Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Marco, The short answer to this one is: As long as the links you are creating to your site come from valid, authoritative sources, they won't hurt you. BUT- They will not help you as much as they might if they were created from a French resource for your French blogs (based on pure relevancy). The big issue you face is ensuring that your link sources are reliable, relevant and authoritative. If you can check off those boxes, your link profile will be just fine. Try to avoid anything that does not fall into these categories, since that might be viewed as spam (although Google is smart enough to know the content topic is the same, even if the language is different). To summarize, I would go ahead and build those links (assuming they come from solid domains). Hope this helps and feel free to reach out with any additional questions or for clarification. Cheers, Rob

I think that's a great answer from Chris - invest in some analysis. Figure out what you need rather than go with X, Y or Z. Base the spend on your requirements and defining those requirements if needs be. Hope that helps!

directory links are still a very much required part of the deal for major directories to say the least. Sure, a lot of them do not pass any link juice or Google may discount a lot of those links in its ranking factors, but you just want to be present where people actually check and where data aggregators grab their source data from.There has to be a reason why Moz local still is as service that charges people for exactly these "directory" listings...

Ok, that's good to know. I think for now, I"ll leave them alone, unless there's one that seems really irrelevant. Thanks to both of you for your help.

Hello there, Remember that PA1 means that the page was not crawled by moz or it doesnt have anything of linkbuilding seen by moz. The question about passing linkjuice, is tricky. Every link passes linkjuice (some more, some less). You should focus in whether the link is ok to be there. The first check you must do is analyze for some spam flags in that page, or if it is a relevant&related topic with your site. That "PA ca go up by promoting the page" is not right. Moz's gives a number in their metrics in a 90% based on the backlink profile of that page/domain. (speking about PA, DA). Here some resources: What is Page Authority(PA)? - Begginers guide to linkbuilding - Moz - Targeted Link Building in 2016 - Whiteboard Friday Best luck! GR.

Thanks ever so much!

Hey there, It looks like the 'Boutique Hotels' page has been optimized for the term 'boutique hotels' more effectively than the homepage. Google takes into account a whole bunch of figures when determining the best page on your domain to rank for a particular term. You might find that users stay on site/convert more often when they enter the site on that page - Google might have picked up on that and chosen to serve this page as the best entry point for that journey. I hope this helps, Sean

Thanks a lot Gaston!

I would view this a a usability matter. Where would someone expect to land after clicking on a link in an author bio? I would likely expect to land on your home page, or a good About me page. Chances are, if it's a well set up bio section, it will be a nofollow link. So there won't be any benefits other than to the user who clicks on it. ~Caro

Thanks, im going to build sitemap via excel, with replacement methodes.. Its good for de SEO after all!

Not much to add to Sean's answer, except make SURE that what you want them to link to is worth it! Ideally, you'll have an angle, such as something the competitor doesn't. Even better, a new feature that the blogger could write about, to give them some 'juice' for their article. Remember to think like them - What can you give to them, to help them make their piece of content better. To get what you want, you really need to figure out what they want

I think I understand what you are trying to do, but I may be off with the semantics. The xml sitemap (at it's most basic level) is just a centralized list of links for pages that are on your site to help the search engines find pages without having to crawl all of the pages on your site. They do not contain any anchor text in them. If you are wanting to crawl your site and find out what all your anchor text is internally, I would use a tool like Screaming Frog. If you are trying to extract information from your sitemap.xml then you would need to use a combination of a text editor and excel.  Say your URL structure includes product and brand information and you have all the URLs in a sitemap.  You can pull that document into a text editor and then use the "Find and replace" function to get rid of all the extraneous code and then you can be left with just the URLs on one line.  You can then use the excel function "Text to columns" to then split out the URL into sections based on slashes or dashes.  If you have Screaming Frog, it will extract all the URLs for you and then you can split out the info in excel as well.  Use Google to find examples of how to run the tools mentioned above in detail. If I am totally off, please give a more detailed explanation of what you are trying to do and that will help as well.

Hey To some extent this is the wrong question and thinking here - both of these could be right and both of them could be wrong. It's impossible to answer this without looking at the context of the linking page - example: Page on the target site for violin teachers in new york Page on an external site that also lists violin teachers in new york but also links out to other resources Using either of those anchors would not make sense here and could potentially be classed as manipulative - the name of the site you are promoting may make more sense. Again, hard to feedback on what would be right here but I would simply use what makes the most sense on the context of the linking page. Remember -  Google already knows the context of the target page so concentrate on making that page as good as possible and getting links with natural anchor text on relevant resources that could also drive referral traffic and you will likely be in good shape. Hope that helps Marcus

They'll send examples - max 3. Then you have to look around for similar.

In my opinion those links have less "strenght" than from websites with better link profile. The question is what are the anchors, content around, other footprints? If they're good, not spammy, good anchors, content around, no footprints, etc etc then keep. However links on websites with high pa or da won't make them good everytime. They can be spammy and you can be penalized.

What do you do to determine the quality of a site to acquire a link from? Is it just a Moz score of 50 or more? Is it just a link from an industry you are targeting? We are a B2B Company, so we feel we can link to a diverse range of industries and topics.  Some times I look at a company with a Moz DA of 30 and think it is a good link to acquire because we want to sell to that industry. Sometimes even more so than another link I acquire that might have a Moz DA of 50. I never link to sites that dont make sense for our business.industry.  Is this a good strategy or should I keep my focus on the high Moz DA first? Thanks for any help. I realize this response is kind of jumping all over the place.

Step 1 should really start off with something more along the lines of "Create a page around a product or service we provide. Determine related search terms, expanded terms, relevant informational queries, FAQ questions, LSI terms, etc. that could be used to enhance content of the page and draw traffic." Don't create a page for a single term. Create a page because it actually provides the user/customer/visitor with something worthwhile and relevant that you provide/offer. Step 2 should not be all about Social Media. SEO _is_how you get people to see/find your site. Social Media is a useful tool along side this but its more than just posting up a new page or a new blog post two or three times a week to your Company Page and somehow magically drawing in millions of followers... its about building a community, conversing with the community and related pages, cross-promotion, making yourself into an industry leader and authority on relevant related subjects. Now, if this is more of a B2B operation then you might want to consider a few other things. Because when thinking about it from that perspective you'll want to do some research about the major social networks and forums that members of that industry use. While Facebook, Google Plus, & Twitter seem like great ways to push out a new site page and to start getting some traction, if all your industry professionals who would care about your information are on LinkedIn and PartnerUp then you'll want to prioritize that. Or if they congregate around a handful of G+ community or Facebook pages then you'll want to work towards being able to post your information there and/or be posted by the admins & users of those groups. Press Releases sound nice but make sure that its a good, legitimate press release service. Back in the day there were tons of these services out there and they were really good at getting your post on one or two decent sites.... and 300 crap sites... all of which were 'useful' at the time but definitely lead to some headaches involving disavows when that became a thing. Just because your content is being syndicated across a whole bunch of sites doesn't mean that its necessarily a good thing... for all you know, the bulk of those pages are buried so deep and NoIndexed instead of having a cross-domain canonical to the 'original' so there's no traffic to & through it and no equity being gained. And hell, since it could be creating 300 instances of duplicate content and most of those sites probably do the same for tons of other 'clients'... those links you do get will potentially be from low quality, low domain authority, and fairly spammy sites. Step 4 sounds fine. You might also want to look into something like HARO (https://www.helpareporter.com/), offer up an article to a relevant business journal as an editorial (and don't try to 're-sell' that article to multiple sites with 'a couple tweaks'), reach out to leaders in related industries for legitimate cross-promotional opportunities, look into opportunities to speak with or offer insight to the writers of relevant industry blogs, etc.

Hi there, Thanks for your reply. Yeah, I know that I don't have to focus on our competitors and I don't. We do our thing, we write blog posts on a regular basis about many different topics (not only related to our direct market) and our competitors and most companies from Latvia (this is where we are from) are not doing anything in this area at all (I mean content marketing). And that is why I am just wondering how come our page/website is below our competitors who are not doing anything, their website is way too outdated and not mobile optimised and they don't even have a blog on their webisite... Just seems really strange to me if you know what I mean Ok, will try to work on link building activity and try to get as many other websites related to our industry to point at our website. Thanks again.

Hi Anders, Great to hear it - best of luck! Sean