Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Chris,

Link building can be very manual, particularly in the early days of a website and when you're trying to get going. Ultimately, you should be trying to come up with ways to make your website naturally link worthy so that you end up getting links which you didn't ask for.

This can come a few ways:

• Your product or service being genuinely useful to your target audience or within your industry so that people recommend it/reference it etc
• Creating content which genuinely answers questions and solves problems for your target audience
• Creating content which has some kind of an angle which encourages top tier sites or bloggers to links to it such as informative guides or statistics/data related to your industry

You may find it hard to get links to lots of your product or sales pages unless they are link worthy in themselves. So also try to focus on getting links to your content and then distributing the link equity from these pages to your key pages.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Christine,

As Alex said, this shouldn't be a problem. I'd just advise keeping things consistent where you can, if only from a maintenance/debugging perspective so that if something breaks, it's easier to diagnose.

You should also make sure that markup is consistent between mobile and desktop sites if you have separate sites or change content based on each one.

Cheers.

Paddy

That's a good question and I'd agree - I imagine that references to your website in published books online could be treated similarly to mentions across the web. Whether Google gives it any extra weight or not is unclear, but I'd agree that the implication is that a mention in a published book could carry some weight.

Hi there,

I'd suggest a few things:

1. If you have old analytics data or log file data to show you which content performed best when the site was last live, take a look at that and prioritise restoring and updating the content which worked well previously.

2. Go through the content and update with fresh information, data, images, links etc to give everything a freshen up. Don't worry if content is still relevant and evergreen, but just do some checks to make sure.

3. Once you've updated the content and you're happy with it, generate some new XML sitemaps and submit to Google Search Console to prompt Google to crawl the pages again and get them into the index.

4. In addition, perhaps submit the homepage and a few key pages to Google Search Console for crawling and indexing.

5. Once the pages are indexed, keep an eye on Search Console to see how pages are performing and use this data to update the most popular pages.

6. In terms of links, if you can restore any valuable lost ones by reaching back out to the websites, letting them know that the site has relaunched and seeing if they can restore the links, that may give it a nudge too.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

It's not the nicest task in the world, but unfortunately, it's best to manually review websites before you add them to a disavow file. You can use metrics such as Moz spam score to filter them and start with the worst score which may speed up the process a bit. You could also try and prioritise multiple URLs that are from the same domain. For example, if you have 50 URLs linking to you from one domain which looks suspect, you probably only need to review a few of those URLs in order to understand the quality/type of link they are and take action.

I'd avoid putting a hard rule in place such as disavowing anything below a certain metric score. You may accidentally disavow links which are perfectly fine.

There is also some debate as to the impact that the disavow tool has unless you have a manual or algorithmic penalty in place. If you don't see any evidence of a penalty, my advice would be to only disavow links which are clearly low quality/spammy.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

There is a lot more to this question which probably goes outside of Q&A, but here are a few points on the links that you've shared:

• The blog posts don't appear to be written by real authors, they appear to be blogs that are made just to link to Results Plan, so while they may pass some link equity, I'm not sure that they are going to be seen by Google as high quality
• The anchor text used on all links is clearly keyword driven. This in itself isn't necessarily a big problem (the whole link profile would need looking at to assess that) but again, it implies that the blogs are built just for link building purposes
• The blogs don't appear to be getting much engagement such as social shares and comments which indicates that they may not get a lot of traffic, so you're also unlikely to get real traffic clicking through to the website

Overall, as I said, more work would be needed to make a full assessment, but looking at these sample links, I'm not sure I'd be recommending building lots of links like this.

Hope that helps.

Paddy

Hi there,

I'd agree with the other replies in the thread in that these links are likely to be risky. They may well work, but they're not the kind of links that Google necessarily value, so the amount of time they work for could be pretty limited.

Reading the description of the ad, it sounds like they are submitting to the business directory section of UK newspapers which is actually not a bad tactic. But paying someone to do it for you without knowing fully what you'll get in return is where the risk lies really.

More broadly, I think that buying links is always going to be risky and therefore moves it into the grey hat area of tactics. It can still work and in some niches, it's almost necessary, but I still wouldn't advise it for most people.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

In summary, you won't be penalised by Google for this. They tend to penalise sites for manipulative techniques and having links from websites in different locations isn't really a problem. The main thing to worry about is that the links you do get are good quality and relevant.

As long as you focus on that, you will be fine

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

I'm afraid that I'm not too familiar with "Hoth" link building so I can't answer that directly. Regarding subdomains though, from a technical perspective, they are different websites and therefore are capable of passing link equity in the same way that any other website could. It really comes down to the quality and relevance of the subdomain.

I'd recommend looking at them in the same way you would any other link and assess them for quality. The one thing to maybe flag is when you have lots of subdomains which are on the same root domain. There is a chance that these may not pass as much value but again, it comes down to why they are there and the quality of them.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the update.

The screenshot showing the 301 is correct - all good there.

Regarding the sitemap, sorry I should have been clearer on this - can you exclude that from the redirects so that when Google crawl it, they don't get redirected and instead find all of the URLs from the old site?

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Eric,

I'd set up a profile for whichever version of the URLs 301 to your main site. So if the https version redirects, then use that one.

I don't think you need to submit every single URL, I'd recommend submitting a handful of the main ones (in terms of traffic or site architecture) and asking Google to also crawl all links on the page.

On the sitemap, you'd enter the URLs that have redirects in place which is your old site. In your example, this would be sites B,C and D which all need their own Search Consoles + XML sitemaps for the pages on those sites with redirects.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the question.

Are you able to register each of the duplicate sites with Google Search Console? If so, you could do that and then use the Fetch as Google feature which then lets you submit pages to the Google index. So you could enter the URL of a page that is now redirected and ask Google to recrawl it.

You could also setup sitemaps for the duplicate sites and submit those to try and prompt Google to recrawl them.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

As others have mentioned, a bit more detail on what you're trying to do would be good, but assuming that you mean that Google isn't indexing your forum and social share links, there isn't a whole lot you can do about that. There are tools available that can speed up the process, but I don't think they're worth the effort because good quality links will be found and indexed by Google quickly anyway. Even if it takes them a bit longer, this won't cause rankings to drop.

With that said, if you're using any automated tools to build forum or social sharing links, these aren't likely to be great links anyway and aren't the kind that you should be focusing on. That may not be the case here, but I wanted to mention it just in case.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for the question.

Here are a few couple of sources of great content / great campaigns that I usually refer to:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z2CSidq-6fxOY1YJLu-MY-DdTqWKiSL4gsuSGVC42r0/edit (curated by Rand)

https://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/showcase?award=2017&pcategory=winner&type=awards - very data led but naturally evergreen because you can refresh the data when new sets come out

Hopefully that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

As you may have noticed, you have two answered from Nigel and Chris which conflict a little. So I'll do my best to help!

I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle in that in an ideal world, links that aren't quite 100% on topic would still help you, but the reality is that there is probably at least some thought given by Google as to the relevance of the link. In my experience, it comes down to the overall link profile and the quality/relevance of it rather than individual links. Websites are linked to 24/7 from random websites on all sorts of topics, so I don't think it would necessarily hurt you.

For me, it comes down to three things that you should keep in mind:

1. As Nigel said, the topics aren't a million miles away from each other, so it's very unlikely that building links related to this topic are going to hurt you
2. Your main focus should be on the quality of the links, if you're worried about the quality and the relevance, then it may be worth staying away from them
3. I'd recommend a dual approach whereby you use the great history of the company in this topic to get links, but also start looking at ways you can build links for the new era of the company too.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

As others have said, buying links is against Google Webmaster Guidelines and if they find you doing it, it can lead to a penalty and depending on how bad the problem is, the penalty can range from losing a bit of traffic to you not appearing for your own brand name.

I won't lie - buying links can still work and I see websites doing it all the time. But you need to be aware of the risks if you're going down that route and if you're working with a business that relies on traffic from Google in order to survive, the consequences can be severe.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Leana,

Thanks for the question.

If you're not updating or maintaining the small shop subdomain anymore, it would make sense to move all of those products/content over to the main domain and then 301 redirect all of the old pages to the appropriate new ones on the main domain. This feels like the best long-term approach given that you will be focusing your efforts on the main shop.

This can carry some risk though - migrating URLs and content can confuse search engines and you can sometimes see a temporary drop in traffic even if the migration is perfect.

I'd suggest testing the move first and move over a few products from the subdomain to the main domain, make sure you're comfortable with the process and then do more after that if it all goes well.

This should help consolidate everything (including link signals) into the main domain and help long term.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Amit,

To echo what Nathan has asked, if you could provide more information on what you mean by bad links, that would be helpful and we can provide a better answer.

In terms of generating more comments, it really comes down to two things:

1. Writing the kind of content which provokes questions and conversation - this comes down to your writing style and ability to write well. This isn't easy to get right straight away and can take time, but ultimately matters the most because if your content isn't engaging, people will be less likely to comment. You could also leave the post a bit open-ended and ask reader to contribute their opinions. If you look at some of Rand's whiteboard Fridays, such as this one, you'll see he leaves a comment first to provoke conversation.

2. Your audience and the size of the audience - many people will often read and enjoy a blog post, but may not feel compelled to comment. This is just how many people are, so to get more comments, you need to build up your audience and increase the number of people reading your content. There is no shortcut to this either, but comes down to building up good SEO, social followings and content.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

I wouldn't worry as much about DA/PA as I would the relevance and "human" quality of a link. DA can be a great indicator of the authority of a domain, but remember that it's just one metric. If you are working through large lists of links, then filtering from highest DA to lowest can help you prioritise, but I wouldn't necessarily rule out links below a certain number.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for your question.

You are right in trying to make sure that your most important pages are linked to internally as much as possible. It's a signal to Google that the page is important plus your internal PageRank will be able to flow to key pages and give them a chance to rank. This kind of technique has been described as PageRank sculpting in the past, but it's not too helpful to think of it like that because none of us know what the PageRank of a given page is. Instead, look at what pages a user would want to find easily and the ones that are important to your business, then make these prominent in your navigation.

Cross-linking from blog posts or other pages of content can also be beneficial, but isn't particularly scalable. So by all means do it where it makes sense, but I wouldn't rely on this as the sole way to link internally to important pages.

I hope that helps!

Paddy