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
-
Is the rel=publisher markup still relevant after google+ disappearance this year?
Hi, how would google+ disappearing after this year would affect the rel=publisher markup? Is it still relevant? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rascordido0 -
Backlinks to internal pages
Hi, Our website of 3K+ pages currently has more links coming to internal pages (2nd & 3rd Level), compared to links to homepage. Just wanted to know if this is bad for rankings ? Please share your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Umesh-Chandra0 -
Is adwords data in organic ranking relevant?
we have noticed that without our adwords, our bounce rate is about half (outstanding rate) as compared to when we enable adwords (relatively bad). This of course amplifies across the board for other engagement metrics. So basically it looks like our website is not deemed too relevant and engaging when we bring in PC as compared to organic views. Does anyone have information if the search engines use this data without correcting out the PC visitors brought through adwords? this would mean to us that without having adwords we have a much better chance of ranking organically. very curious about what your experiences are as experts! Thank you in advance! Cheers, Nima
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TVape0 -
Do backlinks need to be clicked to pass linkjuice?
Hi all: Do backlinks need to be clicked to pass linkjuice? Is so, can someone explain how much traffic is needed from a backlink to count as linkjuice? Thanks for the help. Audrey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Addythenurse1 -
Are backlinks the most important factor in SEO?
I have had an agency state that "Backlinks are the most important factor in SEO". That is how they are justifying their strategy of approaching bloggers. I believe there are a lot more factors than that including Target Market definition, Keyword identification an build content based on these factors. What's everyone's thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndySalmons0 -
Link Building with a Scholarship
One of my clients is using a scholarship to build links. We have a nofollow PR campaign getting ready to start and are doing some social marketing for the scholarship page on the site. We are also trying to get backlinks from highschools and colleges that link to scholarship opportunities. So far this has been a slow process. Does anybody have any advice for speeding any of this up? Has somebody ever done a campaign like this before? Is there some kind of database with financial aid contact info for a lot of schools? I contact a lot of schools and always tend to get put on the backburner.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Resources for how to code pages...
I'm looking for some nuts and bolts ideas about how to best layout the HTML code for a webpage. Can you point to some case studies? Perhaps you've done some testing yourself? This could be folded into the Tom Critchlow's question about what should be included in a updated developers SEO cheat sheet.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 19prince0 -
Can backlinks negatively influence your ranking, or worse, cause a penalty?
Hello everbody! I am the owner of a price compare website and have been running it succesfully for over two years now. However, since february the news and articles section of our website lost a great deal of it's traffic. We did not completely lose traffic but only for items that were posted after february 2011. We have skilled content writers who do good research on the topics covered in our news section, i can honestly say we write our content for our visitors and not just for the search engines. We have investigated every part of our source code but we did not find anything there that was violating any guidelines. So my next guess was that maybe some incoming links could harm our news section. The most backlinks we receive are directed to our news and article section. These links are generally put on sites which use our RSS feed. There is just one website that we think could be the reason. It had included our RSS feed on each page which resulted in over 2,500,000 backlinks from a single domain which hosts a very poor quality website. We never considered it to be harmfull so we never did anything about it. My question is if this case could be the reason for the drop in traffic? kind regards, Jeroen from the Netherlands
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeroenpf0