How do I tell if competitor's links are good?
-
One strategy I have seen recommended over and over is to look at your competitor's back links and see if any could be relevant for your site and worth pursuing. My question is how do I evaluate a link and not end up pursuing some penalized site? I would guess checking for Google index is a good idea since some of the webmasters may not be aware they are penalized.
Is it DA and whether they are indexed alone? Many sites I have seen have DA in the teens but are legitimate in our industry. Should they not be considered due to low DA?
Also I see links from directories on many competitor sites. Seems a controversial subject, but assuming the directory is industry specific, is it OK?
Thanks in advance!
-
Index status, Pagerank, DA, Moz Trust, Social Engagement, Alexa, etc. There are tons of possible variables but the standard for a "good" site would vary by industry. Honestly, you are better off manually looking through all of the links and determining whether a site is 1) indexed in google 2) not filled with spam 3) related to your website (that goes for directories and low DA sites as well)
Rule of thumb: if you think it might be a bad link, it probably is.
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
-
301ing one site's links to another
Hi, I have one site with a well-established link profile, but no actual reason to exist (site A). I have another site that could use a better link profile (site B). In your experience, would 301 forwarding all of site A's pages to site B do anything positive for the link profile/organic search of the site B? Site A is about boating at a specific lake. Site B is about travel destinations across the U.S. Thanks! Best... Michael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Need Magento SEO expert for 301 clean up - any reco's?
My site is a total mess from a clean “crawling” perspective. We are still getting traffic and doing business, but I am afraid from an SEO perspective we are driving with the parking brake on. There a lot of 301’s and some of them are causing 404 errors. Below is an overview of my 5 year old magento site which was moved from a 5 year old xcart site (so there is a lot of old junk (url’s) in there). It needs cleaning up and I need a plan and seo / 301 help. Overview: Recently moved from http to https - not sure best practices were followed, but we had lots of crawl issues before this move. Analytics Top 100 Landing Pages = 82.7% of entrances Webmaster Tools 594 Pages Indexed 65 Not found errors - most involve 301’s - examples below Sitemap: 773 Submitted, 395 Indexed URL Parameters - 41 - I can’t tell if they are doing anything (helping or hurting) Moz Crawl Total Pages 3,454 324 Redirect Issues (258 Temp and 66 Chain) Magento 11,773 Redirects 5390 System 6383 Custom On July 15, 2017 I deleted 40 redirects from htaccess that a developer had put there that were causing problems. Blog We have a wordpress blog installed on Magento site. Years ago it was moved from a subdomain to a subdirectory.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SammyT0 -
Links / Metadata around Recent Posts etc in Wordpress / Blog - Good SEO Practice?
Hello In a Wordpress blog ( or part of an ecommerce site that runs under wordpress ) it is good to show recent posts in the sidebar on most pages. Obviously the posts aren't going to be relevant to every post , so my questions are: Is having these on the page hurting SEO for the page? Is there good metadata structure to put in there? ( like rel="nofollow" or similar ) Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear
Thanks for your time
Marty0 -
Should you allow an auto dealer's inventory to be indexed?
Due to the way most auto dealership website populate inventory pages, should you allow inventory to be indexed at all? The main benefit us more content. The problem is it creates duplicate, or near duplicate content. It also creates a ton of crawl errors since the turnover is so short and fast. I would love some help on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gauge1230 -
Using the same content on different TLD's
HI Everyone, We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same language. For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German, We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise? All answers appreciated. Cheers, Mel.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape1 -
Our site has been penalized and it's proving to be very hard to get our rankings back...
So I have a question. We have used nearly every trick in the book to rank our site, including a ton of white hat stuff.... but then also a lot of black hat practices that resulted in us dropping in the rankings by about 30-40 positions. And getting back to where we were (top 10 for most keywords) is proving to be nearly impossible. We have a ton of great content coming off of the site and we actually offer a quality product. We follow most of the guidelines advocated here on SEOmoz. But the black hat stuff we did has really taken a toll. And it's gonna be pretty much impossible to go back in time and erase all of the Black Hat stuff we did. So what should we do? Should we design a completely new website with a new domain? What can be done to help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LilyRay0 -
Should I 301 Poorly Worded URL's which are indexed and driving traffic
Hi, I'm working on our sites structure and SEO at present and wondering when the benefit I may get from a well written URL, i.e ourDomain / keyword or keyphrase .html would be preferable to the downturn in traffic i may witness by 301 redirecting an existing, not as well structured, but indexed URL. We have a number of odd looking URL's i.e ourDomain / ourDomain_keyword_92.html alongside some others that will have a keyword followed by 20 underscores in a long line... My concern is although i would like to have a keyword or key phrase sitting on its own in a well targeted URL string I don't want to mess to much with pages that are driving say 2% or 3% of our traffic just because my OCD has kicked in.... Some further advice on strategies i could utilise would be great. My current thinking is that if a page is performing well then i should leave the URL alone. Then if I'm not 100% happy with the keyword or phrase it is targeting I could build another page to handle the new keyword / phrase with the aim of that moving up the rankings and eventually taking over from where the other page left off. Any advice is much appreciated, Guy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guycampbell0 -
Why is my site's 'Rich Snippets' information not being displayed in SERPs?
We added hRecipe microformats data to our site in April and then migrated to the Schema.org Recipe format in July, but our content is still not being displayed as Rich Snippets in search engine results. Our pages validate okay in the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool. Any idea why they are not being displayed in SERP's? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Techboy0