Backlink Help - Contact Site Owners or 301 Redirect?
-
Hi,
I am performing some backlink updates for a client and would like to know if I can speed the process up.
Currently I am contact site owners and asking them to update the links that appear on their website of my clients.
As this is tedious work, can I just setup 301 redirects for these products instead of contacting site owners and asking them to change the URL? Is there any benefit to having the proper URL on other websites?
Thanks in advance!
-
This depends upon the nature of your link amendment task. If for example, most of the links are pointing to an old architecture for your site (say your site moved from the HTTP to the HTTPS protocol) then amending the links is better, as it means the link equity won't be diluted through redirects. Even a straight A-to-B 301 redirect loses some equity, though it does a pretty good job of insulation. Usually in this situation your canonical HTTP to HTTPS redirects should be catching those links anyway
If you're redirecting links which result in 404s, you can certainly use 301s but unless the content and theme of the destination URL is very similar to the removed page (which now 404s through inbound links) - then not much of the equity will shift across. Certainly it is better to actually get the links amended.
My advice is, do as many amends as humanly possible (it is tedious, it will take time). For those who don't respond at all in 2-3 weeks, clean them up with 301s. If they later respond and amend their link, you could then remove that 301 to keep your htaccess file / web.config file nice and clean...
Hope that helps
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
-
Why moz is fetching my backlinks so slow?
Hey, it's been 3 months almost I have launched my website and I have seen that moz is not fetching my backlinks as it should fetch them, after almost 3 month moz has fetched backlink but they are just 2 backlink although my website has more backlinks. Can someone guide me that this is the problem with my website or this is moz own algorithm which takes time? In case you need my website, it is ScanMyKitchen. Kindly some expert review and guide me it is kind of worrying that why my DA and Pa is not increasing and all Thanks yGRBCUL
Link Building | | knownboyu0 -
Best way to build backlinks
Hey guys, I was wondering what is the best way to build back links ? I have all the read moz's articles regarding this and I know the crucial parts are creating content, engaging users via social media etc. What I am interested in knowing is whether guest posting is still a solution to create that domain authority you need to rank ? I've spoken with some people that told me guest posting is out of date and will not pay off using it. By using guest posting of course I relate to creating unique content and valuable to the user. Thanks, Andrei
Link Building | | kiraftw0 -
Site scraped/Backlink problem?
Hi - I was looking in my Google webmaster tools because we saw a huge jump in backlinks last week. We found this one article with 84,475 total links, which obviously stands out as spam. All the links are from 1 page and 1 domain (financeai.com). This is the article on our website - http://loyalty360.org/resources/article/engaging-customer-atmosphere-at-pizza-patron and webmaster tools says all the links back to it come from this page http://financeai.com/forex/mxn/pkr/q/39665 My question is - should we/what can we do to clean this up? How does this impact our search ranking? We have had some issues with our website getting extremely slow overnight, and we believe the site scraping is really slowing down the site at points. Thanks.
Link Building | | carlystemmer1 -
Adding Quality Backlinks
Without sounding like an idiot, what are the best ways in adding good quality back links. There are websites out there such as Click Submit but from experience they just link from weird URL's and the links are in comments. In an ideal world starting up my own Blogs and building up a good domain authority would work best but the customer would like some back links adding by next week. Using local directories wouldn't really work for their business so if anyone has any idea's I would love to hear them.
Link Building | | chrissmithps0 -
Could someone be sabataging my site by bad backlinks?
Hello, As I have said before I am new to SEO and especially new to this type of software. I am trialing MOZ, ahrefs and MajesticSEO. I just used the Site Explorer on ahrefs and it showed me that a bunch of backlinks was created today but I haven't engaged anyone in "SEO" for many months. Why would this be? See the image for a screenshot. yhpUxFv.png
Link Building | | infinart0 -
Backlinks from Open Site Explorer not updated
Hi folks! I was checking the backlink profile for my website - wishpicker.com - we got linked to by a large number of prominent websites in the last couple of months. For some reason, this does not seem to show up when I do a backlink search on OSE. Is there something that I need to do here/ fix? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | AB_Newbie0 -
Open Site Explorer
Typically when using Open Site Explorer to analyze links, how long does it take for them to show up? I have some links that are on high page ranking sites, yet they still do not show up with the Open Site Explorer. Thank you
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
Observation on Linking to other sites
Hello, I have a blog for one year now and in the overwall is going great. In all this time it was an awesome way to discovery some SEO mysterious and learn with experience wich in my point of view is the best way to do it. Now my observation is about links to other sites and what does that do. At the present I have about 35 keywords in the 3 first places in Google, bing e Yahoo. All good. I notice that the posts that I have links (dofolow) to other sites are performing better then those ones that only have internal-links. And Its curious that this change as starting to surface in Dezember of 2011. Now the confusion is about the SEOmoz observation towards external links. "You should avoid having too many (roughly defined as more than 100) hyperlinks on any given page. When search engine spiders crawl the Internet they are limited by technology resources and are only able to crawl a certain number of links per webpage. In addition, search engine algorithms divide the value of some popularity metrics by the amount of links on a given page." Now hell with this observation I say. Its working for me and for now on I will actually apply this SEO strategy when Im talking about a subject in a post:) What do you guys think? Whats your experince on this? Regards, Pedro M Pereira
Link Building | | PedroM0