be penalised by backlinks?
Hi, I just wanted to get some clarification on whether Google would penalize your site if you had many links coming from a questionable site. We've been struggling with rankings for years even though we have one of the oldest sites in the industry with a good link profile and the site is well optimized. I was looking through webmaster tools and noticed that one website links to us over 100,000 times, all to the home page. The site is www.vietnamfuntravel.com. When I looked at the site it seems that they operate a massive links exchange, I'm not sure what the history is and why they link to us so much though. Is there any chance that this could impact us negatively? if it is then what would be the best way to deal with the situation? I could ask them to take the links down but can't guarantee they would do it quickly (if at all). Would blocking their domain from our htaccess file have the desired effect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maximise0