How do I know if a Backlink will help or hurt?
 

Hey GFY

A lot of my link trading and link buying opportunities are with wordpress sites which, to my eyes, seem pretty shady. It ranges from stuff like this, to slightly better but still low-effort wordpress sites like this. The first one is a trade I was offered on linkspun, and the second is asking $15 for a blog post.

I'm just not confident that these sorts of websites will always be looked at favorably by google. I work hard to make sure that the sites I own are of good quality, so I don't really want to be trading with sites like this. It sort of leaves a bad taste in my mouth. However, a lot of them have better backlink profiles than my own sites, so maybe its to my benefit? I think I have quality, SEO-optimized affiliate sites, but without good back link profiles they will just sit on the internet looking pretty.

Every once in a while I'm able to work out a good trade with a legit website, but these opportunities are rare. It seems like most adult webmasters are paying for their links, and truly quality sites aren't likely to care about reciprocal links or guest posts.

I guess to sum up: Should I trade links with lots of crappy small sites, go for the rare legit opportunities with better sites, or pay $100-$1000 on the higher class of paid backlinks? How does google feel about the endless horde of low-effort adult wordpress sites?

Thanks for reading :winkwink:

I'm also very interested if Linkspun exchanges can help or harm.

Whenever I'm looking at a trade, I check a couple things.

on google do a site:url.com to see how many pages G has included in it's database. If there are very few pages, or none, that's a sign there may be a penalty for something and may want to stay away from.

Then I check the DA/PA. Moz has a nice little chrome plugin to do that when you hit the page.

Majestic also has a chrome plugin to let you see the backlink summary for free, or if you have a membership can see a lot of the most needed info from the browser bar.

Then of course you want to look and see where your link will end up at, and how many more offlinks there are on that site.

With LS there are a ton of trades to be had, you just have to watch out for the really spammy ones and stay away from them. I noticed that a lot of the traders there run the footer/blogroll trade links all the way thru their sites, which makes them look spammy to G, so best to stay away from them also. If you find one of those that looks good otherwise, message them and ask for a link inside one of their posts which would then just show up on that one page.

Even lower quality sites can offer a spot to change up the "anchor text" for your link. I also find a number of blogs on LS which have comments turned on and many of them don't monitor comments so you can use it to get free links from comments. Even if they are no-follow, G likes to see a mix of follow/no-follow in your backlink profile to make it look less spammy :)

Good luck :thumbsup

This is great response full of actionable advice. I really appreciate you taking the time - thanks!

Additional to MOZ check out semrush.com too for an overview of the backlinks etc. The limited reports are free.

There are a ton of great chrome plugins to help weed out linking partners.

SEMRush Rank
Open in SEMRush
SEOquake
Alexa Traffic Rank

You just have to find the one's you like and not over do it, otherwise your page load time starts to drag to a crawl :1orglaugh

Nice post, but what the hell is "LS"? :1orglaugh

Sorry :) LS is LinkSpun.com. The OP was talking about linkspun where he got a trade, so I assumed everyone would pick up on that, my bad :pimp

My two main considerations these days are how much organic traffic the site gets and whether it's relevant, or has a relevant section on the site where my link would appear. I only buy links from sites that get at least 5k uniques/mo from Google, bonus points if the organic traffic comes from target country. Forget old-school metrics like DA/PA, TF/CF. It's all about organic traffic and relevancy. I'd rather get a link from a DA 10 that gets 6k uniques/mo from Google than a DA 40 with no organic traffic.

What tools do you use to see how traffic google is sending that site each month? I've tried similar and ahrefs, but the numbers they have for my sites are off, so I can't say with any certainty that they would be on target for anyone else.

But good points on being relevant to your site, that is really key to make sure your trading with pages in the same niche, or at least a niche that is similar to yours!

Combo of Ahrefs and SEMRush. I also manually check to see if the site in question ranks for the keywords the tools claim it does. When it does and meets all other criteria, sold.

2 things,

1: If bad links could hurt you, negative SEO would be incredibly effective. Got the #2 spot for your keyword and want to derank #1? Spam him with the worst GSA links you can find. Google obviously doesn't want to allow that, so I strongly believe bad links can't hurt you, they just don't help.

2: both the wordpress sites you linked to could be decent links, they both appear to have unique copy. As long as your link appeared in contextual copy you could pump it up with some social signals and even GSA and it could help

Can I ask in what way you find the estimates to be off? Personally I find that ahrefs underestimates my organic traffic by about 10%. I'm curious to know how accurate those numbers are for others.

Good point, bad links are probably less of an issue than many perceive them to be. But the issue he was talking about was buying or trading for links, so no reason to buy or trade with links that aren't going to help you out!

The first site that was a LS trade, seems to be ok. Has a 25/24 pa/da 10/14 tf/cf and similar is showing 80% SE traffic as inbound, with kw of cutediana nude, beach massage stranger, mature wife hotel, exhibitionist chat, granny big tits nude in forrest stockings. So if those match up with your site's niche, your good to go on a trade. Make sure he gives you a link in a post, and not on the blogroll that shows up on every page of the blog!

The second site on the other hand, doesn't have any traffic that I can see, no alexa rating, 17/25 pa/da 4/7 for tf/cf with only 20 domains giving backlinks. I'd say you could find better sites to buy blog posts from. :2 cents:



I don't have a login to ahrefs atm so I'm not sure what the current figures say, but last time I looked, around April 2018 they were +- 25% on some of our bigger sites vs what GA has listed. So not a huge amount off, but still it makes you wonder :1orglaugh

The first site is better for sure but if I could get a link from the second for cheap enough I'd definitely go for it. I'd pump up the link URL with some social and GSA links

Google is so addicted to copy it's ridiculous. If a link appears in unique contextual copy I don't care where it's from, you can pump it up with 2nd/3rd tier links and it'll help

Fuck that's complicated :2 cents: