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Hi there,

Gaston's reply below is very helpful so I don't have too much to add apart from a couple of points.

Personally, I think I'd disavow these links a bit at a time - perhaps submit a few of them to start off with and make sure there are no negative effects, then add more over time. Right now, no one really knows how Google handles disavow because on one hand, Google say they handle things automatically, but on the other hand they still provide the tool for us to use...

1. If you don't disavow now, just make sure you keep a note of all of these kinds of links (and watch for new ones in the future) and if you do experience any penalty problems, you have a list ready to go to submit.

2. If you do disavow now, take your time to get the list right and make sure you only disavow links which are purely manipulative and / or look spammy. If you haven't seen any traffic or penalty problems, you want to be extra careful when using disavow. At the same time, if links are clearly spammy, they're unlikely to help long-term anyway, so disavowing them may not hurt at all.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

As others have said, submitting to good quality directories is fine and won't cause you any problems. Try to focus on ones which have value to your business such as good local coverage or are focused on your particular niche/industry. Also put plenty of effort into the listing itself to provide as much info as possible to make your listing good quality.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Hampus,

Thanks for the question!

If I were to choose, I'd prefer this option:

https://www.granngarden.se/husdjur/hund/c/**hundfoder**

Mainly because, like you, I prefer shorter/cleaner URLs and am not a fan of repeating the same words. I don't think there will be a negative SEO impact of removing one of the category name words because the repetition is unlikely to be helping that much right now. If there was a valid reason to have it repeated, then my view may be different. But that doesn't sound like the case so I'd say to go with the shorter URL.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

It sounds like this wouldn't be an issue (see my reply below) but if Heinrich says different, I'll reply again

Hi Heinrich,

Thanks for the question.

If I've understood correctly, you're not talking about building links, you're talking about recording where someone comes from when they enter your website? Much in the same way that Google Analytics does, but using your own scripts?

If that's correct, then there is nothing to worry about from a Google Penalty perspective. The only thing to be aware of is whether you're also recording personally identifiable information about the person that clicks through, which is a whole other area.

If I've misunderstood, please let me know and I can help further

Cheers!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question!

As Nigel said, it is a risky tactic if you're doing this kind of thing at scale, so I'd definitely echo what he said about being careful. There are legitimate ways of linking multiple sites that you own together - publishers will often link all of their magazine sites together - but the way you've described it doesn't fit with this.

It may well work for a short period, but if it's clearly been done for SEO purposes then it will most likely catch up with you at some point!

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

It can be a challenge to build links to an ecommerce website, particularly if you're selling products which are widely available and not very link-worthy in their own right. The guide suggested by Rayflexgroup by Backlinko is certainly a good starting point, as well as a few others:

https://moz.com/blog/building-deep-links-into-ecommerce-pages - it's a few years old but worth seeing if any of the tactics are relevant for you at the moment.

https://moz.com/blog/creative-link-building-for-ecommerce-sites

https://geoffkenyon.com/ecommerce/link-building/

A few other things I'd suggest:

1. Look wider than just your products to look at your audience and what their issues, problems or concerns are. Then create content around those and look to build links into these. This takes time and you need to put a lot of effort in, but essentially you need to "surround" all of your products and categories with genuinely useful content which is as good as it can possibly be. You won't "go viral" with this kind of content but it will have the ability to pick up links over time.

2. Depending on your niche, spoof products can work well. A few examples are here and while these were not link building plays, they certainly generated links and attention.

3. Also look at the people at your company and their story - do you have a founder or CEO who is open to talking to business press or websites about business growth or retail trends? This can work well and get links from the kinds of sites that your competitors may not think of.

I hope that helps!

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

It's almost an impossible one to answer exactly because no one truly knows what goes on behind the scenes at Google. But we can assume that for an average site, Google probably discovers new links pretty quickly and you can check this by seeing if the page where the link is located is indexed and cached.

In terms of then that link "counting" - it's hard to say but from experience of working on various link building campaigns, we typically see improvements between 1-2 months after the first links went live. BUT there are some caveats to point out:

• I've worked on campaigns where great links haven't had any effect at all because of some other underlying issue such as a penalty or technical issue.
• One-off link campaigns with no consistency don't always have an effect in the long term.
• The best campaigns I've worked on have generated links over the course of many months

I hope that helps a bit - sorry that I can't give an exact answer but can only speak from experience.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question. Can I just check something regarding this bit from your question:

"My company currently owns five different websites and every day we download a list of for Google crawl errors.I then crawl the downloaded list with screaming frog to double check the redirects to make sure the pages are not 404s."

I'm a bit confused because you say you download a list of crawl errors, which would be 404s, but you then crawl them to make sure they're not 404s?

Could you clarify this bit?

Thanks!

Paddy

Hi there,

If you're seeing the links reporting in a tool search as Open Site Explorer or Majestic, it could be that they crawled the link and since then, it has been removed. So I'd always trust looking at the site itself. Also make sure you check the Google cache of the page to see if the link is there somewhere.

If you can't find the link, I wouldn't worry about the disavow file, but keep a note of the sites that you're concerned about just in case you do need to disavow in the future for some reason.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Zach,

Just to quickly add to what Nicholas has said, I have seen instances where links to a site via hotlinked images can cause ranking problems. It sounds like you're on top of it with the disavow file, so just keep an eye on things and update that as you find new links.

If you've been hit by the Fred update, that does seem like something different, but again it sounds like you're doing the right things that would help with SEO anyway. It could be worth comparing your site and it's features to other sites that seem to have been affected and see if you can spot any similarities. Here is a list from Search Engine Roundtable.

Cheers.

Paddy

I'm not sure how many redirects you're doing, but generally, they're not a problem if you're trying to redirect broken pages to new ones so that users get a better experience. A few things to bear in mind though which can cause problems:

• Avoid multiple redirect "hops" e.g. going from page A to page B to page C. Wherever you can, write the redirects so that they go directly to the new page which is the final destination for the user.
• Keep the redirects "one to one" - basically avoid redirecting lots and lots of pages to a single destination if you can.
• Redirect to the most relevant page that you can in terms of the topic of the pages e.g. redirect a page about blue widgets to a blue widgets page, not a red widgets page - if that's possible.
• Do a crawl of the redirects using a tool such as Screaming Frog in list mode to check them all and make sure you turn on "follow redirects" and check the "redirect chains" report it provides.

I hope that helps!

Hi there,

As a link building tactic, I think that what you're describing is perfectly fine and within Google guidelines as long as a few things are true:

• The resource you're linking to is genuinely valuable and high quality
• The pages you're getting links from a relevant, high quality and not just "made for SEOs"
• This type of link doesn't make up the bulk of your link profile - you should try to get links via other methods too and not just rely on this

Longer term, Google may get better at working out which of these types of links are lower quality, but I don't think they will ever put a blanket rule in place to mark them all as low quality - there are just too many that are genuinely useful and relevant.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

There isn't a definitive answer regarding the number of links that you should add. The way I'd suggest thinking about this is what would make sense for users - do they need to have links on every single page? Does it make sense for them to be able to click to different subdomains from anywhere or could you list them all on your homepage or another page?

It's pretty common practice to cross link between subdomains that are related to each other, but you do want to be careful not to do it if it doesn't make sense i.e. if you're doing it just for SEO benefit, it's worth considering if it's the right thing to do. It's also worth avoiding a focus on keyword driven anchor text, because that could definitely be seen as manipulative if you overdo it.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

I hate to say this, because it's not a great answer, but it really does depend on a bunch of things.

Generating links naturally i.e. links as a result of someone linking to you without you asking, is generally quite difficult unless you have a very, very good piece of content. But when this does happen, I've seen content pieces get anything from 10 - 10,000 links with the majority of them being natural. On the other hand, I've worked on content pieces where I've had to work really hard to get 10 links using outreach.

Sometimes, you work really hard and get nothing!

If you're just starting out on this path, you're unlikely to get links naturally from day 1 and will need to work hard to get links via outreach. But you should find that over time, it becomes easier and eventually you get to a point where you're not having to scrap for every single link. It isn't easy, but certainly possible.

I hope that helps a bit!

Paddy

Yes, if you could post some examples of the "unrelevant/unnatural links coming in Google Search" here or in a message, that will be helpful.

Hi Rachel,

Given that Trust Flow and Citation Flow are metrics calculated by Majestic SEO, it could be worth sending this to their team to see if a link like that could have affected them.

If you've seen a drop in rankings as well, it is definitely worth investigating further to see what factors could have contributed to this. I'd be surprised if a single link like this would lead to a drop in rankings across many of your clients. If you think this is the case though, it's worth trying to get the links removed to see if that helps. If you can't get it removed and you're sure that this is the cause, then it's worth disavowing the link.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Julie,

Sorry, I don't think I agree that Google ignores links from pages that have "links" in the title. That would mean they ignore this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/parents/links/

Which obviously wouldn't make sense.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Hunter,

There are a few things here that I should probably address before giving you my view on those links.

1. The expectations that were set by the agency in question

If they didn't tell you in advance that these were the types of links they were going after, then they haven't set expectations very well. If they did set expectations on the types of links they'd be targeting and these are very different to that, then they haven't done a good job on that front.

2. The processes they've used

Condensing outreach into a short time frame does seem a bit strange and doesn't allow for refinement at all. Link building can sometimes be hit and miss, so you need to allow time to adjust an approach if something isn't working or you, as the client, want to change something.

On these two alone, you probably have a right to feel aggrieved and haven't had the service you expected.

Having said that, there is a time and a place for these kind of links. They seem to be what's know as "resource" based links because the pages in question list lots of resources on them. I scanned through all of them and they all seem to link out to legitimate resources. I didn't check every single one, but if these were link farms, I'd expect to see links to random websites in a range of industries such as gambling or pharma. I also don't agree with Julie that Google ignore links on pages with "links" in the title, that would mean they ignore links like this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/parents/links/

Which is clearly a good, trusted domain.

The types of links that your agency has built for you aren't necessarily bad, but if this is the only activity that they're doing (and you're not doing anything else), then this can look a bit strange and you need to diversify your tactics a bit more.

In summary, I don't think it's as black and white as those links being low quality. They may be fine, it's more about the context they're being built in and what they're linking to. As well as the other links on the page.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Happy to help, but I have a few questions if that's ok.

1. How are you determining that you have unnatural and irrelevant links pointing at your website?

2. When you say "removed it Through Remove URLs option" - what do you mean? What are you using for this. It seems like you're referring to the remove URLs option in Google Search Console but you can only do that for URLs on your own website, not external links.

3. How have you cleared all spammy backlinks? Do you mean that you've had them removed from other websites?

If you could answer these, I can help further

Thanks!

Paddy