Link Placement and Trust

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey all

I am looking at a new SEO campaign and am just starting to have a look at the competition and their links. This is a client in the website design industry who operates in a given city in the UK. Taking a quick look, the competition seems well established and there is plenty of companies ranking on the first page for all of the key terms.

When I start to dig a little deeper though it gets a little more interesting and this maybe relatively unique to this industry but I think it also applies to spam links and any company that supplies white label website based services.

Basically, the competition have lots of links. I have reviewed the top 10 competing sites across various terms and there is no shortage of links and lots of anchor text variations. Here is the stats from open site explorer for the one site that commonly comes up again and again.

Page Level 61 - Page Authority 6.78 - mozRank 6.13 - mozTrust 30,144 - Total Links 30,064 - External Followed Links 33 - Internal Followed Links 325 - Linking Root Domains

Domain Level 53 - Domain Authority 5.13 - Domain mozRank 5.10 - Domain mozTrust 47,969 - Total Links 44,788 - External Followed Links

So, this gives us lots of nice metrics and the new deep analysis tool in keyword research easily allows us to get some more data on what exactly is driving the ranking of this site and the others who all rank in a similar way.

Link Quality

This is where it gets a bit more interesting and this applies to all the sites in the first ten results for the various keywords we are interested in (general keywords for the homepage at this stage).

The links are primarily domain wide and in the footer. They are things like:

website designed by x
web design by x
website design
website design in <area name="">
<area name=""> website design
(you get the picture)

Quality vs Quantity

So, whilst the competitors have lots of links, from a reasonable number of sites, they are pretty much all site wide footer links. This is fairly clear when we look at total links 30,000 from only 300 sites.

My thinking here is that the quality of these links is not that great:

• poorly positioned on the page
• domain wide
• narrow anchor text and in some cases no 'click to visit' type links

Content

These sites are pretty much all dull as hell. Service pages, clients, jobs done, maybe a case study but really, nothing I would really class as interesting (hence only links from their clients sites hey).

So, my question is

Has anyone built a campaign with quality vs quantity? Do you have any tips, experience or feedback? Our strategy will be built around great content, promotion of that content and much more (not explored that) but at the foundation it will be a content and promotion strategy.

Really, if I break it down, I am looking at the above as 300 links, from the footers of various sites. If we were to get 300 links from quality sources and then bulk it out with some similar footer style links from the clients clients (they are not 100% keen on this so we may not go that route yet) then... these established big boys really should not be too difficult to topple in my mind given enough time, content and effort.

What are your thoughts people? Anyone conducted a quality vs quantity campaign like this? Any feedback?

Cheers
Marcus

P.S. SEOMoz - is there any chance that a link trust or quality metric could be built into the tools at some point in the future as sheer volume, is not always the best indicator and as times goes on I would imagine that to be even more true.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Marcus,

There is a general belief that Google and probably other search engines can generally identify and ignore credit links and that part of this is attributed to location on the page. Footer links are the most obvious of these.

If you search Google Webmaster Central for references to credit links in footer or footer link value, you will find quite a lot of discussion of this.

[dignan99]

I have read many times that footer links hold less value than links mentioned in the content areas of pages and posts, but that does not mean they do not have reasonable value.  When coming from a site with a higher value of trust, these links will have even more juice.

If somebody offered me a mixed amount of anchor text from 300 different footer links with differing IP"s, I would take them in a heartbeat(as long as they are from reliable and trust worthy sites of course.)

The great thing is, you know how the link building has been done for your competition, and now the real work begins.

While there are no guarantees as there are many factors beyond links, you most likely have an excellent shot at getting your client to the top if you put in the effort.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Sha, yeah, I have read a bunch of that, and I know it's the general consensus, but I was wondering if anyone had any quality vs. quantity experience - that is, have you conducted a campaign to pitch quality against quantity?

These guys rank well, for competitive terms, so the approach works. Equally, the moz tools only look at volume and the overall quality of the linking site and page and in no way asses the value of the link with regards to it's placement on the page or repetition across the site.

You had any experience with this? Was wondering about a metric or a way to topple this approach and would love to hear your feedback.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Buddy, thanks for the answer.

I guess what I am looking for is some kind of metric to structure my campaign around.

I am thinking the best I can do at the moment is to go for 300 quality links as there are 300 linking sites to the #1's but would love to hear if anyone has put this into practice in anyway and what if any lessons they learned along the way.

Cheers
Marcus

[Marcus_Miller]

This seems to be a useful resource on the different value of links and ties in well with my 300 quality links should outweigh 300 site wide footer links:

Search Engines Valuation of Links http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

I guess I did not phrase the original question all that well and I guess what I am looking for is some kind of metric for footer links and site wides. Is a footer link worth maybe 10% of link in the content of a page? Does a sitewide links value degrade over X links?

I am not even sure it matters and I can guess and will feed back over a period of months, maybe it is a great piece of content / study to publish to the site but the part of my nature just wants some way to make this work on a spreadsheet.

[KeriMorgret]

Thanks for the great feedback in the P.S. - we really appreciate it!

Did you know we have a feature request forum? It's a great place to share your ideas. Other people can vote on them and it will help us determine priorities. You should check it out: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums

Thanks!

Keri