What is the time of impact of a link regarding to rankings?
-
I own a website in a pretty semi-competitive market (220 000 searches a month for my main keyword). I've been doing some intensive linkbuilding with some good results. I got around 10 links from organisations, schools and websites of city halls, all of them, the pages being at least pagerank 3 or 4.
I let some time pass inbetween, to let Google craw the pages I got the links from and most of them also start to appear in my GWT. The thing is, my rankings havn't improved anything, they are doing quite some Google dancing, staying around position 50. I got the links about 2 months ago (April).
When checking other websites in my market, they all have fewer links and mostly low quality. My website itself is also pretty good, all unique content, updated pretty often, around 100 pages of content. All on-site SEO is done as it should be.
Am I just being impatient? Or should i start digging deeper?
What, on average, is the 'impact time' of decent links on your rankings in a semi-competitive market??Thanks!
-
Well it sounds like you've been careful on the approach to building the links. Have you analysed the websites above you (with a fine tooth comb) and critically analysed yours as if it was someone else's?
I know it's frustrating, but I'd say remain patient and just remain ethical. It may be the case that these .gov links look good because of their 'authority' but the actual relevance of them to your site may not be ticking boxes. You'd be better getting a natural link from a .co.uk or .net, for example, rather than trying to sap authority.
What's more, if the .gov sites are already linking out to others - remember that you're sharing the link benefit with all those other sites, so it may not actually be that valuable.
Try and explore other ways you can get links in your niche rather than asking for them - the rankings will come naturally then!
-
Hi there,
Thanks for your answer!
The links are pretty diverse, from the 10 links 4 use the url of the website, 2 use the main keyword, 2 other use main keyword+other keyword, and 2 links are with a 302 redirect (don't ask me why, probably the outdated system of government websites).
The interval of the links from the first to the last links was about 8-9 days. it sounds rather strange to me that I could have been penalised, looking at the quality of the links and that they are put naturally by the webmasters of those websites after I told them about our project in our mail. Of about 50 mails I sent out, we got 10 links, which I think is rather good.
The main reason I'm asking this, is that in the past for other projects in quite the same markets, when getting same quality like links, the next day my rankings improved.. Now, almost 2 months later, and not one good link, but then, and still no change, I am starting to become clueless..
However, what bothers me with our link profile, is a comment on a website someone made with a link to our website, where the content of the comment is shown on ALL the pages of that website (about 800) with a latest comment widget. Those links are all no-follow. I see in GWT that the number starts to decrease as other comments have been placed by other users, but it might be that it affected our website as been seen as getting spam links (going from 1 to 800 links, and then back to 1 eventually)..
-
I see you're at the 'why isn't anything happening stage' of SEO work!
This doesn't necessarily mean that the work you've done isn't helping your website - but you need to analyse your link building strategy.
How did you go about getting the links? What anchor texts did you go for? If you've gone keyword heavy on links, for example, it's likely you've been penalised.
I can't stress how important it is to look natural. What you perceive as natural may be completely different to how Google perceives 'natural'. Remember, a link should look like someone is referring to you/referencing you as the source of information/a product. You've almost got to have an element of paranoia about you when thinking about whether something looks natural.
As for the impact time - this all depends when Google is crawling your site and how often. If you're updating content pretty often - why not stick some news content in there too, or reviews, or offers... something people can share and interact with rather than simply read and click away from.
Good luck, hope your site gets to where you want it!
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
-
Does redirecting a duplicate page NOT in Google‘s index pass link juice? (External links not showing in search console)
Hello! We have a powerful page that has been selected by Google as a duplicate page of another page on the site. The duplicate is not indexed by Google, and the referring domains pointing towards that page aren’t recognized by Google in the search console (when looking at the links report). My question is - if we 301 redirect the duplicate page towards the one that Google has selected as canonical, will the link juice be passed to the new page? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lewald10 -
Internal Linking
Hi, I'm doing internal anchor text links. Relative path. if I use /destination-page instead of https://website.com/destination-page will I still receive a transfer of internal Google trust to the destination page? Does google treat just the / url the same as full url??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scotty_Wilson0 -
If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post. Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website. Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal? Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Google Signal for Site Speed: PageSpeed ranking, Time To First Byte, or something else?
We were having an internal discussion regarding what specific signal Google is looking for regarding Site Speed. My understanding was that Google primarily used Time To First Byte (TTFB) as its signal of Site Speed. My colleague argued that this is not part of Google's PageSpeed Insights (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) and therefore was unlikely to be the primary signal. Who is right? Is TTFB the primary signal or the score on PageSpeed Insights?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DesignHammer1 -
Link Type Analysis
Howdy Moz Fans, Just wondering if anyone knows any tools to which can identify link types. E.g. is the link - navigational, in the footer or in the body text. Specifically for internal links. Any suggestions? Cheers, RM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
Technical Question on Image Links - Part of Addressing High Number of Outbound Links
Hi - I've read through the forum, and have been reading online for hours, and can't quite find an answer to what I'm searching for. Hopefully someone can chime in with some information. 🙂 For some background - I am looking closely at four websites, trying to bring them up to speed with current guidelines, and recoup some lost traffic and revenue. One of the things we are zeroing in on is the high amount of outbound links in general, as well as inter-site linking, and a nearly total lack of rel=nofollow on any links. Our current CMS doesn't allow an editor to add them, and it will require programming changes to modify any past links, which means I'm trying to ask for the right things, once, in order to streamline the process. One thing that is nagging at me is that the way we link to our images could be getting misconstrued by a more sensitive Penguin algorithm. Our article images are all hosted on one separate domain. This was done for website performance reasons. My concern is that we don't just embed the image via , which would make this concern moot. We also have an href tag on each to a 'larger view' of the image that precedes the img src in the code, for example - We are still running the numbers, but as some articles have several images, and we currently have about 85,000 articles on those four sites... well, that's a lot of href links to another domain. I'm suggesting that one of the steps we take is to rel=nofollow the image hrefs. Our image traffic from Google search, or any image search for that matter, is negligible. On one site it represented just .008% of our visits in July. I'm getting a little pushback on that idea as having a separate image server is standard for many websites, so I thought I'd seek additional information and opinions. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MediaCF0 -
Links in body text
From a purely SEO /link juice perspective, is there any benefit to linking from body text to a page that is in a pervasive primary navigation? The primary nav puts a link at the top of the HTML. With the tests done by members of this site, the "first link counts" rule negates the link juice value of a link in the body text if there is already a link in the nav. Now I've also seen the data on using hash tags to get a second or third link, but ignoring that, it would seem that links in the body text to pages in the nav have zero effect. This brings me to another question - block level navigation. If anchor text links pass more juice than links in the top navigation, why would you put your most coveted target pages in the top nav? You would be better off building links in the content, which would create a poor user experience. To me, the theory that anchor text links in the body pass more juice than links in the primary nav doesn't make any sense. Can someone please explain this to me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Are there certain times of the day that it is better to update content or blogs? How do I find out what time is best for a particular site?
Trying to figure out how to best optimize timing of new content... including blogs and other on page content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronSchinke0