Rand Fishkin Reveals Why Your Links Aren't Boosting Your Rankings

Rand Fishkin Reveals Why Your Links Aren’t Boosting Your Rankings

May 14^th 2015 Sally Ormond link building, linking factors, links and rankings, Rand Fishkin, seo, Whiteboard Friday

As a copywriter I’m not an SEO expert, but have a rough working knowledge of how to go about it to help my site rank well.

The world of search engine optimisation is constantly changing and keeping pace with it can be a real challenge for people like me. That’s why I regularly trawl the internet for expert advice and opinions on what works and what does’t work (anymore).

One thing I always struggle with is link building so I was pleased to come across one of Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Friday‘s on Moz.com in which he talks about why the links you’ve built aren’t helping your page rank.

I’ll let him tell you all about it in a moment (the video is 9mins 40), but here’s a quick round-up to give you an idea of what might be going wrong.

You don’t have the right type of links

Being the wrong link can be down to a number of different factors, including:

Low domain diversity - you have a lot of links all from the same domain
Source trustworthiness - Google may have issues with the linker, making it think your content could be paid, non-editorial or promotional in nature)
Low-Value link - cause by the low authority of the linking site
Where else is the source pointing to? - Google will check out the other links from the site to see if they can be viewed as manipulative links
Not relevant - this means the linking website is not related to your industry
Location of the link on the page
Not unique - this happens when the same article is published on a number of websites all giving backlinks

Your content is wrong

It’s important the content you produce is of high quality and focused on the needs of your audience, if it’s not, you won’t get any benefit from it:

Your content isn’t seen as being evergreen
You’re not answering a specific question being asked by your audience
You are giving a poor user experience causing bounce back (i.e. slow speed, poor layout etc.)
You’re not meeting your searchers’ expectation

Your domain is wrong

This one is pretty straightforward in that your domain isn’t associated with the topic or content that Google and searchers are expecting. For example, as a copywriter, my content should be about all things copywriting and marketing not drugs research or celebrity gossip.

Accessibility and technical issues

If this is the cause you should be aware of it because it relates to things like page errors and your content not being displayed properly.

Over to you Rand.