Tag: Rankings

Do High DA Backlinks From Blog Comments Help Rankings?

If you have ever left a comment on NeilPatel.com, you’ll notice that there is no URL field.

Why?

Well, a few years ago, blog commenting exploded. I was literally getting thousands of spam comments a day from people just leaving a comment for the purpose of link building instead of providing value to the community.

Sure, there are spam plugins like Akismet, but it doesn’t catch everything.

Now, most blog comments contain the nofollow attribute in which they tell Google not to follow the link or drive any “SEO value” to that URL.

But still, people still leave blog comments for the purpose of link building.

So, over the past 7 months, I’ve been running an interesting experiment to answer the age-old question…

Do backlinks from blog comments actually help rankings?

Experiment rules

First off, for this experiment, we used “domain score,” which is similar to domain authority.

If you want to know your domain score, the backlinks report in Ubersuggest will tell you what it is.

With this experiment, I sent out an email to a part of my list looking for participants and had 794 websites apply.

From there, I set the following criteria:

  1. English-only sites – It’s easier to rank on many of Google’s international search engines even without building links. I removed non-English speaking sites as I didn’t want to skew the results.
  2. Low-authority sites – I removed any website with a domain score greater than 20 and any site with more than 20 backlinks. The reason being is when a site has a lot of authority, they tend to rank easily for new keywords, even if they don’t build any new links.
  3. No subdomains – I didn’t want a WordPress.com site, a Blogspot site, or even a Tumblr site. Again, this would skew the results so I removed them.

After eliminating the sites that didn’t meet the above criteria, I was left with 314 sites.

Of those 314 sites, many dropped off because they didn’t complete the required work on their part (which was to write a blog post), so I was left with 183 sites at the end that participated.

How the experiment worked

Similar to my previous link building experiment and my on-page SEO experiment,  I had these websites write a 1,800 to 2,000-word blog post on whatever subject that was relevant to their site.

The websites had 2 weeks to publish their content and then after 30 days, I looked up their URL in Ubersuggest to see how many keywords each URL ranked for in the top 100 spots, top 50, spots, and top 10 spots.

As I have mentioned in the past, Ubersuggest has a big database of keywords. We are currently tracking 1,459,103,429 keywords.

Now, most of these keywords are barely searched but a decent amount of them get hundreds, if not thousands, of searches per month. A much smaller percentage of keywords generate hundreds of thousands or even millions of searches per month.

In other words, the majority of the keywords people are searching for are long-tail phrases.

We then spent a month building links and then waited another 3 months to see what happened to each site’s rankings.

But here’s the thing: We didn’t build the same type of links to all sites. Instead, we broke the 183 sites into 4 groups (roughly 46 sites per group).

Here were the groups:

  1. Control – we didn’t build any links to these sites, we just wanted to see what happened to their rankings over time with no focus on link building.
  2. Nofollow high domain score blog comment links – with this group, we built 10 links through blog comments. The links pointed to the newly written post and they were from blogs that had a domain score of 50 or higher and they all contained a nofollow attribute.
  3. Dofollow high domain score blog comment links – with this group, we built 5 links through blog comments. The links pointed to the new post and were dofollow from blogs with a domain score of 40 or higher. (I reduced the domain score criteria for this category and the link quantity as we struggled to find a large number of high authority blogs that pass link juice in the comment section.)
  4. Dofollow low domain score blog comment links – with this group, we built 10 links through blog comments. Each link pointed back to the article and it was from a blog that contains a domain score of at least 20 but no higher than 39. (I was able to build more links here as there are many more low domain score blogs than high domain score ones.)

Keep in mind with the link building for groups 2, 3 and 4,
there was no specific anchor text agenda. Because the links were built through
blog comments, it was too hard to control the anchor text as we didn’t want to
be spammy.

And each comment left on the blog contained at least 75
words as we wanted to ensure that each comment provided value and the core
purpose wasn’t just link building.

Alright, so let’s dive into the results.

Control group

Do you really need links to rank on Google? Well, the chart below says a lot…

As you can see over time, you will naturally grow your search rankings even if you don’t build any links.

Of course, if your content is amazing and you do on-page SEO, you’ll rank higher, but still not growing your link count doesn’t mean you will rank for anything out there… instead, you will still rank for long-tail terms that aren’t too competitive.

Nofollow high domain score blog comment links

Now the results from this group were interesting…

As you can see, the sites in this group had better results than the control group even though the links were nofollowed.

Keep in mind, though, that it could be many variables that caused this, such as the content quality may have been better.

Overall, the sites did perform better than the control group but not by a substantial amount.

Dofollow high domain score blog comment links

Google is sophisticated, they are able to know if a link is from user-generated content (such as blog comments), so I assumed even though the links where dofollow they still wouldn’t have much (if any) impact.

But, shockingly, sites in this group had the largest gains.

As you can see from the chart above, links from high authority sites, even if it is through user-generated content, help with rankings. They just have to be dofollow.

Dofollow low domain score blog comment links

With this last group, we were able to build more dofollow links because we focused on sites with lower authority.

And as you can see from the chart above, it did help with rankings more than building nofollow links but it didn’t help nearly as much as getting links from blogs with higher domain scores.

We built 10 links instead of 5, but the quantity didn’t help
as much as having high domain score links. This group increased their rankings
by 337% versus 828% that group 3 experienced even though they had half the
links.

Again, we still saw gains, just not as large as the previous group.

Conclusion

Who would have thought that building links through blog
comments still helps?

Now, if you are going to use this tactic, you’ll want to focus on blogs that have dofollow comments.

If you aren’t sure how to find them, you can perform a Google search for the following:

  • “title=”CommentLuv Enabled”” KEYPHRASE – this will showcase blogs that have CommentLuv enabled which means they pass link juice.
  • “dofollow blogs” – you find a lot of blog articles listing out blogs that have dofollow links. Some of them look like this but you will have to double-check each site as many are nofollow even though bloggers claim they are dofollow.
  • Followlist – this is a directory of blogs that have dollow links.

When building links, focus on higher domain scores as it has a bigger impact on rankings.

In addition to that, you’ll only want to leave a comment if you can provide value. Don’t stress the anchor text, focus on the quality of your comment as you don’t want to be a spammer.

Posting spammy links will just cause your comment to be
removed.

Lastly, don’t just leave a valuable comment for the sake of generating a link. Make sure it is on relevant blogs as well. And if that means the blog doesn’t have as high of a domain score that’s fine because the data above shows that even low domain score links still help (just not as much).

So, have you thought about leaving more comments on other blogs? It’s a great way to get your brand out there, generate referral traffic, and boost your rankings.

The post Do High DA Backlinks From Blog Comments Help Rankings? appeared first on Neil Patel.

Any surprise inclusions in Shaka's Power Rankings?

Shaka Hislop presents his weekly power rankings and is given quite a bit of stick by the FC guys for how he ordered the top 10.

The post Any surprise inclusions in Shaka's Power Rankings? appeared first on Buy It At A Bargain – Deals And Reviews.

The post Any surprise inclusions in Shaka's Power Rankings? appeared first on Business Marketplace Product Reviews.

The post Any surprise inclusions in Shaka's Power Rankings? appeared first on Buy It At A Bargain – Deals And Reviews.

Ubersuggest 6.0: Track and Improve Your Rankings Without Learning SEO

I’ve been an SEO for roughly 17 years now.

And one thing that has remained constant, no matter how much
you know about SEO, there is just too much to do.

So much so, that most SEOs don’t even optimize their own websites anymore. And if they do, you’ll find that their site doesn’t rank for many competitive terms.

Why?

Because it is a lot of work!

That’s why I’m excited to announce Ubersuggest 6.0.

It now tracks and improves your rankings, even if you don’t have an SEO bone in your body.

So, what’s new?

Dashboard and login

First off, you can now keep track of all of your websites.
You’ll have to register to
use this feature, but don’t worry, it’s free.

Once you register, you’ll be dropped into a dashboard.

Now for me, I’m already tracking a few websites. Which is why
my dashboard is already populated.

The dashboard will keep track of your SEO errors, link
growth (or decline), your monthly search traffic, your overall search rankings,
and any SEO errors that you need to fix.

Best of all, it crawls your website for you each and every week so you don’t have to worry about keeping up with Google’s latest algorithm changes.

And with the search rankings feature, you can automatically track how your rankings are changing on a daily basis.

Rank tracking

Within each site you add to the dashboard, you’ll be able to
automatically track your rankings for any specific keyword.

Not only are you able to track your rankings on desktop devices, but Ubersuggest also shows how you rank on mobile devices.

If you want to track specific keywords, all you have to do is click Add Keywords and it will pull a list of suggestion from your Google Search Console. Of course, you can also track any other keyword even if it doesn’t show up in your Search Console.

What’s also cool is that you have the ability to track your rankings in any country, city, or region. That means if you do local SEO or international SEO, you can see your rankings anywhere.

There’s also a date picker so once you’ve been using
Ubersuggest for a while, you’ll be able to see a nice chart of how your
rankings are improving over time.

Conclusion

What’s great about these changes is you can now directly see how Ubersuggest is helping you grow your search traffic.

It will automatically keep track of all of your changes and
notify you when it finds any new SEO issues to fix.

And over the next few months, you’ll see a few more features added that will make your life even easier.

One example is that I’ll introduce email alerts so that you don’t have to log into Ubersuggest anymore and it emails you when there is an issue that needs your attention.

I’ll also be adding in competitive analysis features. You’ll be able to track your competitors and be notified when they make an SEO or marketing change that you should look at.

And my long-term goal is to make it so you don’t even have to code or make any changes manually. Ubersuggest will eventually be able to go into your website and make these fixes for you. However, this feature won’t happen until next year sometime.

So, what do you think of the new Ubersuggest? Give it a try… make sure you create your free account.

PS: If you missed it, I released some cool features like local keyword research and a billion-plus keyword database last week. Click here to get the update on those new Ubersuggest features.

The post Ubersuggest 6.0: Track and Improve Your Rankings Without Learning SEO appeared first on Neil Patel.

F1 Power Rankings: Why Verstappen is outshining Hamilton this year

Ahead of each race in 2019, ESPN is ranking every driver on the grid in our Formula One Power Rankings. Here’s who is hot and who’s not ahead of the Hungarian Grand Prix. The post F1 Power Rankings: Why Verstappen is outshining Hamilton this year appeared first on Buy It At A Bargain – Deals … Continue reading F1 Power Rankings: Why Verstappen is outshining Hamilton this year

How to Track and Improve Your Rankings Without Spending Money

Can you guess how most people improve their rankings?

Well, they either hire an SEO firm, which is expensive, or they do it themselves, which is time-consuming.

There must be a better solution, right?

One that still gets results, doesn’t take as much time and doesn’t cost any money.

Well, I’m about to make a major upgrade to Ubersuggest in the next 30 days that will help you do just this.

And before I release it, I need your feedback… so let me know what you think.

Here’s what I am thinking of doing to help you get better rankings in less time and without spending money.

SEO starts with good data

The first thing I want to do is help you track your results so you can see what’s working and what isn’t.

Currently, with Ubersuggest, there is no way to track your progress, but I am about to change that.

First, I plan to create a dashboard that looks something like this:

dashboard

You’ll be able to see your site, how much organic search traffic you get on a monthly basis, the keywords you rank for, how many backlinks you have, and any website errors you need to fix.

And on a weekly basis, we will automatically run your site through our site audit report to show you what’s wrong and if you are improving.

seo analyzer

This way, you don’t continually have to check your site or look for opportunities. Instead, you’ll be notified when you need to fix something.

In addition to that, you’ll be able to start tracking your rankings for any keyword you want.

Rank tracking

From your dashboard, you can click on a profile and see where you rank for any given term on both mobile and desktop devices and in any country or city.

rank tracking

If you have specific keywords that you want to track, you’ll be able to manually add them to do so. And if you aren’t sure which keywords to track, you’ll see a list of suggestions as well.

keywords

And if you want to track those rankings in a specific city or country, you can also do that…

city

My favorite part about the report is that you can easily see your rankings over time. Not just from an overall site perspective but also from a keyword level.

rankings over time

Conclusion

Now, this is where I need your help.

My goal is twofold… the first is to help you track how your SEO is doing and the second is to tell you what to fix.

Here’s why I am trying to accomplish both of those things:

  • Track your progress for you – it’s too much work to track on a daily basis if your efforts are going in the right or wrong direction. The new Ubersuggest will track your rankings for you on a daily basis. That way you don’t have to do it. And if Google updates their algorithm, you will see what’s happening in real-time.
  • Tell you what to fix – instead of you having to hunt down what you should fix, I will simply send you alerts and reports with step-by-step instructions on how to fix what needs improvements. And if you or someone on your team updates your site, no worries, because every week I will automatically recrawl your site and tell you if there are more errors you need to fix.

Eventually, I want to even automate most of link building, but that isn’t ready yet.

Is there anything else I can add to the reports to make your life easier? Is there anything I can change to make it easier for you to get higher rankings?

PS: If you haven’t checked out Ubersuggest recently you should. We’ve made a lot of improvements to it over the last few months.

PPS: These features will be free of course. 😉

The post How to Track and Improve Your Rankings Without Spending Money appeared first on Neil Patel.