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
-
Spammy backlinks
I am very new to this site and need some help. I have two spammy backlinks in my report that were done by my host provider as I hired them for SEO. When I click on the web site there is no where to contact them. I can only subscribe to their group and I sure don't want to do that. Is having two ranking as an 8+ awful. I don't know if I should do the Disavow route or not.
Link Building | | kelkolkta0 -
Backlink count is WAY high vs. competitors
Hi all! My site was managed by a SEO company that is no longer around. I started to look for a new agency and in the process, found Moz and decided to try out the report. While running the report, found out that my I have 3K links vs 173/1600/6344 links that my three other competitors have. Any simple guidance will be appreciated.
Link Building | | fullerton0 -
What is the best backlink? Homepage or specific post?
I am working hard to get backlinks from other blogs by submitting deal tips. I am a deal blog so I am wondering - is it better to get a backlink to a specific post that will expire because it is a time sensitive deal or sale? Or is it better to get a backlink to my homepage? I focus on the best blog with PR of 7 and DA of 72 as well as others that are high up there. In case I am not being clear, which backlink is better? A. www.mysite.com B. www.mysite.com/awesome-sale-of-the-day Sometimes I won't have a choice but just wondering what I should focus on or if it even matters. Thanks!
Link Building | | dealblogger0 -
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 -
New pages backlinking
Hello there, I have created a website that with some basic link building has been appearing nicely in location based keywords, eg, computer repairs flintshire, this was easy enough to achieve as the competition wasnt great, just wish i has these on page seo tools 6 months ago! my question is this - i am trying to get similair results in other location based keywords, eg, computer repairs chester and computer repairs wirral. What i have done is created a new page dedicated to each keyword, making sure that there is no duplicate content ect ect, the on page SEO is perfect and i am already on the first page for a couple i have done. so i have a url that now is http://www.ep-networks.co.uk/computer-repairs-chester.php
Link Building | | eirianprice
when linking the keyword 'computer repairs chester' do i point the url to this page or just to the http://www.ep-networks.co.uk ?? Thanks EP0 -
Some questions about guest posting
After reading this on the SEOMoz blog, I've decided to try some guest posting to gain some backlinks for our real estate site. I have a few questions for those of you who do this regularly: 1. If the site you are posting on allows up to 3 links in the signature box, do you generally use them all? My gut instinct is that one anchor texted link would give me the most bang for my buck. 3. How much attention do you pay to PR or DA? If a site is PR1 but relevant to your niche would you spend the time to write the article? 4. What negatives have you found when writing guest posts? Thanks!
Link Building | | MarieHaynes0 -
Starting My First Backlink Campaign
Hi Team, I've started my first campaign and would like some advice on building backlinks. I have got the no. 1 competitor's backlinks through OSE. Here is the first backlink URL as mentioned in OSE. for them: www.uofaemergency.org/ (DA: 45 PA:44) However the backlink appears on another page of that domain, not on the homepage as it says in OSE. That backlinking page as a PA of just 1. Do I go for the homepage or the page on which the competitor's backlink appears? It is an unrelated site to the niche and the content in which the link appears is nonsensical. Does this matter as far as link juice is concerned? Is this a good site or page to get a link from? How do I go about getting an in content anchor text link from this site? What's the required process? I would like to start buidling good links asap and start to get rankings for my site. Thanks. Sunil.
Link Building | | sunilmuse0