A backlinks question
-
Hi all
Could do with a second opinion on this one if anyone has a moment please.
Recent Google updates have targeted overally optimised backlink profiles as they are clearly for seo purposes and not natural. The question I have is how does this relate to an ecommerce website?
If I sell 'blue 1980 aged cheese' (I know nothing about cheese so perhaps not the best example!!) and I have a url on my shop domain.com/store/blue-1980-aged-cheese with the product name as the page title along with the domain name. If I were to get backlinks pointing to this page using the anchor of 'blue 1980 aged cheese' (and other variations of that, blue cheese, aged blue cheese etc) would this be considered to be too optimised?
Given the page is about this item then surely it could be considered natural that people link using the product name, as well as using the site name and the domain url
Any thoughts please
Thanks, Carl
-
Hey, a couple of links to the top 100 products would likely make a big difference, just try to keep it natural.
You may do better with a highly scalable content + outreach campaign to bring in hundreds of links as manual link building for this many pages is just not practical.
Or, alternatively, some kind of competition or some such to try and stimulate natural linking to the product pages - obviously, idea needs fleshing out and not knowing your industry it's a total shot in the dark but... there is always a way.
Best of luck!
Marcus -
Marcus/Rod
Thanks for taking the time to reply. You make some very interesting points which I will take on board. I will take a look over the studies mentioned. You're right when saying the product pages on big retailers such as Amazon tend to have little to no backlinks. My website has about 85,000 products so one of the alternative strategies being considered is to seo just the root domain or the categories instead. It will take longer to see results this way but if I can get the overall domain authority much higher by working with just a few pages then the knock on effect should help the rest of the site.
Many thanks
-
Marcus/Rod
Thanks for taking the time to reply. You make some very interesting points which I will take on board. I will take a look over the studies mentioned. You're right when saying the product pages on big retailers such as Amazon tend to have little to no backlinks. My website has about 85,000 products so one of the alternative strategies being considered is to seo just the root domain or the categories instead. It will take longer to see results this way but if I can get the overall domain authority much higher by working with just a few pages then the knock on effect should help the rest of the site.
Many thanks
-
Hey Carl
There was a good study done on this by Distilled and published here at SEOMoz a while back.
As I remember, they looked at anchor text distribution for different types of pages and it was determined that product pages would have around 45% keyword anchors (varied of course). They then broke that 45% down so that 25% of it was an exact match anchor and then the rest was several varieties of that including branding etc.
The whole article is worth a read but the general advice was that you work to a 7:3 ratio and for every 3 (varied) keyword links you build you would add seven branded or safe links (URL etc).
Another point worth noting here is that product pages don't tend to get mega amounts of external links. I just checked a few well established products on amazon and they tended to have a low amount of links. Somewhere between 10 and 25. In fact, the main xbox 360 model only had 22 links so don't go overboard.
There is a lot more to what is considered natural with links than just anchor text though so be careful if you are asking this to help engineer the natural or create a supernatural set of product links.
Hope that helps.
Marcus
References
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/seo/anchor-text-ratios-and-link-building/ -
The anchor text from your link profile, will never penalize you. It might not be as great as a keyword based anchor text but it doesn't have a negative impact. On the other side, if you have 80% of your link's anchor text saying "blue 1980 aged cheese", Google will see that something's not right and you will not get the value that you would from a natural link profile.
If the links are genuine and are inbound from genuine websites and not link farms or spam sites, you should be fine. Penguin is about penalizing black hat tactics, for example, buying links from link farms.
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
-
HTTS vs HTTPS Backlinks
So I am going to change my entire site from HTTP to HTTPS, but SEMrush shows 21 backlinks on HTTP and 0 on HTTPS. How can I make sure I don't lose them after the switch?
Link Building | | moon-boots0 -
Quick question on meetup.com links
I've been using open site explorer to assess my competitors inbound links. I filtered for "link equity" and returned these results. I noticed a link from meetup.com and investigated it further (a link on this page). As far as open site explorer is concerned this link is passing some value. That said, I noticed the link was actually posted as a comment on the meetup page. When I looked at the source it looked like this: [http://www.meetup.com/sfruby/members/82741532/](<a class=)" class="mem-photo-background-45 square-35 memberinfo-widget" data-memberid="82741532" title="Aleksandr Melentiev" style="display: block; background-image: url(http://img1.meetupstatic.com/501554713870081192606960/img/nobody_50.png);" data-src="http://img1.meetupstatic.com/501554713870081192606960/img/nobody_50.png">![](<a class=)http://img1.meetupstatic.com/6297749526911517292/img/blank.gif" alt="Aleksandr Melentiev" /> [http://www.meetup.com/sfruby/members/82741532/](<a class=)" class="memberinfo-widget" data-memberid="82741532" title="Aleksandr Melentiev">Aleksandr Melentiev Hi. I am the creator of a similar tool - [http://bootcamper.io](<a class=)" title="http://bootcamper.io" target="_blank" class="linkified">http://bootcamper.io. Will do my best to attend this as well. Cheers. <a class="j-like-list tooltip-widget" data-key="reply-32914742-likes">1</a> · February 28 I don't see a nofollow attribute above but I do see the "linkified" class. Am I correct in assuming that this link is probably not passing value? Secondly, can meetup.com descriptions (as opposed to comments) contain follow links? Thanks in advance for your time in answering my noob question!
Link Building | | alovallo0 -
Best place to outsource backlinking services?
Hi, I have been doing "lite" SEO on my site for several years and have achieved some decent ranking for relevant terms. I have good solid content and and am simply in need of quality backlinks to boost my SERPs. I stopped doing SEO because I was focused on development of the site for about 6 months and lost about half of my traffic as a result. In the past I have used rentacoder, guru, and odesk for software development, but does anyone know the best one to find decent SEO consultant/content writers? I want to start out at about $300/month for back links and ramp up from there. Also, The last company I hired provided almost all links from India spam sites, however, I still noticed a steady increase in rankings over a few months. Thought on thats? Thanks!
Link Building | | lane06180 -
Frustrated with spammy backlinks from competitors
I've only been doing SEO for my company for the last month and I've made some headway but what is really frustrating me right now is a couple of competitors that have OBVIOUS spammy links ranking in the number 1,2,3 stops all over the board for the keywords i'm going for. One competitor in particular has anchor text links EVERYWHERE that make absolutely no sense...junk like... "I have never been more saddened by anything in my life than when my grandfather got cancer. I told my uncle he needed to buy some auto insurance. I really like pork." I mean, these links are the pages with the most page authority and page rank out of all of the ones they have...and I'd venture to say that almost all of their backlinks are like this...well, half of them are just random links with good anchor text on the sidebar of a bazillion spam websites (diapers, toys, fake blogs, etc.)...while i have about 3k links and most of my top competitors have about 5k links...these guys have over 33k. Worse yet, when I look at something like Alexa rank, they have pretty high overall traffic rank but it shows traffic rank in MX (mexico) instead of the US...these guys only sell in the US! I mean, they're black hat if I've ever seen such a thing and they rank superbly on all keywords. What can I do to compete with this junk?
Link Building | | jgower0 -
How good is a backlink that's in the footer
Hello, The strongest site in our industry (according to domain authority and excluding wikipedia) said that they would put a sitewide link to us in their footer. We're good friends with them. It would be right next to the copyright. Our site is nlpca (dot) com The partner site is nlpu (dot) com The link will say something like "More NLP Training" with the "NLP" as the link. We're targeting the keyword "NLP" How much will this move us up for the keyword "NLP"? Right now we're on the 3rd page for that term. I also want to make sure that it's a white hat move. Thanks!
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Yahoo Directory Link Question
Recently two of my clients purchased a listing in the Yahoo Directory, but they don't show up in the SEOmoz campaign analysis. Is there a reason why?
Link Building | | thriveseo0