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Hi there. There are a number of ways in which this is a bad idea - as others have pointed out. But in particular: What you are doing may manipulate the "bounce rate" you see in analytics, but won't affect the % of users who return immediately to the search results after landing on your page - which we know is one of the ways Google evaluates the quality of their own search results Going via an interstitial page is on its own not great UX, but having a delay on that page just makes it more likely that a user will give up and leave immediately - and also have a greater chance of remembering your site as being a poor UX and be less likely to return At an overarching level, there's nothing wrong with having external links off a page. This is normal and expected on any site. I would say you should put all your efforts that are currently going into manipulating this behaviour and these metrics into improving the user experience of your site to make it better for the people who do find it. I hope that helps.

Hi KSCaserta, Did you see Nigel's thoughtful response to your question? If it helped you resolve your issue, please mark it as a "Good Answer." Regardless, we'd love to hear from you! Christy

It sounds like this wouldn't be an issue (see my reply below) but if Heinrich says different, I'll reply again

Hi Greenroads This is a fairly simple thing to do. 1. Go to site:yousiteurl and see how many pages you have in Google - if there are only 100 or so they will all be listed. Put them in to a spreadsheet. 2. Use a backlink checker to identify any other pages that sites may be linking to you from. I use SEMrush but there are plenty of free backlink checkers where you can register and get free info (I just Googled https://monitorbacklinks.com/seo-tools/free-backlink-checker) Note all the backlink destinations. 3. Set up the new site and 301 all the old pages to relevant pages on the new website.There are various plugins that can help or you can edit the htaccess file yourself which is better for site speed. (Generally plugins slow the site) There are plenty of guides on this but essentially you will just enter lines like this: Redirect 301 /old page.com/old https://newpage.com/new The full process is here: https://wpbuffs.com/301-redirects-wordpress-htaccess/ Regards Nigel

Hi Catherine The problem with setting up tags and categories within your blog is that the content will likely conflict with the main categories on your website. Sure, so that from a user point of view but I would advise you noindex/follow them so that you don't have them appear in Google but link juice is allowed to flow through the pages. When you post it is perfectly OK and good for SEO, to link to internal pages using anchor text. Just be aware that if there is already a link to those pages in the main menu then your efforts will be thwarted as Google only reads the first anchor to a page it comes to. If that is in the menu then your link on the page will be largely ignored. Backlinks from blog pages and of course other forms of internal linkage strengthens the whole site in term of allowing link juice to flow through all connected pages. Don't think of it as arbitrary linking or negative for SEO. Do think of linking to pages that are two or more clicks down, so that they will not have a main link in the menu. I repeat - if you do set up categories and tags in the blog then noindex/follow them as they will produce low grade/skinny pages. Regards Nigel Carousel Projects.

Hello, I would just concentrate on the "Non" www site as it is the one that has the content. If you are redirecting traffic from the other site it will be ok, but don't post any additional links to the "WWW" site though. Also like you said it would be a good idea to go back and correct the links if there are not too many of them. You don't lose much from the redirect, but the "Dampening" factor of PageRank does deduct a small portion of the links value. In reality, if the "WWW" site is not being used and has no content just make sure it permanently redirects to your main site and forget about it. Put all your effort into your main site. Build lots of high-quality content and promote it. It takes a little time for the links to start showing up in MOZ, but when they do it can start building fast. Then your "DA" score will start going up. You may like this article regarding "Organic Quality Scores" and I hope it helps you. Best Regards

Hello All, I was just about to hit pay now button but after reading this conversation and suggestion  ( Brian Dean ). started rethinking. Thanks For the helpful discussion. medhahosting.com

Hi there, Thanks for the question! As Nigel said, it is a risky tactic if you're doing this kind of thing at scale, so I'd definitely echo what he said about being careful. There are legitimate ways of linking multiple sites that you own together - publishers will often link all of their magazine sites together - but the way you've described it doesn't fit with this. It may well work for a short period, but if it's clearly been done for SEO purposes then it will most likely catch up with you at some point! Hope that helps! Paddy

Eldon, Open site explorer does not include all links in every index. And sometimes it excludes less authoritive links from index to index. What is the domain authority of the site you are linking out from? Thanks Don Silvernail

As I understand it Penguin is no longer penalizing sites for bad links but just devalues them/don't count them. So I imagine getting targeted by such methods by a competitor, or even acquiring questionable links from PBNs can't hurt you anymore, but just return 0 value?

Hi Gaston, thanks for the response. Didn't even think of disavow! Great reminder. Fingers crossed it registers soon. Id like my stats to be a bit more reliable.

Hi Swiftech buy As far as I can see resellerratings.com is a dofollow backlink so it would add to the overall weight of backlinks you would be looking for, Trustpilot is nofollow. (Just go to the page right click>view page source and look for the link) If I was starting a new campaign on a brand new site with 1 DA I would look for a wide range of varied backlinks as possible which would include getting in local directories, local/national (if you can) news sites, suppliers, partners and maps. Rand did a Whiteboard Friday on this a while back. Watch this for advice on getting those first 50 backlinks: https://moz.com/blog/link-building-tactics-to-acquire-50-links And this on the value of nofollow https://moz.com/blog/seo-value-nofollow-links My advice is, don't sign up with a review site just because of one dofollow backlink. (Finally, yes the backlink is created when you sign up with them) Regards Nigel

Do you mean on mobile? If so I have seen the buttons too and wondered how some industries showed these and others did not.

thanks for share it xiaomi

Hmm - aside from webrings of yore, I haven't seen too many tools trying to accomplish this. There were a few out there trying to connect guest bloggers, but, they mostly turned into directories of spam or low quality sites, not ones you'd really want to partner with. As Roman mentioned, there's tons of influencer networks in every consumer niche that will enable pay-to-play opportunities but the safe advice is to treat these as advertising opportunities, not link opportunities. Most people doing good collaboration will do direct email outreach and treat the collaborations like a real partnership (links are a side benefit and never mentioned). Figure out a good way to partner with people and the links will be naturally part of it.

Hi, I'm going to answer with 2 separate and very excellent blog posts that can answer the question much better than I can: http://seogadget.com/link-auditing/ http://www.stateofdigital.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/ There are also a number of automated tools out there link Link Detox, but a manual review is always necessary before disavowing links. Also keep in mind that although Panda might have some backlink elements baked in as part of the algorithm, most people consider Panda to be mostly caused by on-site issues, such as duplicate content. You may want to do a bit of digging into recovering from Panda penalties, including removing thin and duplicate content, and improving on site experiences, before removing links. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Russ, Thanks for the clarification. I've attached links to two images. I see the link listed as an unlinked message when I use Open Site Explorer. When I view the metrics in the campaign, it says there all mentions are linked. J38nT egSMNuX

Thank you, I think that having only 1 backlink on the homepage footer is the best approach.