SEO agency makes "hard to believe" claims
-
Hi
I operate in a highly competitive niche of "sell house fast" in UK.
Sites that are in top 1-3 tend to have thousands of links. Some of these are spammy type links. These sites have Domain Authority too.
My site has good content http://propertysaviour.co.uk and is listed with around 12 well known directories. I have been building back-links manually over the last 3-4 months.
The SEO agency we are looking to work with are claiming they can get my website to first page with above keyword.
How would you go about this strategy? What questions would you ask SEO agency?
What elements can do I myself? By the way, I am good at producing content!
-
There are companies that can get rankings that quickly in competitive verticals. But to do so they'll need to use techniques that are not within Google's guidelines such as using private blog networks or injecting links via hacking other people's sites.
If this is a site that you can walk away from should it get penalized, then hiring them might make sense. I'd want to ask how they are getting links and to make sure that they are not doing anything illegal or anything that involves hacking other websites. Getting links from a private blog network (if that's what they are doing) is not illegal or immoral, but if Google catches on and the site gets penalized then you may never be able to recover it.
If this is a site that you plan to keep for the long run, then it makes more sense to hire an agency that will improve your search presence gradually. Good SEO usually takes a lot of time.
I have been building back-links manually over the last 3-4 months.
Be careful. I'm seeing links that Google will likely see as unnatural such as:
http://www.linkaddurl.com/Arts___Humanities/Performing_Arts/Business/Real_Estate/?p=6
http://cqycxzfwzx.com/sell-my-house-fast-for-cash-your-request-fulfilled/
You're in a competitive space. I am betting that those sites above you with spammy links will drop out of site the next time Penguin hits. If they don't then it's because they're using private blog networks that Google hasn't been able to detect algorithmically and they're prime targets for a manual penalty.
My advice for hiring an SEO company would be to ask them exactly what they will do for your site. Are they going to improve your on page SEO? If so, how? Are they able to get you links? If so, how? If they tell you that the process is proprietary then it's probably not above board. If they give you marketing speak like, "We'll leverage your blah blah blah and produce stellar content marketing blah blah blah" without actually giving you a concrete idea of what they'll do then that's not good. I'd also ask for references. If they hide behind an NDA that's not good. Good SEO companies will have people lined up to give them a reference.
-
It's still as easy as it ever was to build spammy links. But it's just not what you should be doing to build a long-term high traffic site.
-
The SEO agency we are looking to work with are claiming they can get my website to first page with above keyword.
Walk away. No-one can make these claims without doing something a bit dodgy. Generally these sorts of claims turn into results that are short-lived and after a few more months, Google has caught up with what they are doing and you end up with a penalty.
Link building is not as easy as it once was. Now you need to have a reason for someone to want to link to you - if you want good links that is. A good linkable asset can make a real difference, so you need to start thinking outside the box a little bit on what you can do to help make you stand out a little.
-Andy
-
Sam
Thank you. I can do the link building. What I am not so good at is finding good sources of manual link building. Is there any recommendations?
I have used the Web Explorer tool as seen my competitors spammy links being built. I do not want to go down that route.
Would love to get your opinion on this. What tools do you use for finding good links?
-
In all likelihood they're telling the truth.
Shock? Perhaps, but here's another truth in the following 12 months you'll get slapped so hard your site will be in a worse position than today!
Sam
P.S. Talking from experience as I once used one of these agencies!
-
Thank you for your input.
The SEO agency is claiming that in 2-3 months, I should be ranking in top 1-5 positions.
How do I increase domain authority and page rank for my website. The websites I'm up against have tens of thousands of links (mostly spammy)!
I have seen guide to building backlinks.
Help!
-
I dont have a huge amount to add to this, other than in my experiance a lot of agencies tend to be 2 or 3 years behind in general practises, especially the smaller ones.
"The times of looking to rank numero uno for one term are long gone." is completely correct though, so be very careful about messing up other key words etc.
-
The times of looking to rank numero uno for one term are long gone. What sounds like your existing strategy of having good content is the way to go. The risk with an agency that would even focus up on one term and promise number one is that they are going to inadvertently wreck your link profile.
If I were you, I would read the beginner's guide to link building https://mza.bundledseo.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building and continue to make good content. Don't allow an agency to manipulate the hell out of your profile for the sake of one term.
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
-
Pagination & SEO
Hi We have automatically created brand pages based on which brand they have in their attributes. At the moment, developers have restricted the ability to properly optimise these for SEO, but I also wanted to look at how we should handle pagination. Example: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=1 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=2 http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/manutan?page=3 Should we do any of the following - which I've found in an article: Put no follow on all links located on pagination pages Should we no index these pages as they are wasting crawl budget? - Don’t show links to page 2, 3, 4, 5… 10, 11, 12… at the end of your content but only a link to the next and previous pages so that you won’t dilute your page authority. Or does anyone else have any tips on how to handle these pages? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Google WMT/search console showing thousands of links in "Internal Links"
Hi, One of our blog-post has been interlinked with thousands of internal links as per search console; but lists only 2 links it got connected from. How come so many links it got connected internally? I don't see any. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Duplicate content across similar computer "models" and how to properly handle it.
I run a website that revolves around a niche rugged computer market. There are several "main" models for each computer that also has several (300-400) "sub" models that only vary by specifications for each model. My problem is I can't really consolidate each model to one product page to avoid duplicate content. To have something like a drop down list would be massive and confusing to the customer when they could just search the model they needed. Also I would say 80-90% of the market searches for a specific model when they go to purchase or in Google. A lot of our customers are city government, fire departments, police departments etc. they get a list of approved models and purchase off that they don't really search by specs or "configure" a model so each model number having a chance to rank is important. Currently we have all models in each sub category rel=canonical back to the main category page for that model. Is there a better way to go about this? Example page you can see how there are several models all product descriptions are the same they only vary by model writing a unique description for each one is an unrealistic possibility for us. Any suggestions on this would be appreciated I keep going back on forth on what the correct solution would be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | The_Rugged_Store0 -
Something happened within the last 2 weeks on our WordPress-hosted site that created "duplicates" by counting www.company.com/example and company.com/example (without the 'www.') as separate pages. Any idea what could have happened, and how to fix it?
Our website is running through WordPress. We've been running Moz for over a month now. Only recently, within the past 2 weeks, have we been alerted to over 100 duplicate pages. It appears something happened that created a duplicate of every single page on our site; "www.company.com/example" and "company.com/example." Again, according to our MOZ, this is a recent issue. I'm almost certain that prior to a couple of weeks ago, there existed both forms of the URL that directed to the same page without be counting as a duplicate. Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wzimmer0 -
SEO considerations around an "Ad Wall"
I'm not sure what the correct terminology would be for this but I'm calling it an ad wall. Essentially an ad overlay when someone enters a website. I see this most commonly on certain news websites. For example when you click on a link to an article on ign or forbes.com you get an ad that you have to close or skip to read the article. What are the SEO considerations if implementing something like this? I'm wondering if there are any similar to a pay wall in the sense that you want to let crawlers in to see your content and rank it but users get an ad or redirected to an ad and then back to the article page. This link currently does it for me for example http://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2012/05/22/spacex-launches-with-15-dreams-onboard/ I set my user agent to google bot and go right through to the article but if it is set to the browser default I get to an ad page I have to skip first. Is this the infamous "white hat cloaking"? Are the other ways to implement the same idea (a modal window that opens via javascript for example) that are more or less risky? I'm mainly interested in doing this based on referrer: people who type a URL directly don't see it but clicking on a link they do see it, for example.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
After Receiving a "Googlebot can't access your site" would this stop your site from being crawled?
Hi Everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMA-DataSet
A few weeks ago now I received a "Googlebot can't access your site..... connection failure rate is 7.8%" message from the webmaster tools, I have since fixed the majority of these issues but iv noticed that all page except the main home page now have a page rank of N/A while the home page has a page rank of 5 still. Has this connectivity issues reduced the page ranks to N/A? or is it something else I'm missing? Thanks in advance.0 -
Language Attribute - does changing it make a difference to SEO and Search?
I am an SEO newbie, but learning fast. 🙂 I am based in London, UK and have a website: www.twofourseven.co.uk. I noticed that the language attribute was set to 'en-US'. I work in London as well in international locations in the Middle East and Asia. Thinking of this I wanted to ask the experts if given that I am based in the UK, would changing the language attribute make a difference to search results? If so, would 'en' be better than 'en-GB', which might be too specific? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | twofourseven0 -
If google ignores links from "spammy" link directories ...
Then why does SEO moz have this list: http://www.seomoz.org/dp/seo-directory ?? Included in that list are some pretty spammy looking sites such as: <colgroup><col width="345"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg
| http://www.site-sift.com/ |
| http://www.2yi.net/ |
| http://www.sevenseek.com/ |
| http://greenstalk.com/ |
| http://anthonyparsons.com/ |
| http://www.rakcha.com/ |
| http://www.goguides.org/ |
| http://gosearchbusiness.com/ |
| http://funender.com/free_link_directory/ |
| http://www.joeant.com/ |
| http://www.browse8.com/ |
| http://linkopedia.com/ |
| http://kwika.org/ |
| http://tygo.com/ |
| http://netzoning.com/ |
| http://goongee.com/ |
| http://bigall.com/ |
| http://www.incrawler.com/ |
| http://rubberstamped.org/ |
| http://lookforth.com/ |
| http://worldsiteindex.com/ |
| http://linksgiving.com/ |
| http://azoos.com/ |
| http://www.uncoverthenet.com/ |
| http://ewilla.com/ |0