Was reading an SEO article on Niche Pursuits I Need Your Input for 2 SEO Experiments! which is looking for ideas for an SEO experiment. Basically they want their visitors via comments to suggest an SEO experiment and there’s a social media SEO experiment I’d like testing I was going to post this as a comment at Niche Pursuits, but it got a little long explaining my SEO logic (I don’t write short comments :-)) so new SEO test article… I’ve setup a lot of SEO experiments over the past 10-15 years and always try to limit them to one variable (studied genetics at University, I’m a scientist at heart) as it makes it easier to understand an experiment when […]
Continue Reading SEO Social Media Experiment
Social Media SEO
I would like to suggest that social media is a complete waste of time. I just joined a social media seo site (linkcollider) and just received a TON of social media signals and it has not done anything for my website. Not one thing, in fact my traffic is down. Back-links are my weak point. Social media sucks!
Question? I have a .NET automated YouTube site that is starting to get traffic. Is it safe to start linking together with my website or should I wait a while??? As you know all these limp wristed paranoid white hat Google worshiping “do-gooders” always say “be careful” linking websites together. The whole point of my .NET is for backlinks but as you know real SEO advice is a needle in a hay stack. One big rehash.
Social Media SEO
Low Quality Backlinks
You have to be very careful with backlinks from low quality websites.
It’s all about numbers, if you own one low quality site with say 1,000 pages indexed on duplicate/low quality content and add the odd link here and there to your money site, PROBABLY won’t cause damage.
Increase the number of low quality backlinks (sitewide links for example) and the risk increases. Create lots of low quality sites, risk increases further.
I fell foul of this one. Gave away free AdSense themes with sitewide backlinks to the domain I gave the themes away from. Was OK until so many webmasters used the free themes it generated MILLIONS of backlinks and not all the links were high quality, a lot from autoblogs. Was that bad had to ditch the domain and move the content to recover it!
I own a reasonable size network of sites and have been removing links both to and from the low quality parts of the network (plan to cull my blog network by over 50 domains), just not worth the risk in 2014, Google is getting too good at determining quality long term. I can see my network reducing to under 20 sites LONG term: quality over quantity.
Take into account if you do have autoblogs with thousands of posts consider the domain is never going to be considered “high quality” by Google and so the value of the links are practically worthless.
“High Quality” to Google means the domain has generated high quality aged links and doesn’t carry any penalties. You aren’t going to generate high quality backlinks to an autoblog (if you do the domains the links are from are running a risk linking to low quality sites) and the content is likely to be considered duplicate/low quality long term, so fails on both high quality metrics.
You’d have better results with a single page website (even a free Blogger blog) that had high quality content and you generated a few good quality backlinks.
I can built WPRobot autobogs with thousands of webpages in under 30 minutes a site and link them all here, I don’t because the links have no real value. The 30 minutes is better spent on a high quality site. I wouldn’t use autoblogs for backlinks.
David
Low Quality Backlinks
SEO Low Quality Backlinks
Dave would it be a bad idea if I made a “links” page and offered backlink trades for my specific niche???
SEO Value of Link Pages
If you mean a page just for adding links to other sites the value to the other sites is minimal at best and dangerous as worst. Small links page means you won’t be able to setup a lot of reciprocal links, sets of links pages and you look like a link farm.
If you are only offering links from a links page, you will probably only gain links from links pages and see above.
Personally I’d never build a links page and never trade links from a links page.
Only links I’d consider are contextual links from related content.
I don’t do much link trading (too time consuming) instead work on link bait. If I did go looking for links I’d target sites in the same niche with a similar rank for the SERPs I’m targeting.
I’m top 3 for the WordPress SEO Theme SERP, if someone contacted me for a links trade that wasn’t even top 30 why would I trade links?
On the other hand I’m outside the top 10 for the SEO Tutorial SERPs (around 15th), would make sense for me to trade links with sites ranked top 20 for the SEO Tutorial and it would make sense for them to trade with me (after due diligence).
I would only trade links from the pages in the top 20, so wouldn’t accept a links page or another webpage on the same site, I’d want the webpage in the top 20 for SEO Tutorial and in return give a link from my top 20 SEO tutorial page.
If I didn’t work on link bait, that’s how I’d build reciprocal links. Both link partners gain a link from a webpage that Google considers important for that SERP, that has serious SEO value.
Note building relevant reciprocal links isn’t about PR per se, relevance should be your goal.
David
SEO Value of Link Pages
SEO High Quality Backlinks
Thanks Dave. That was the information I needed to know. Off-page is my weak link (speaking of links). LOL