Questions About Link Building**

I have some questions about link building and would appreciate your assistance. Thanks in advance.

Project Details:

• Website Platform: Shopify
• Market: Niche B2B industrial equipment

Current Situation:

I am finding it difficult to locate websites in the same niche for link building.

Questions:

1. If it's not possible to find websites in the same niche, where should I focus my link-building efforts? Should I target business, technical, or news sections?
2. I have two websites with similar traffic:
   • Site A: Declining traffic trend but older domain with high AS, DA, and DR, and a large number of backlinks.
   • Site B: Increasing traffic trend but newer domain with fewer backlinks.
     Both sites are priced similarly. Which one should I choose for link building?
3. Is it still necessary to create tiered link structures (tier 1, tier 2, tier 3), or should I just focus on high-quality, high-content tier 1 links?

If niche-specific sites are scarce, focus link-building efforts on related industries, technical forums, or news platforms where your audience might frequent. Prioritize quality over quantity. Considering traffic trends and domain authority, prioritize Site B for link building to leverage its upward trajectory. Simplify your strategy by emphasizing high-quality tier 1 links over tiered structures.

professors07 said:

If niche-specific sites are scarce, focus link-building efforts on related industries, technical forums, or news platforms where your audience might frequent. Prioritize quality over quantity. Considering traffic trends and domain authority, prioritize Site B for link building to leverage its upward trajectory. Simplify your strategy by emphasizing high-quality tier 1 links over tiered structures.

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Thanks for your reply. Can I understand it this way, that the vertical relevance of the industry is greater than the authority expressed by SEO tools. For example, the guest posts I buy on a high-authority, high-traffic website are less valuable than my posts and links on relevant niche market forums? Or can both be done at the same time?

danny0616 said:

If it's not possible to find websites in the same niche, where should I focus my link-building efforts? Should I target business, technical, or news sections?

Click to expand...

yeah, you can do that. When it comes to link building relevancy is important, but you don't have to stress about finding 100% relevancy. You can branch out to less relevant niches if you don't have other options and you're still fine as long as the links carry authority and they're still slightly relevant to your niche.

For example, suppose you have a site in the pets niche, and you buy a guest post on a site about insurance. There is obviously no correlation between these 2 niches (pets and insurance), but if the guest post talks about pets insurance the relevancy is there and the link is worth getting.

danny0616 said:

I have two websites with similar traffic:

• Site A: Declining traffic trend but older domain with high AS, DA, and DR, and a large number of backlinks.
• Site B: Increasing traffic trend but newer domain with fewer backlinks.
  Both sites are priced similarly. Which one should I choose for link building?

Click to expand...

it's hard to say, because other things could be happening, so you'll need to check both of them in depth. Also, if you can get links from both you should, the more links the better

At a first glance, I would go with site B, but that's based on the little info I have on these sites. In general, when I get links I don't like getting them from sites that are on downward trend when it comes to rankings and traffic, because this tells me that something's bad, or is going to be bad with this site (might be / has been penalized by google in some way and now it's losing rankings / traffic), so its high DR / AS scores are not attractive to me if these metrics will go down by the day and in 6 months time this backlink will be worthless, whereas site B keeps growing until its score surpasses the current score of site A.

But it's also possible that site A is declining because it might be in a seasonal niche so its decline is only temporary and when the season comes it will start picking up traffic and rankings again, in which case a backlink from it could still be worth 10x the backlink from site B which could see only a temporary spike and then stabilize but never grow, or - worse - start going down.

Like I said, you need to check these things in depth and draw your own conclusions as to what could be happening with the sites. Or, don't bother with any of these and just get links from both sites

danny0616 said:

Is it still necessary to create tiered link structures (tier 1, tier 2, tier 3), or should I just focus on high-quality, high-content tier 1 links?

Click to expand...

tiered linking or not, you still want to focus on getting high quality links for tier 1. Tiers 2, 3, etc are usually needed to rank extremely competitive keywords (because the tier 2+ backlinks will boost the links in the higher tiers), but if you target only easy / medium keywords tiered linking might not be necessary. Unless, maybe you can't index the tier 1 links (if they're quality links this should not happen, though), in which case you might want to build extra tiers...

Again, focus on getting quality links that point directly to your site and if those don't move the needle it means that the keyword is tough and you'll either need more of those quality links, or you need to build additional tiers, or both.

tazarbm said:

it's hard to say, because other things could be happening, so you'll need to check both of them in depth. Also, if you can get links from both you should, the more links the better

At a first glance, I would go with site B, but that's based on the little info I have on these sites. In general, when I get links I don't like getting them from sites that are on downward trend when it comes to rankings and traffic, because this tells me that something's bad, or is going to be bad with this site (might be / has been penalized by google in some way and now it's losing rankings / traffic), so its high DR / AS scores are not attractive to me if these metrics will go down by the day and in 6 months time this backlink will be worthless, whereas site B keeps growing until its score surpasses the current score of site A.

But it's also possible that site A is declining because it might be in a seasonal niche so its decline is only temporary and when the season comes it will start picking up traffic and rankings again, in which case a backlink from it could still be worth 10x the backlink from site B which could see only a temporary spike and then stabilize but never grow, or - worse - start going down.

Like I said, you need to check these things in depth and draw your own conclusions as to what could be happening with the sites. Or, don't bother with any of these and just get links from both sites


tiered linking or not, you still want to focus on getting high quality links for tier 1. Tiers 2, 3, etc are usually needed to rank extremely competitive keywords (because the tier 2+ backlinks will boost the links in the higher tiers), but if you target only easy / medium keywords tiered linking might not be necessary. Unless, maybe you can't index the tier 1 links (if they're quality links this should not happen, though), in which case you might want to build extra tiers...

Again, focus on getting quality links that point directly to your site and if those don't move the needle it means that the keyword is tough and you'll either need more of those quality links, or you need to build additional tiers, or both.

Click to expand...

Thank you very much for your professional response.

tazarbm said:

yeah, you can do that. When it comes to link building relevancy is important, but you don't have to stress about finding 100% relevancy. You can branch out to less relevant niches if you don't have other options and you're still fine as long as the links carry authority and they're still slightly relevant to your niche.

For example, suppose you have a site in the pets niche, and you buy a guest post on a site about insurance. There is obviously no correlation between these 2 niches (pets and insurance), but if the guest post talks about pets insurance the relevancy is there and the link is worth getting.

Click to expand...

This answer resolved my doubts. I always thought I needed to find a highly relevant niche market, but that was evidently quite challenging. First, the sources are scarce, and second, it's expensive. Therefore, I will follow your strategy. Thanks again.

This was an educative thread. Thanks

To create the most quality links possible (which is enough for B2B, no need for great numbers), you can imagine the real situation where someone would post a link to your page

In my view, the likeliest sources are forum discussions in this field (like "recommend some good equipment of this field"), review platforms, social media. That's where you should go if the articles are scarce

Tier 2-3 links are not needed in that case, I think

Check the URL structure, whether products appear only on one unique URL, same with collections, also, if every page has a H1, things like that

Basically run it through Ahrefs health check or something similar

I recently fixed a whole bunch of such issues for a Shopify shop and did nothing in terms of backlinks or content

Traffic keeps growing surprisingly well, not affected at all by March-May 2024 Google updates