Are Sidebar Backlinks worth for SEO?

[btqkelvin]

Hello!

Let's use the following example:

I have a blog (let's call it Blog A) and I find another blog in the same niche (this will be Blog B) that has higher DA and PA than mine. Will Google penalize me if the Blog B puts a link to my blog in their sidebar?

Remember, the Blog A and Blog B are from the same niche.

I ask this because Google says that links on sidebars appears in every page and in some pages the link may be useless. But if both blogs are from the same niche, there won't be pages where the links will be from different themes and with less relevance.

So, is my thought correct: we can use sidebar links without caring about penalization ONLY if the blogs are from the same niche?

Thanks in advance!

[Justen_H]

You might want to consider having the link placed elsewhere. Linking from Blog A and Blog B in the same niche seems only natural because it's highly relevant. Sitewide outlinks however are not great. If it was my site, I would rather have the owner of Blog B mention me in one of his blogs. A page called "link partners" or something like that is also not great.

Overall, I would say more relevance = higher value of the link.

[btqkelvin]

Thanks for the answer, Justen!

I ask this because I've got a Spam Score 7/17. I will show the flags and what I am willing to do to remove them. We are an e-commerce and have a blog too.

- **Low MozTrust or MozRank Score **(?????)

- **Large Site with Few Links **(look for more partnerships to build a more consistently Linking Building strategy, one way I thought was Sidebar Backlinks that was a strategy used before)

- **Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Subdomains **(maybe start using more nofollow in the links from our blog to the store?)

- Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Domains (since the beginning we only used Do Follow)

**- Small Proportion of Branded Links **(here I think in using the brand's name in the anchor text when the bloggers post something about my store)

- Thin Content (this doesn't makes sense to me)

- Low Number of Pages Found (Google has almost every page indexed, so again, this doesn't makes sense to me)

Are my actions correct? Is this the proper way to solve this Spam Score problem?

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hey there! I agree with Justen, sitewide links offer little to no value and could potentially do more harm than good. I would find somewhere else to place the link(s).

Not sure if you've already read this but here is an article that can help you learn more about MozTrust & MozRank Score

Although this article is from 2011, Dr. Pete does a great job explaining thin content.

Hope these help!! Cheers

[btqkelvin]

Thanks, Bryan!

I am already looking for Guest Post opportunities to build more High Quality Backlinks. The articles recommendations are very good also! Thanks.

[Corsiva]

Hi Kelvin,

Thank you for posting this question! I have recently look up into Moz Resources and these are some insights.
1. Focus on "Natural" editorial links, those that are editorially given by other website owners. This would be much more efficient than having to contact someone and ask them to link to you. (Provide them a good reason for them to do so. Making them aware of that reason.) - Cons, it takes time but nevertheless is HIGHLY VALUED.

2. Manual 'outreach' link building - most common which involves manually contacting website owners and bloggers to get linked.

An important note from Moz Res: Google has been devaluing and even penalizing 'self-created, non-editorial links' which often fall in line with black-hat practices that aim to fool the search engines into thinking a piece of content is relevant and important when it isn't.

Non-editorially given link, inherently carry less weight than other types of links. Focus on tactics that give you editorial links that add value to your website and business.

**What you should do in my opinion:

• Look out for blogs with great evergreen content (**with good rankings, good links, seeming decent traffic, etc) and link to a relevant page on your site.

• Look out for more active sites(usually have better overall quality, search performance, and a more active audience) - with a more active audience, potentially increase your chance to attract more decent traffic to your page.

Whether or not you succeed, it is crucial that you have a structure towards link building, which is very much dependent on a combination of your available assets and resources.

Hope the above insights have answered to your question applying to all kind of links. Different kind of links brings different impact to your business (whether or not this bring awareness to the potential audience).

You can visit my blog at https://www.corsivalab.com/blog and have reference to how I am actually backlinking the necessary stuff. Marketing is all about learning and sharing, the blog too has tips and ways you can better strategize and do links for marketing purposes.

Let's learn more as a community!

Cheers!