Links make the SEO world go round. Links from high traffic, high Google value sites are the most important. Publishers seek to take advantage of this by building websites that appear to be more valuable than they actually are.
Ahrefs.com is a great tool for checking the value of a site, but to the novice user… Ahrefs.com can actually make a junk site seem fine.
Eg
Ahrefs says “DR is 60, this is a site we rank in the top 300,000 sites”
What might this mean?
- This site is spamming its backlinks, using junk Blogspot links. These are worthless, but they bulk up backlink score and fool our algorithm.
- This site was once an expired domain name, with lots of links. The links are worthless, but we still count them towards DR.
- The website of this site, might be pointing links from their own network of sites to bulk at DR. We can see the links are coming from sites on one IP, but we ignore that.
- This site has other sites permanently redirected to it. Those sites we busted for buying and selling links, and have no value. We don’t demonstrate this lack of value in our scores for the site
So what to do?
1. Check out the waybackmachine. Did the site use to look radically different, with different content? This is probably a junk site in Google’s eyes. Probably, an expired domain.
2. Are the majority of backlinks to the site from Blogspot? Probably, this is a junk site.
3. Are there pages of other sites, redirecting to pages on this site? Probably, this is a junk site. Probably, the webmaster of those sites is doing this, to fool you into thinking this site has rankings and traffic. Later, once they have sold links from the site, these redirections will be removed.
Link building has never been trickier. Buying links.. has never been more fraught with danger. Not only is it a banned SEO tactic… the reality is many cases you are looking at a penalty for both buying the links, and no value anyway from the links you bought.
Better to just ask for links, or build things into your website that give people a reason to link to it.
