Are My Links Valuable?
-
I have been link building for a couple months now. I am having a hard time trying to figure out which sites are even worthy of getting links from. Obviously, those that are clearly link farming, or have lots of ads throughout their site are not valuable. I use OSE, but don't know what is a good P.A or D.A. and what it means when one is much higher than the other (and if that is a bad thing). I also use compete.com to give me a general idea of the unique visitors going into a site. Any tools I can use to help evaluate the strength of specific incoming links/ specific websites? Any ideas or thoughts would be helpful. Thanks So Much, Melissa
-
Hi Melissa.
The value of a link can be interpreted in many ways. First let me offer several great links on this topic:
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-from-a-to-z
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-management
Some generalities regarding measuring the value of a link:
You naturally want links from the highest DA site possible. It is also important to receive the link from a page on that site that has good PA. If the page is buried or otherwise is not seen, then the link may not even be seen by search engines.
The linking site should ideally be relevant to your site, and the anchor text used to link is very important as well.
Links from sites with higher DA/PA then yours is definitely preferred. Links from sites with lower DA/PA require a lot of quantity to make up for their lower quality.
As you can see, there are a lot of factors involved. There are some SEO people such as Ross Hudgens who almost exclusively focus link building.
If I may make a suggestion. Try focusing on creating the most incredibly interesting / helpful / informative content that the world will WANT to link to. If you can create such content, you wont have to work at link building as people will seek out the content and build the links for you. Users will +1 / Like / tweet about your article and let the world know.
-
Good question, Melissa. Unfortunately, there is no tool I know of that evaluates the strength of a specific incoming link beyond an evaluation of the page and domain that OSE gives you.
You're on the right track using OSE and considering Page Authority and Domain Authority, and the general perception of spamminess. Other things to consider when evaluating backlink targets:
How many outbound links are on the page you're targeting? Link juice gets divided (not necessarily equally) among all the outbound links on a page. So other things being equal, a link from a page with 5 outbound links is better than a link from a page with 150 outbound links.
When looking at PA and DA, if PA is less than 10-20% of DA, your getting into a less than ideal scenario. There is a chance that page isn't getting crawled . As to "what is a good PA or DA" it's depends on your niche and competition. Run OSE on competing domains to get an idea of what you're up against.
Anchor text. A "click here" link is not going to help you as much as descriptive anchor text like "super awesome widgets".
Alignment. Links from relevant pages/sites are going to be better for your site than links from general/unrelated pages/sites. This not only helps your SEO, but hopefully you actually get good/qualified traffic through the links.
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
-
Interal linking
Re: I'm stuck by internal linking. What structure should a football website follow? Silo or Topic Cluster?
Competitive Research | | thanhdung0906
I need advice on my website. My website: https://tipbongda247.net/
I hope there are answers!
Thanks0 -
Alternatives To Link Detective
Hi, A while back I used link detective to scan through our OSE reports. However, it seems that the site is no longer maintained and the system no longer seems to work, ie I upload the CSV file and then when i check back it leads to a blank screen. I wonder if anyone knows of a similar software as its functionality was very useful. Thanks
Competitive Research | | bobanna1 -
Page Linking Root Domains and Root Domain Linking Root Domains?
hi, i want to know if Page Linking Root Domains is less and Root Domain Linking Root Domains is higher in number, at that time your keyword is highly competitive or less competitive? for example if a keyword having this information:- Page Authority is:-83 Page Linking Root Domains:- 295 Domain Authority is :- 94 Root Domain Linking Root Domains:- 42,399 which point is more important to consider? if you want to bring your keyword on the first page of the Google ?
Competitive Research | | parallelseo0 -
Tool to compare which links competition has but i don't?
Is there a tool that I can use that will show me a list of my competition's links that I don't have?
Competitive Research | | ballhogjoni0 -
Discrepancy in Competitive Link Analysis?
I currently have a campaign set-up that monitors a few competitors compared to our site. When I look at the Root Domain Metrics I see that Company A has 2,053 total external links, and Company B has 1,632 total external links. I wanted to view these links in more detail so I ran Advanced Inbound Links reports. The reports returned 432 results for Company A and 693 results for Company B. Shouldn't these numbers match up with each other, or am I missing something? Also, I noticed that in the Inbound Links analysis for my competitors there are a number of results listed that are not actually inbound links, but are internal links from there own site. Is there a reason these are appearing? I am having problems because I am trying to use this campaign to show the improvements in our site vs our competitors. However, OSE shows dramatically fewer total external links for our site (about 260 vs 3200 in Webmaster Tools) and I cannot tell if the competitor data is accurate? Thanks
Competitive Research | | zazo0 -
Link checking tool
I am trying to find the number of back links received from a partner for different pages of the site that I am currently working on. Site has several thousand pages. Does anybody know any tool that can pull the links to entire site from a particular source? Thanks.
Competitive Research | | gmk15670 -
What tools do you use for competitive link analysis?
I have been using SEO Spyglass lately but it can be very slow at times. Wondering if there are any other accurate/robust tools out there.
Competitive Research | | rmteamseo0 -
Question regarding back link analysis and anchor text
Hello, I am looking at my competitors back link analysis and comparing a range of link based metrics from the top 10 SERPS. I am then putting this data into excel and comparing our back link profiles. When looking at the anchor text distribution i am not sure whether to look at exact match anchor or phrase match anchor. For example, one of the companies I am looking at holds positions 3 and 4 in the SERPS. Looking at their linking profile I can see that only 1.7% of their links use the exact match anchor 'widget'. Looking at their phrase match anchor is an entirely different story, 93.5% of anchor links contain 'widget' somewhere. i.e. 'cheap widgets', 'widget sale', 'buy widgets at www.examplewidget.co.uk' etc. Obviously their exact match and phrase match anchor distribution tell a completely different story. THIS IS TRUE FOR MANY OF THE TOP 10 SERPS. Therefore, should I be looking at phrase match anchors instead of exact? Side note: would people recommend targeting anchors with 'brandname widget' based on predictions of Google giving weighted anchor more weight. Robert.
Competitive Research | | 87ROB0