SEO agency makes "hard to believe" claims
-
Hi
I operate in a highly competitive niche of "sell house fast" in UK.
Sites that are in top 1-3 tend to have thousands of links. Some of these are spammy type links. These sites have Domain Authority too.
My site has good content http://propertysaviour.co.uk and is listed with around 12 well known directories. I have been building back-links manually over the last 3-4 months.
The SEO agency we are looking to work with are claiming they can get my website to first page with above keyword.
How would you go about this strategy? What questions would you ask SEO agency?
What elements can do I myself? By the way, I am good at producing content!
-
There are companies that can get rankings that quickly in competitive verticals. But to do so they'll need to use techniques that are not within Google's guidelines such as using private blog networks or injecting links via hacking other people's sites.
If this is a site that you can walk away from should it get penalized, then hiring them might make sense. I'd want to ask how they are getting links and to make sure that they are not doing anything illegal or anything that involves hacking other websites. Getting links from a private blog network (if that's what they are doing) is not illegal or immoral, but if Google catches on and the site gets penalized then you may never be able to recover it.
If this is a site that you plan to keep for the long run, then it makes more sense to hire an agency that will improve your search presence gradually. Good SEO usually takes a lot of time.
I have been building back-links manually over the last 3-4 months.
Be careful. I'm seeing links that Google will likely see as unnatural such as:
http://www.linkaddurl.com/Arts___Humanities/Performing_Arts/Business/Real_Estate/?p=6
http://cqycxzfwzx.com/sell-my-house-fast-for-cash-your-request-fulfilled/
You're in a competitive space. I am betting that those sites above you with spammy links will drop out of site the next time Penguin hits. If they don't then it's because they're using private blog networks that Google hasn't been able to detect algorithmically and they're prime targets for a manual penalty.
My advice for hiring an SEO company would be to ask them exactly what they will do for your site. Are they going to improve your on page SEO? If so, how? Are they able to get you links? If so, how? If they tell you that the process is proprietary then it's probably not above board. If they give you marketing speak like, "We'll leverage your blah blah blah and produce stellar content marketing blah blah blah" without actually giving you a concrete idea of what they'll do then that's not good. I'd also ask for references. If they hide behind an NDA that's not good. Good SEO companies will have people lined up to give them a reference.
-
It's still as easy as it ever was to build spammy links. But it's just not what you should be doing to build a long-term high traffic site.
-
The SEO agency we are looking to work with are claiming they can get my website to first page with above keyword.
Walk away. No-one can make these claims without doing something a bit dodgy. Generally these sorts of claims turn into results that are short-lived and after a few more months, Google has caught up with what they are doing and you end up with a penalty.
Link building is not as easy as it once was. Now you need to have a reason for someone to want to link to you - if you want good links that is. A good linkable asset can make a real difference, so you need to start thinking outside the box a little bit on what you can do to help make you stand out a little.
-Andy
-
Sam
Thank you. I can do the link building. What I am not so good at is finding good sources of manual link building. Is there any recommendations?
I have used the Web Explorer tool as seen my competitors spammy links being built. I do not want to go down that route.
Would love to get your opinion on this. What tools do you use for finding good links?
-
In all likelihood they're telling the truth.
Shock? Perhaps, but here's another truth in the following 12 months you'll get slapped so hard your site will be in a worse position than today!
Sam
P.S. Talking from experience as I once used one of these agencies!
-
Thank you for your input.
The SEO agency is claiming that in 2-3 months, I should be ranking in top 1-5 positions.
How do I increase domain authority and page rank for my website. The websites I'm up against have tens of thousands of links (mostly spammy)!
I have seen guide to building backlinks.
Help!
-
I dont have a huge amount to add to this, other than in my experiance a lot of agencies tend to be 2 or 3 years behind in general practises, especially the smaller ones.
"The times of looking to rank numero uno for one term are long gone." is completely correct though, so be very careful about messing up other key words etc.
-
The times of looking to rank numero uno for one term are long gone. What sounds like your existing strategy of having good content is the way to go. The risk with an agency that would even focus up on one term and promise number one is that they are going to inadvertently wreck your link profile.
If I were you, I would read the beginner's guide to link building https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building and continue to make good content. Don't allow an agency to manipulate the hell out of your profile for the sake of one term.
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
-
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
Community Discussion - What's the ROI of "pruning" content from your ecommerce site?
Happy Friday, everyone! 🙂 This week's Community Discussion comes from Monday's blog post by Everett Sizemore. Everett suggests that pruning underperforming product pages and other content from your ecommerce site can provide the greatest ROI a larger site can get in 2016. Do you agree or disagree? While the "pruning" tactic here is suggested for ecommerce and for larger sites, do you think you could implement a similar protocol on your own site with positive results? What would you change? What would you test?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattRoney2 -
Is google seeing "all" my homepage?
Hello All 🙂 Since launching my new website design - www.advanced-driving.co.uk I am not convinced Google is seeing all the content on the page. I took a long extract of text and did a search on Google and nothing was found. Also although in the search results for "advanced driving course" I can see the new title tag, the snippet isn't showing.. Is there anyway I can check this? As a scroll down I can see the URL changes ie: www.advanced-driving.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robert78
then:
http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/#da-page_in_widget-3
then:
http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/#da-page_in_widget-4
then:
http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/#da-page_in_widget-5 Is this right? Thanks in advance..0 -
Is there a tool to find out if a URL has been deemed "SPAM" by GOOGLE
I am currently doing a link audit on one of my sites and I am coming across some links that appear to be spam. Is there a tool that I can plug their URL into to see if they have been deemed spam by GOOGLE?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mozd0 -
Taking up an "abondoned" domain?
Hi, As far as SEO goes, are there any direct contradictions to picking up an approximately 1 year old domain, where the only thing that has ever been on is a static "Hello world" page from a wordpress install done when the domain was created? I'm thinking about picking it up again, as if it was a totally fresh domain, add content, and do SEO on it. What are your thoughts friends? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kaince0 -
Rel="external" What affect if any does this have on SEO
When building Anchor text links what affect if any does rel="external" have on inlinks placed to your site. Thanks, Kjay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOKeith0 -
How Google treat internal links with rel="nofollow"?
Today, I was reading about NoFollow on Wikipedia. Following statement is over my head and not able to understand with proper manner. "Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page)." It's all about indexing and ranking for specific keywords for hyperlink text during external links. I aware about that section. It may not generate in relevant result during any keyword on Google web search. But, what about internal links? I have defined rel="nofollow" attribute on too many internal links. I have archive blog post of Randfish with same subject. I read following question over there. Q. Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love? [In 2007] A: Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
_
(Matt's precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.) Matt has given excellent answer on following question. [In 2011] Q: Should internal links use rel="nofollow"? A:Matt said: "I don't know how to make it more concrete than that." I use nofollow for each internal link that points to an internal page that has the meta name="robots" content="noindex" tag. Why should I waste Googlebot's ressources and those of my server if in the end the target must not be indexed? As far as I can say and since years, this does not cause any problems at all. For internal page anchors (links with the hash mark in front like "#top", the answer is "no", of course. I am still using nofollow attributes on my website. So, what is current trend? Will it require to use nofollow attribute for internal pages?0 -
Prowling report says "duplicate titles" for wp-login.php
Hi there, How are you guys doing? I have a quick question. The last prowling report we received said we have three pages with "duplicate titles". Those three pages are: /wp-login.php wp-login.php?action=lostpassword /wp-login.php?action=register I'm a little confused because those pages don't even have a title. Do you think it's a big deal? Also do you have any idea of why the prowling report says those pages have duplicate titles? Apparently, wp-login.php is part of the Wordpress core. It's a built-in page that
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ericc22
handles login and registration. Not something we can edit. Thanks a lot and have a nice day!0