Building "keyword" backlinks
-
Looking for some opinions here please. Been involved in seo for a couple of years mainly working on my websites and picking up the odd client here and there through word of mouth. I must admit that up until a few months back I was guilty of using some grey methods of link building - linkvana, unique article wizard and the such. While no penalties were handed out to my domains and some decent rankings gained, I got tired of always being on the lookout for what the next Google update will do to my results and which networks were being hit, and so I moved a lot more into the 'proper' way of seoing.
These days my primary sources for backlinks are much more respectable...
myblogguest
bloggerlinkup
postjoint
Guest Blog Finder http://ultramarketer.com/guest-blogger-finder/ - not sure where i came across this resource but it's very handy
I use these sources alongside industry only directories and general word of mouth.
Ironically I have found that doing the word by hand not only leads to results I can happyily show people (content wise) but also it's much quicker and cheaper. The increased authority of the sites means far fewer links are needed.
The one area I still am having a little issue with is that of building keyword based backlinks. I now find it fairly easy to get my content on a reasonable quality site - DA to 40 and above, however the vast majority of these sites will allow the backlink only as the company name or as a generic read more type thing. This is fine and it is improving my website performance and authority. The trouble I am finding is that while i am ranking for the title tag and some keywords in the page, I am struggling to get backlinks for other keywords. In an ideal world every page on the site would be optimised for a different keyword and you could then just the site name as anchor text to build the authority of that page and make it rank for it's content, but what about when you (or the client) wants to rank the home for a number of different keywords, some not featured on the page. The keywords are too similar to go to the trouble of making unique pages for, and that would also add no value to the site.
My question really then, after a very long winded way of getting there, is are others finding it much more difficult to gain keyword based backlinks these days? The great thing about the grey seo tools, as mentioned above, is that it was super easy to get the backlinks with whatever anchor text you wanted - even if you needed hundreds of the thing to compensate for the low value of each!!
Thanks
Carl
-
if you come up with a big idea, and link the page in the idea, you will get tons of links
-
I'd be really careful when it comes to keyword anchor text links. I find that 99% of them are either unnatural (ie in author bios) or paid for which is even worse (unless you no-follow it!). Ensure that your onpage SEO areas are perfected and make sure that there are no other issues onsite that could be hindering your rankings and then concentrate on producing high quality content.
Have a look at your backlink profile and see what percentage of branded links to keyword anchor text links you have because you should have a higher percentage of branded links. Those who concentrate on including too many anchor text links will (if they haven't been already) be penalised.
-
thanks for the reply, you make a good point about not overdoing the anchor text and using generic anchors to increase a page authority, that is a good strategy in the ideal world where you can optimise one landing page for one keyword. The trouble occurs when a client wants to rank one page for several different keywords. You may be able to rank for one or maybe two on the strength of good page authority and good onpage seo, but what about the other x keywords they want to rank for? Too few clients think about seo when building their site, in my opinion
-
Hello.
Thus anchor in backlinks is very important, I will not only worry about that. With this I mean you can have anchor as "read more" from a very valuable and authoritative website, which will be very important anyway. I will, in this case, not being able to decide anchors, improve my keyword (and similar) mostly ONPAGE, trying also to increment external forward links with the preferred anchor (which I can now choose) and internal linking from / to that page, still using the preferred anchor.
Otherwise, to get anchor you may want also try to ask the webmaster of the site you want the backlink from, to add your preferred anchor. If this is not possible, also try maybe including the whole code in a message to webmaster. You may be able to receive your wanted anchor. But as well, as far as I know, even anchor is very important, to have "read more" anchors may be useful as well, avoiding keyword stuffing in anchor.
Hope my thoughts are right, and may help you a little
Eugenio
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
-
Internal search pages (and faceted navigation) solutions for 2018! Canonical or meta robots "noindex,follow"?
There seems to conflicting information on how best to handle internal search results pages. To recap - they are problematic because these pages generally result in lots of query parameters being appended to the URL string for every kind of search - whilst the title, meta-description and general framework of the page remain the same - which is flagged in Moz Pro Site Crawl - as duplicate, meta descriptions/h1s etc. The general advice these days is NOT to disallow these pages in robots.txt anymore - because there is still value in their being crawled for all the links that appear on the page. But in order to handle the duplicate issues - the advice varies into two camps on what to do: 1. Add meta robots tag - with "noindex,follow" to the page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWEMII
This means the page will not be indexed with all it's myriad queries and parameters. And so takes care of any duplicate meta /markup issues - but any other links from the page can still be crawled and indexed = better crawling, indexing of the site, however you lose any value the page itself might bring.
This is the advice Yoast recommends in 2017 : https://yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/ - who are adamant that Google just doesn't like or want to serve this kind of page anyway... 2. Just add a canonical link tag - this will ensure that the search results page is still indexed as well.
All the different query string URLs, and the array of results they serve - are 'canonicalised' as the same.
However - this seems a bit duplicitous as the results in the page body could all be very different. Also - all the paginated results pages - would be 'canonicalised' to the main search page - which we know Google states is not correct implementation of canonical tag
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html this picks up on this older discussion here from 2012
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/internal-search-rel-canonical-vs-noindex-vs-robots-txt
Where the advice was leaning towards using canonicals because the user was seeing a percentage of inbound into these search result pages - but i wonder if it will still be the case ? As the older discussion is now 6 years old - just wondering if there is any new approach or how others have chosen to handle internal search I think a lot of the same issues occur with faceted navigation as discussed here in 2017
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation1 -
Backlinks to internal pages
Hi, Our website of 3K+ pages currently has more links coming to internal pages (2nd & 3rd Level), compared to links to homepage. Just wanted to know if this is bad for rankings ? Please share your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Umesh-Chandra0 -
Should I switch all paid-for directory backlinks to nofollow backlinks?
Hello Mozzers, I'm looking at a niche party services directory (b2c), established for over 8 years. They're not using nofollow tags on backlinks from their paid entries (free entries only get phone numbers and not backlinks). If they suddenly switch all the paid-for backlinks in their directory to nofollow backlinks, might that have some kind of negative impact. Switching sounds like the best way forward, but I want to avoid any unintended consequences. Perhaps I should only implement this change gradually? Thanks in advance, Luke Edited 30 minutes ago by Luke Rowland
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Link Building with a Scholarship
One of my clients is using a scholarship to build links. We have a nofollow PR campaign getting ready to start and are doing some social marketing for the scholarship page on the site. We are also trying to get backlinks from highschools and colleges that link to scholarship opportunities. So far this has been a slow process. Does anybody have any advice for speeding any of this up? Has somebody ever done a campaign like this before? Is there some kind of database with financial aid contact info for a lot of schools? I contact a lot of schools and always tend to get put on the backburner.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Is it dangerous to use "Fetch as Google" too much in Webmaster Tools?
I saw some people freaking out about this on some forums and thought I would ask. Are you aware of there being any downside to use "Fetch as Google" often? Is it a bad thing to do when you create a new page or blog post, for example?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Facebook "lockout"
I'm not sure what the correct term is, but I've visited websites that require me to like page 1 of an article, to view page 2. Little annoying but fair enough, they wrote the content, I clearly find it of value as I want page 2. I run a download website, with user generated content. We used to only allow downloads to members, this resulted in 5,000+ new signups per day and a massive userbase. We now allow guests to download content, the majority are freeloaders, not even a thank you to the artist. I am about to employ a system for guests, that forces them to like, tweet or G+ the download, for it to begin. If they don't, no download. Are there any SEO considerations here? The page this will be implemented on, isn't a crawlable page. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-wanna-bs0 -
Schema.org Implementation: "Physician" vs. "Person"
Hey all, I'm looking to implement Schema tagging for a local business and am unsure of whether to use "Physician" or "Person" for a handful of doctors. Though "Physician" seems like it should be the obvious answer, Schema.org states that it should refer to "A doctor's office" instead of a physician. The properties used in "Physician" seem to apply to a physician's practice, and not an actual physician. Properties are sourced from the "Thing", "Place", "Organization", and "LocalBusiness" schemas, so I'm wondering if "Person" might be a more appropriate implementation since it allows for more detail (affiliations, awards, colleagues, jobTitle, memberOf), but I wanna make sure I get this right. Also, I'm wondering if the "Physician" schema allows for properties pulled from the "Person" schema, which I think would solve everything. For reference: http://schema.org/Person http://schema.org/Physician Thanks, everyone! Let me know how off-base my strategy is, and how I might be able to tidy it up.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mudbugmedia0 -
Has important is it to set "priority" and "frequency" in sitemaps?
Has anyone ever done any testing on setting "priority' and "frequency" in their sitemaps? What was the result? Does specifying priority or frequency help quite a bit?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline2