Links

[Petnanny]

I know how important links are and must admit that I have done very little link building for some time now. This I understand, can be relevant to my website slipping slightly in google.

Just wanted to ask all you SEO people out there, do links on forums and websites such as vivastreet have any bearing? In other words if all my forum posts were deleted (perish the thought, since I keep you lot busy ), along with my vivastreet and adzooks, would it affect our google rank?

Also, where else can I go for further links please?

[RedEvo]

The quality of links plays its part - potentially a big part - so links that are easy to get such as forum footer links may only have a small impact on your site.

Generally the harder a link is to get and especially links that depend on the quality of your content then the more impact they can have. Of course none of this is an exact science.

d

[LOS Design UK]

Just about what I was gonna add Dave.

Simple logic and one I try to follow is that if it is easy to get, how much is it worth?

Work for it and it may well carry more weight than you think....

[Petnanny]

My links are mostly pet related so it does narrow your options.

[Find Accountants]

Just out of curiosity, what would you class as a hard to get link?

[RedEvo]

Links based on merit, the quality of your content, from other trusted resources. As opposed to forum sig spam etc.

d

[theonlything]

The simple answer would be: yes, if you lost all those links then you would slip in the Google rankings. How much? Who knows..

It's also worth noting a few things that I have read and have found from my own experience:

Getting a lot of links from the same place (that is, the same domain or IP address) does not boost your Google rankings all that much. Getting a few hundred links from a few hundred different domains and IPs is better than millions from the same one.

Also, you should really be checking if your links are dofollow - this is easy to do with a firefox plugin or with SEO Quake (both free). Dofollow links are literally 'followed' through by Google's bots when they crawl a site, whereas nofollow links have told the bots not to even bother looking at the target.

And another thing - I have simply not found that links which are relevant to my area have a bigger impact than irrelevant links.

With respect to PR etc, if your link comes from a site which has high PR (page rank) and is seen as a high authority site (i.e. it gets traffic and is ranking well itself) then the general consensus is that that link is worth more. More often than not I've found that to be the case with my work too.

And lastly, apologies if I am stating something very obvious, but the more often you can get a link which has your desired anchor text, the better! E.g. if you wanted to rank for the keyphrase "organic dogfood" you would be best off trying to get as many links with that as your anchor text as you can.

Hope that helps!

I know how important links are and must admit that I have done very little link building for some time now. This I understand, can be relevant to my website slipping slightly in google.

Just wanted to ask all you SEO people out there, do links on forums and websites such as vivastreet have any bearing? In other words if all my forum posts were deleted (perish the thought, since I keep you lot busy ), along with my vivastreet and adzooks, would it affect our google rank?

Also, where else can I go for further links please?

[iblbuilder]

Yes if links are deleted then obviously it will effect the amount Google takes into account for ranking purposes.

It is also perfectly possible to build your own decent one way backlinks without paying an SEO firm ££hundreds.

[RedEvo]

Yes if links are deleted then obviously it will effect the amount Google takes into account for ranking purposes.

It is also perfectly possible to build your own decent one way backlinks without paying an SEO firm ££hundreds.

Also, it's possible to build a house without paying for expensive brick layers, simply learn to lay bricks. You can also stop paying expensive garage bills by learning to be a mechanic at night school. When you've finished that take a course in plumbing and you'll never have to pay to have a leak fixed ever again.

You can do anything yourself, just remember to calculate the opportunity cost

d

[Lingua21]

Hi Petnanny,

A lot of sound advice has been given on this thread already, but in direct answer to you question Petnanny, Vivastreet links to your site can reap rewards provided that you optimise your adverts as you would do normally for your own web pages. Vivastreet adverts themselves can get Googled highly pretty quicky especially at local level.

Similar sites to go for are fridayad, locanto, gumtree, adoos, olx, ukfreeads, classifieds.aol, local.thesun, franglo and craigslist.

As far as forums are concerned, whether you get Google backlinks or not might for example depend on the credibility, type and quality of the forum, the relevancy of the thread, your anchor text in your link, the number of links on the page etc. etc.

You will need to check in Google Webmaster Tools to see all of your Google backlinks. The link command only shows a percentage.

From my own personal experience, on a forum such as this one, provided for example that the threads that you post to have reasonable appropriate content etc., then on average you might expect about 10% of your posts being rewared with Google backlinks.

Above all, put your eggs in as many baskets as possible and concentrate mainly on exceptional relevent content on your own website that others will want to link to naturally.

I hope this helps.

Mike Dove

P.S. Another good thing about this forum is that it is a co.uk site which helps if you want to rank in Google's UK pages.