Welcome to the Q&A Forum

While DA is important, I've seen more a correlation with DA and backlinks than I have DA and SEO. I have a site that I've increased the overall SEO by leaps and bounds, removing about 1,000 pages of junk products and useless content pages that could easily been merged into epic category content pages.

I mean I overhauled this site to the T. What did I see in the process? A loss in DA by about 15 points, in the end the culprit? Backlinks, in that time we had the EPA.gov remove a backlink while they redesigned the page themselves, as well lost a few other backlinks from directories that bit the dust and articles that either were removed or some other issue that resulted in backlink loss. Mind you, the SEO and even organic traffic increased in this time period alongside conversation rates.

I think DA might be going the same way pagerank went, since in SEO, there isn't one or even 2 issues that spell success, it's over 9,000.

I also feel, rankbrain will continue to make fools out of us all in the coming years, as it learns and enacts new practices through better optimization and user query intake.

I'm on this same path since we too cannot use noindex / nofollow due to limited backend interaction with Bigcommerce.

I like to block all cart related pages, which for ecommerce sites can be a boat load.

• /cart.php
• /checkout.php
• /finishorder.php
• /*login.php

just to name a few, then you have the sorting and compare pages, they have to be blocked or a mess unfolds.

• Disallow: /*sort=newest
• Disallow: /*sort=bestselling
• Disallow: /*?page=       ( Big duplicate page issue if you don't block this one with a wildcard, and cannot access your .htaccess file or the backend properly to noindex / nofollow )

Just to name a few, in my case, I only want the meat of the site to be indexed and rank for. Otherwise one client's site was ranking terms that more related to web development than the niche industry they lived in. Plus with a limited index budget, why would you want google or anyone else to crawl pages on your site with no SEO value towards your niche?

Unless you sold carts as in web developed carts for ecommerce sites you wouldn't want much of that indexed anyways, and even in that case, those pages aren't too useful for ranking. At least from what I've gathered in the niche industries.

What would be the negative aspects to sending customer's requests for a backlink in conjunction with asking how their experience with us was?

Backlinks are one of the toughest for our niche industry to acquire and this seems like one of the best angles to cover, since we have .edu , .mil , .gov , and many bigname companies making purchases from us.

Would if be wrong to offer a small 5% discount during their next purchase if they create a backlink with us? Or if we added a " Customer's we've served " section including their logo or text link?

Thank you!

I hope you're all having an awesome day / week / month!

No Problem,

Just a heads up in case you don't see where to look at your backlinks in webmaster tools:

Click on " Search Traffic " > " Links to Your Site " and enjoy!

Hope to see you on page 1 soon! Good Luck!

I've been disavowing urls for my current client for the past 4 months.

I 1st went through like you, but from various sources to get a broad overall picture.

Then I went through EACH AND EVERY SINGLE ONE, create a spreadsheet and add a comment to each listing, good, spam, needs more looking! This takes a few days if not more. But is very important, because your eyes are much better at seeing the spam ( just poor UI, many times if they use pagerank still its no good, just check for if this site would really help users )

Once you've gone through and done the above, it's best to start small, group or order your results from the spam section into worst offenders to least spammy, start disavowing about 25 to 50 link chunks, don't forget if you get a lot of backlinks from a spam domain, to disavow the backlinks shown and the domain like this ( domain:site.com )

You'll want to disavow in chunks so you know whats helping and what is hurting, so if you disavow a chunk and your site starts hurting, you can quickly see what it is and remove them from the disavow file and re-upload it.

I've so far removed most directories, unless I see something that is different or that can help users, mainly you want to make sure humans are editing link submissions and that there aren't any pay to rank schemes on it.

Remove all blog / article comments, they aren't good for you, but if you want to keep some, remove all keyword rich anchor text links, this goes for EVERY follow backlink you have that is a keyword rich anchor text. Google hates these, and will cause you problems later on if you don't at least categorize them and key track.

By doing the above, I've seen my client's backlink rank on ahrefs.com climb from 15,000,000 to now 9,400,000, that's in the last 4 months. Which I'm pretty happy about, just the bigger kicker is trying to get good quality backlinks, in my niche, people don't really operate like most other niches, this niche isn't just boring, it's counter-intuitive to what most SEO backlink processes are.

I hope this has helped, and please, ASK QUESTIONS! only way to learn!

As Eric has mentioned above, you really should be doing backlink audits every month or every other month just to keep your site healthy and free from possible penalties.

Using a spreadsheet, entering in all backlink urls, fill in all other data you can find on them, DA, PA, backlink profile themselves, are they a directory, comment spam or are they even relevant to your site, or are they using many exact match keyword anchor texts and especially check if the backlink is still active, does it have a php error and so forth.

Fill out the spreadsheet to the best of your ability and go through and remove site's that are considered no good.

Be careful using disavow tool, google starts working on it once you upload it, if you made a mistake you can reupload the disavow file with updated changes. Make sure you have a copy of all disavow files you send to google, since it will help you very much in the future.

I'd love some help in this department.

As most ideas I've read seem completely unrelated or unreasonable for a very niche industry, basically to the point I've been completely dumbfounded as to how to approach this.

Guest blogging is extremely hard to do in this industry where there aren't many blogs if any that would even be worth the effort to find them, since normal methods turn up little leads.

We have our manufacturers linking back, but other than that and the trickle we get from directory scrapers and links to actual content, backlinks for niche industries seem like a uphill battle.

Even the blogs here at moz and elsewhere on niche industry backlink building haven't really helped, due to the nature of what is being sold and the parent industry in general consisting of older than millennials and don't use the internet in a way that would assist us in this process.

In some senses seems we could acquire backlinks easier if we sold black eyes or bad luck.

Any advice in this case?

Yes there is, you'll need to do a site crawl.

To do this you'll go to the top menu bar, click on Moz Pro > site audit

Then enter your site url and hit crawl this url, you'll get a report after a bit that will go into detail what is going on in terms of errors and warnings that need fixing.

You can also doublecheck these by using another SEO checking software or site, like woorank or SEMrush site audit.

Hope this helps, also if you're site is under 500 pages, download screaming frog ( it's a web crawler ) it has a limit of 500 pages, for the free version, but can still give great insight as to what's going on with your domain.

Well, the thing is, disavowing a backlink only does one thing, it makes the backlink a nofollow in Google's eyes. And this process will take anywhere from about a week to 3 months or more, that's basically sticking to Googles MO and the numbers are from a few articles from Search engine journal and elsewhere.

As far as MOZ / AHREFS they will differ, moz most likely won't have all your backlinks in the 1st place, so you won't be able to even know due to how they index. And Ahrefs will have about 80% or so of your links maybe more or less, so it too isn't the best, but it's a good idea and they even have a rank based on your backlink profile and how healthy it is, the lower the better.

If you're referring to broken or removed backlinks that happen naturally, that's just a matter of when they're crawled. Don't expect any haste unless you're a fortune 2,000 company, unfortunately.

Just keep an eye on your keyword rankings, as when you improve your backlink profile, your rankings will improve depending the amount of link juice you regained or lost, it's like ratios, too many bad backlinks does seem to affect the backlink's health and thus pruning can be beneficial..

Hello there,

I'm sure this can be extremely frustrating, especially after all the work you done for it.

Couple things to check off the list:

• Do you have a www and non www version of your site in webmaster tools, even if you decided on the website default being the non www, it's good to have all variations of your web property so you can monitor them.
• Please don't hit me but, are all www urls being redirected, so your older backlinks with the www are leading to your non www pages?
• Are there other on-page SEO issues that could be preventing the site's indexing / crawling as it should be?
• Does the site have any penalties, manual or algorithmic?
• Have you used a keyword rank checker to see where they are ranking? If using only moz's keyword rank checker, they only check up to rank 50, ahref.com only checks to 100 but other tools can go further, serpfox was one I played with, knowing the rank despite how bad it is, can help determine whats going on.
• Also doublecheck that either htaccess or robots.txt are not blocking pages

While this is in no way a complete checklist for figuring your issue out, it's a shot in the dark, since I don't even know what your website is and keywords are. I am sure others can help weigh in as well with other issues to look at, but this should be at the very least a place to start.

I'll respond to this in private, but we can continue this here so it can benefit others.

I'd have to 3rd the wordpress suggestion, if you had a big site with lots of pages and a involved user portal then Drupal would be the goto suggestion. But if it's a smaller site, no need to deal with the issues of a huge site if you don't need to.

Joomla isn't bad, and can be managed but unless you're a webdev you'll want access to info and scripts and by far the most popular choice is wordpress.

Just make sure you do a thorough product audit so you can reduce the overall amount of product before you put them online, this will help SEO drastically, since you'll have less pages that users would draw attention to that don't work too well.

I actually just talked with BBB.org ( Greater Baltimore Area ) about this backlink issues, since we found a few competitors who had " FOLLOW " backlinks while we did not, all this while we paid their yearly subscription. After asking why this was, the BBB.org ( Greater Baltimore Area ) Informed us that this practice of follow links for backlinks was going bye bye.

**They told us that all follow backlinks will be changed to NOFOLLOW links shortly.  **

As for the when the listings would be changed, that was answered " Whenever the webadmins of that area get to it ". So seems they were giving one group of customers one treatment while giving another the run around.

I don't think BBB.org will be around much longer after this major tidbit is implemented, since the overall site doesn't do much more than act as a verified source and google and plenty of others do this for free.

Spend your money on something with a better ROI, in my opinion.

Google has said you can disavow anytime, disavowing is only telling google that you want these backlinks to be nofollow and not pass any linkjuice so they wont help or harm you.

You don't need to be penalized to use the disavow tool, you merely need to have backlinks or domains to add to the disavow file.

It's common for SEOs to disavow urls / domains monthly, however most will tell you to do an audit yearly and keep up on new backlinks as they come in.

I've used the disavow tool but before I did, I did about a few weeks research into what it means to disavow and why one would disavow as well as how to properly disavow. No where did I read you only use the disavow tool if you have a penalty, especially since if you were hit by penguin you wouldn't really know, so Google had to leave the door open on that one.

The industry I have to be secretive about, but will say its a distribution company for commercial equipment that every commercial building needs.

That was the only part I wanted to be private, not the answers related. The rest of the conversation will be here.

I sometimes wonder if Domain Authority takes much time to increase, I've watched a Brandnew site, go from 1 to 9 in about 3 to 4 months, with 47 pages and only 8 backlinks most from a SEO site.

Seems they found a magic solution, since in that same time, I've seen myself and other sites, add content, increase backlinks but since we lost a backlink or two, and went through the reindexing, we've lost points to our DA, mind you my client's site and their competitors in question are 650+ pages including product pages.

I'm starting to wonder if the eCommerce stores in general are being hurt because of the product pages, instead of helped.

Since why would a site with 47 pages be more authoritative on a subject while other sites include actual help content and products that further the keyword in question.

I think the backlinks to that site in question bug me the most, since most are from an SEO site with a 30 DA, but is still enough to rank for the keyword we are trying for in a huge jump ahead of us. Some of this doesn't seem to follow rhyme or reason.

Seems less is more.

Also I'd like to add, your homepage should be ranking for what your overall site / service does, not the main things it sells nor the main service. Kinda like a very general keyword usage there, since you want more control over how these keywords rank in SERPs.

I just got done redesigning a client's site that had most of it's keywords ( main ones included ) ranking the homepage for those keywords, which was kinda nightmarish, since customers were hurting our overall CPC campaign and our organic results since they were bouncing so much. A homepage isn't going to be the info hotspot a user wants when they search for a keyword, since it normally is the spot you do brief eye catching highlights of items or services. Think of the homepage more like clickbait.

When you have subpages that specialize on keywords, you have a better chance to give the user what they wanted when finding your page in SERPs which will improve overall rankings and if you advertise, can help lower costs and improve quality scores.

You basically answered your own question just didn't realize it, using example.com/key-word-example should be a subpage targeting a main keyword you want to rank for. That way you'll be able to focus on content for that keyword easier, without worrying about other factors that a homepage needs.

Hope this wasn't TL:DR

You're very welcome, glad this helped.

As a web developer and SEO I understand far too often that the two worlds are not in constant communication about many of the things that matter. As well aren't always up to par with latest knowledge from each opposing fields.

This far too often leads to those moments where things happen.

Glad you monitored these and spoke up to seek answers, if not you, who else would have? That's always the scary part.

Thank you greatly for the effort and time,

All the ideas and suggestions can help, it's certainly a long game.

This should get us started for a bit, anything worth something takes time to complete.

Thank you again!

So far in my experiences, backlinks especially quality ones are a piece of the SEO golden ticket, closer to a full ticket you piece together, the closer to page 1 you get.

Funnier thing is, backlinks are also some of the hardest to achieve SEO wise, even more so in niche industries where even your competition ranking page 1 has blog comments as backlinks, I'm not ditching blog comments, however they really aren't providing much usefulness to your site's user's.

I'm willing to bet this domain is doing just enough SEO that when combined with the backlinks they have, means they get the SERP results they want.

If your SEO is on point, focus on a effective backlink campaign. It's still the closest thing SEOs have that works well for short game, long game is always content that even your high school teachers couldn't say wrong about.