Are Sidebar Backlinks worth for SEO?
-
Hello!
Let's use the following example:
I have a blog (let's call it Blog A) and I find another blog in the same niche (this will be Blog B) that has higher DA and PA than mine. Will Google penalize me if the Blog B puts a link to my blog in their sidebar?
Remember, the Blog A and Blog B are from the same niche.
I ask this because Google says that links on sidebars appears in every page and in some pages the link may be useless. But if both blogs are from the same niche, there won't be pages where the links will be from different themes and with less relevance.
So, is my thought correct: we can use sidebar links without caring about penalization ONLY if the blogs are from the same niche?
Thanks in advance!
-
Hi Kelvin,
Thank you for posting this question! I have recently look up into Moz Resources and these are some insights.
1. Focus on "Natural" editorial links, those that are editorially given by other website owners. This would be much more efficient than having to contact someone and ask them to link to you. (Provide them a good reason for them to do so. Making them aware of that reason.) - Cons, it takes time but nevertheless is HIGHLY VALUED.2. Manual 'outreach' link building - most common which involves manually contacting website owners and bloggers to get linked.
An important note from Moz Res: Google has been devaluing and even penalizing 'self-created, non-editorial links' which often fall in line with black-hat practices that aim to fool the search engines into thinking a piece of content is relevant and important when it isn't.
Non-editorially given link, inherently carry less weight than other types of links. Focus on tactics that give you editorial links that add value to your website and business.
**What you should do in my opinion:
-
Look out for blogs with great evergreen content (**with good rankings, good links, seeming decent traffic, etc) and link to a relevant page on your site.
-
Look out for more active sites(usually have better overall quality, search performance, and a more active audience) - with a more active audience, potentially increase your chance to attract more decent traffic to your page.
Whether or not you succeed, it is crucial that you have a structure towards link building, which is very much dependent on a combination of your available assets and resources.
Hope the above insights have answered to your question applying to all kind of links. Different kind of links brings different impact to your business (whether or not this bring awareness to the potential audience).
You can visit my blog at https://www.corsivalab.com/blog and have reference to how I am actually backlinking the necessary stuff. Marketing is all about learning and sharing, the blog too has tips and ways you can better strategize and do links for marketing purposes.
Let's learn more as a community!
Cheers!
-
-
Thanks, Bryan!
I am already looking for Guest Post opportunities to build more High Quality Backlinks. The articles recommendations are very good also! Thanks.
-
Hey there! I agree with Justen, sitewide links offer little to no value and could potentially do more harm than good. I would find somewhere else to place the link(s).
Not sure if you've already read this but here is an article that can help you learn more about MozTrust & MozRank Score
Although this article is from 2011, Dr. Pete does a great job explaining thin content.
Hope these help!! Cheers
-
Thanks for the answer, Justen!
I ask this because I've got a Spam Score 7/17. I will show the flags and what I am willing to do to remove them. We are an e-commerce and have a blog too.
- **Low MozTrust or MozRank Score **(?????)
- **Large Site with Few Links **(look for more partnerships to build a more consistently Linking Building strategy, one way I thought was Sidebar Backlinks that was a strategy used before)
- **Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Subdomains **(maybe start using more nofollow in the links from our blog to the store?)
- Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Domains (since the beginning we only used Do Follow)
**- Small Proportion of Branded Links **(here I think in using the brand's name in the anchor text when the bloggers post something about my store)
- Thin Content (this doesn't makes sense to me)
- Low Number of Pages Found (Google has almost every page indexed, so again, this doesn't makes sense to me)
Are my actions correct? Is this the proper way to solve this Spam Score problem?
-
You might want to consider having the link placed elsewhere. Linking from Blog A and Blog B in the same niche seems only natural because it's highly relevant. Sitewide outlinks however are not great. If it was my site, I would rather have the owner of Blog B mention me in one of his blogs. A page called "link partners" or something like that is also not great.
Overall, I would say more relevance = higher value of the link.
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
-
Unreadable backlinks
Greetings master
Link Building | | oqib12
Recently I have embedded the roqibus.com site link on one of other people's more popular sites. But after I checked with Moz, it turns out that there are no backlinks from the site?
How can be like that?0 -
Backlinks 101, one or multiple?
Analyzing a competitor backlink profile I noticed they have the habit of adding multiple links to the guest post/advertorial they get, one link to their site, plus some links to authority site like wikipedia and institutional websites. Is there anyone with some data, testing, and so on, supporting this? I can see their SERP positioning is very good, but they spent a lot of money on quite expensive links, so I don't know if it's the DA of the linking domains or the multiple links making the difference. Anyone has an idea?
Link Building | | max.favilli0 -
Redirecting broken backlink to my site
Hello guys, I found an expired domain with inbound links from 41 different root domains, almost all of them from relevant sources. I have 2 ideas in my mind: A) I am thinking about buying this expired domain and place a 301 redirect to a post in my blog who talks about a similar subject.Relevance: let's say the content of the expired domain is about "horses wallpapers" and the content of my site is about "horse transport". Not the same, but a post in my blog could talk about "top 10 horse wallpapers". Do you see what I mean? B) Contact all the webmasters with broken links, alert them and expect they are nice and place a nice link to the post in my blog talking about "top 10 horse wallpapers". What do you think? Should I take A or B? Any other idea? I added a picture with the Domain Rank of the broken links 🙂 Thanks a lot !!! Luis V1LZBC3
Link Building | | Yeeply.com0 -
Very Frustrated SEO
Hi Guys, I wake up this morning one very frustrated, tired and fed up SEO. I have always used very traditional link building methods upto last year directory submissions, social bookmarks, article submissions and maybe a few profie links but I always up front and honest with my clients what they were getting for their buck!. and sent them reports showing all links done. Obviously with the recent algorithm changes, I have switched my focus to content marketing (i hear you all cheering lol), however, I am stumped!. I have read everything I can get hold of to do with content marketing, registered with buzzstream for outreach opportunities and joined myblogguest just so I could understand the process a little bit more. I have watched the whiteboard Fridays and actually have a great opportunity to get in with a site using "guest post + niche". I love writing content which is a bonus. Okay here's my moan. Coming from a traditional SEO background and coming to content marketing late, do I ditch everything else. Is content marketing all I should be doing? or can I still do the some directory submissions (good PR moz rank only), social bookmarking (only for content marketing articles), profile linking (maybe I need to drop altogether). Is content marketing enough to rank a client?. I look at some clients competitors links and they have 100's of links to stuff that looks unnatural. Kind Regards Neil
Link Building | | nezona0 -
Outsourced Backlinking?
Hello, I've been newly hired to head up a decent sized company's digital marketing initiatives. Between social media campaigns, web content development, ppc management, etc. I've been a bit overwhelmed. It looks like until my team gets a bit larger we may have to outsource link building, but with the new penguin update I'm worried about choosing the wrong company and ending up with a ton of spam links that gets us nailed. Does anyone happen to have any good recommendations? Thanks!
Link Building | | JFritton0 -
Creating Backlinks On Behalf of Client
I'm on my first SEO project with a law firm. I'm at the stage where I am doing competitive backlink research on other law firms that my client gave me. I saw a blog site called typepad. It has a high domain authority so I was going to recommend to my client that they set up an account and blog away! Since it's a law firm, I am not qualified to start blogging on behalf of my client and I know they are extremely busy so now I have to "ride" my client to get busy and start creating content. I feel like I want to do more for them on the blog side to keep things going but not having a law background, probably not doable. Question: Do most SEO's do the blogging for their clients, farm it out or keep pushing their clients to do it? I also want them to sign up with articlebase but the same thing is going to happen. I have to push them to write articles. I guess this is my job? -Bob
Link Building | | Czubmeister0 -
Backlinks not showing up
I've been noticing that not all links that a website obtains are showing up as a backlink. For example, the following page has a link to a website (**www.pwgglaw.com)**at the bottom of the page. http://www.ocbar.org/AllNews/NewsView/tabid/66/smid/384/ArticleID/564/Default.aspx I went to opensiteexplorer and typed in pwgglaw.com and it didn't list the ocbar.org as a backlink. Is this right? If not, then how do you force the link from ocbar.org to show up as a backlink?
Link Building | | jamesjd70 -
Building backlinks
Hello all! We regularly create articles for clients and post them (along with links to their Websites) on their blogs. We then promote the blog article across social media and other networks to create backlinks / authority for the articles. My question is whether anyone has had any success with an automated submission tool for the articles that delivers good results to "many" directories, social Websites and so on. At the moment, we do everything manually. Thanks!
Link Building | | webindustry0