Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Why These Backlinks Don't Count?

Posted by Anonymous on 2/22/2011 at 5:18 PM ET 125 Points
We are looking for insight on backlinks. We recently launched our redesigned website and we've been working on improving our SEO rankings by optimizing our on-page content and building backlinks.

One of the things we have done is extensively blogging on various topics and linking to articles we have published (articles residing on our website). However, those blog links don't seem to count when we check in Alexa and the inbound links from the SEO Toolbar. Does anyone have any idea why that would be the case? Any input on how we can utilize our blog for building backlinks to our website?

Thanks a lot for any advice!
To continue reading this question and the solution, sign up ... it's free!
SUBSCRIBE
Or, SIGN IN

RESPONSES

  • Posted by excellira on 2/22/2011 at 5:44 PM Member
    The links aren't inbound links. They're internal links. Internal links are very helpful at flowing internal PageRank and getting pages found. However, having external links is important.

    People link to useful pages. If you blog valuable content and ping out and push to social media channels and friends you should gain some traction on the linkage front.
  • Posted by excellira on 2/24/2011 at 10:27 AM Accepted
    The blogger piece is an important bit of information.

    PageRank (PR) is a calculation of the number and quality of backlinks (incoming links from third-party web pages pointing to your web page(s)). There are a number of filters in place that remove or diminish the value of backlinks but that is another topic.

    In order to pass PR you need to have PR. In other words, if your blogger blog post has zero PR, there is nothing to pass. You'd need to generate links and PR first (ideally through engaging content and social interaction, etc.).

    It does not matter if the blog is on blogger, a subdomain or a subfolder of the main site. If you are passing links, you are passing links. The main domain isn't better or worse off.

    However, dvogel brings up a good point. Readers and backlinks are like equity. Do you want to invest resources in a platform that isn't portable. Meaning, if you decide to move your blog, all your links are gone. I suppose a meta redirect is possible, but it's still not a platform you control. There are advantages to the platform such as no cost of entry, simplicity, good Google crawling, etc. but I think you probably get my point.
  • Posted on 2/26/2011 at 10:33 AM Accepted
    Just wanted to add my .02 on this question . My main contribution to this discussion is that a blog on a subfolder on your site is better than on a subdomain and is significantly better than an external blog. This is because you should treat your blog as a way to communicate your competence and relevancy and having it on a subfolder builds depth and authority for your site if done correctly. The way to use a blog for link building is to create great content that would compel people to naturally link back to your site because they found the information useful and relevant enough. Of course great content is not magically found on the web , you have to seed your articles socially among other things and the beauty of a blog is syndication . Syndicating your "quality content" thru rss or atom feeds is a great way of communicating your content. Do not discount the power of internal linking as well, many people think that internal linking is not as important as external links I will have to disagree with them and tell you now that having an internal linking strategy is crucial to SEO for so many reasons.
    There are other great benefits of having a blog so please do more research on this .

    There is a WP plugin I think that will port your content from blogger.

    Goodluck and I hope this helps you out.
BACK TO TOP

Post a Comment

Related Discussions

Community Info

Top 25 Experts
(SEO/SEM)