Forums Forums White Hat SEO Is this link building?

  • Is this link building?

    Posted by seohelper on October 14, 2020 at 12:47 pm

    Hey guys, I’m a web developer and started my own company at the beginning of the year. My first client and I are very close and still talk every week. He hired a SEO girl a few weeks before I finished the site and that’s what she’s been working on since March. My issue with this is that this website has about 30-40 pages and 100’s of blog posts. When I log into WP and open some of the core pages, only several have meta titles and descriptions and none have any changes on page. His site is ranking for 36 words which a third of them don’t even matter or have 0 views a month. She’s focusing her attention on one blog post from weeks ago. Her monthly report has some fluctuations in the keywords and she mentioned that she *Just Now* want to start working on his GMB? He’s a local cleaning company? Shouldn’t she have started this months ago? Lastly, she attached an excel file with “link building” that she’s started…. but it contains 7 links… to sites that she’s made his company a profile for: Tumblr, PearlTrees, Reddit, Plurk, Scoop, Flipboard, Folkd? She’s said that she’s done this for idk how many years… 10(?)… Am I wrong in assuming this is all wrong? Is she doing things correctly? Because if she is, I need to know now that I’ve been learning SEO the wrong way and I should probably stop altogether. Thank you for your advice, and I’m sorry there are no spaces between the sentences, I don’t know how to add an extra line on here.

    cooker69 replied 3 years, 5 months ago 1 Member · 7 Replies
  • 7 Replies
  • devansh97

    Guest
    October 14, 2020 at 12:58 pm

    No, this is generating links which is not a good practice if you want to rank.

    She’s a fraud.

  • mohaidhayath

    Guest
    October 14, 2020 at 1:16 pm

    You are right about GMB. This should have been done long ago.

    And I think on-page seo should be the primary focus. If titles, descriptions are not updated and pages not optimized, then all our other efforts may not bring benefit.

  • Alert-Complaint-1518

    Guest
    October 14, 2020 at 1:43 pm

    This is not good practice. Creating accounts on Reddit and linking back is not link building.

    Based on what you’ve said the client needs to fire her.

  • BapaLynde

    Guest
    October 14, 2020 at 3:20 pm

    Yeah, everything you’ve said she has done sounds wrong. Not getting GMB sorted, letting basic on-site SEO slide and that excuse for link-building are all bad signs. It doesn’t even sound “black-hat”, it just seems like she’s out of her depth.

  • aiky90

    Guest
    October 14, 2020 at 4:27 pm

    It’s sounds really, really wrong. The pages you mentioned are more aggregators, not places from which good links are obtained. I’m pretty sure she didn’t check their parameters either. Also GMB is a essential in local SEO.

  • emuwannabe

    Guest
    October 14, 2020 at 9:25 pm

    Well not every page needs meta tags so that’s ok. Ideally yes they would all have them, but in reality most pages won’t rank so what’s the point. However the pages you do want to rank for should be properly optimized with meta tags and correct keyword density. If the text on the pages hasn’t changed then it’s pretty safe to assume the KWD density isn’t optimized.

    7 links in even a week is a TERRIBLE number. Even my smallest clients get about 100 new links per month.

    GMB should have been set up/claimed in the first week.

    It sounds like she doesn’t know what she’s doing, so aimed for low hanging fruit – “optimizing” for phrases with low or no search volume. You can usually easily get these types of phrases ranked for just by optimizing a title tag. However as you noted, these pages get zero searches so what’s the point?

    A proper search phrase analysis would be a mix of high and medium competition phrases. Optimization for those phrases should include an optimized title and meta description as well as additional on-page visible content around those phrases. If any of those steps are missing (which it sounds like the on-page is) then she hasn’t done her job.

    I have 20 years experience in this industry so I know what works. What she has done obviously does not. You will get lots of responses saying the same. Show those to your friend so he can make an informed decision.

  • cooker69

    Guest
    October 14, 2020 at 10:45 pm

    Thank you so much for your detailed response. How do you come up with 100 links a day? Wouldn’t that seem spammy to G?