Difficulty getting relevant backlinks
-
I run a very niche blog on getting section 8 housing. I've had the blog for about 6 years and have paid attention to it on and off. For the past few months, I've been ON again. What's appealing to me is the amount of potential traffic the keywords have and small competition. I have knowledge on the subject. I've read Moz seo guides, etc...
The problem is government sites rank high (understandably) or other sites that are nonsense / scams when you search 'section 8 application'. It's very hard to find active bloggers to do link exchange is with as the sites that rank high are trying to scam people and obviously I can't get government back links. I've tried reaching out to people with no avail. I think I have good informative content. All of my adsense goes to charity but at this point it's not much. I'd like to get it out there, white-hat style, but I'm having difficulty. Any suggestions (please be specific), on how I can target sites that would be relevant to this topic and not do generic back-linking (unless you think news submissions, etc will work)?
Thanks!
-
Thank you very much for the thoughtful answer and the helpful advice!
-
Oh boy this is a fun one! Full disclosure: I used to run marketing/growth on HotPads.com for about 18 months and we targeted some Section 8 queries, though as you say the space is very opaque and full of spam. It's also a hard space to monetize because Section 8 is low-income and most of these landlords are not making much money from their properties, so they in turn don't have much to spend on marketing etc.
Tough space, as I said.
A few things I take exception to in your original post that I'd like to clear up first:
- Don't be looking for "link exchanges". That tactic died in 2010. Instead you could look to establish relationships with other bloggers talking about low-income ways of living and exchange posts on each other's sites. This is a totally whitehat way to do it.
- You can absolutely get .gov links. Why not? They link to good resources as much as anybody else.
- Look at local chambers of commerce and places that have low-income housing pages and reach out to them asking them to link to some of your articles, or share via social media, or in their email newsletters. It's much easier to get links once you've established yourself as an authority, but of course it's an old chicken-and-egg problem.
If I were you, I'd take your main competitors and see where they are getting links from then figure out how you a) get those links and b) where the gaps are. If you identify, for example, that .edu sites are awesome link acquisition then go crazy getting a big old list of them and doing your outreach. Sure you'll get some of the same links, but I bet you'll get a bunch that your competitors don't also have.
Hope that helps!
John
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
-
Impact of distribution of backlinks across multiple pages
Community, I would be interested to see if anyone has been seeing any experiments, experience documentation, or other data that would give context around the impact of pointing backlinks not just to your money page / home page but distribute it across pages. When doing competitive research I often run into competition which has lower domain strength and page rank but a link profile that is more spread out across their domain; these competitors often outrank my site despite their individual page properties being weaker. Any reference to existing documented experiments, personal experience or guidance is welcome.
Link Building | | italiansoc0 -
Backlinks Redirected Temporarily (New to Old)
I have a website of which we are being forced to change the domain name and soon after give the control of the domain name to the corporate office. The corporate office will eventually put a new website up on it. We would like to build more backlinks without the threat of losing all of these backlinks to the corporate site. We were considering to start building backlinks to the new domain with temporary redirects to the old domain but have recently been advised against doing this (threat of Google looking down on this technique). Should we continue to build back links to the old domain, or should we 302 redirect the links to the old domain? Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Link Building | | wishmedia0 -
Directories for backlinks
Hello, I was wondering whether directories are a good source of creating quality back links? Thanks
Link Building | | PeterAllen910 -
Getting links into forums
Hi guys Ive been try to get my links to my site in forums but when i post a comment , which includes a link,
Link Building | | Hardley
they are marked as spam. Can anyone suggest any techniques to getting links into forums?0 -
How Many Backlinks Per Day
I am starting to do some manual back-linking for a medium competition word with high traffic. I plan to start back linking with like niche blogs with non spam comments, like niche directories, like niche forums, and guest blogging. My domain is over 3 years old and ranks for multiple keywords, but I'm going to concentrate specifically on this keyword, but need to know how many links to back-link a day. Again none of these will be spam, but will be of real quality. I was thinking 10-20 a day, but unsure.
Link Building | | treeoflife0 -
Do NOFOLLOW backlinks have ANY value? or did I waste money?
So, I hired a helping hand to create some back-links for me (in form of comments on some blogs and forums etc) About 60% of those links created are using "nofollow" attribute in the link. Is there ANY - ANY! value in creating such links? or is just wasted time and money and Google will absolutely not give any love for NOFOLLOW links? please share you insight. thnak you.
Link Building | | limens0 -
Backlinks from embeded Wistia video?
If I use Wistia for my videos, and somebody embeds my video on their site, can I get a backlink from this?
Link Building | | gregalam0