Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How important is the originating country of backlinks?
-
How important is it that you gain backlinks from websites in the same country you're targeting?
Scenario: You have a website targeting users in Japan. How important is it that backlinks to your website are from Japanese websites? Do you need a majority of links from Japanese websites to rank well, or will you do OK with 25% Japanese links and 75% links from other countries?
According to Majestic, sites for popular Japanese brands like tsutaya.co.jp and seiyu.co.jp get more links from US sites than from Japanese sites.
-
I agree with Tom. Backlinks can be from anywhere as long as they don't appear to be blatant spam. I tend to agree that a backlink serves a greater purpose than just link juice and may actually send relevant traffic and business to your company. I would try to target as many local links as possible, but branching out to a global mindset won't hurt at all.
-
It's by no means essential.
I've worked on a number of international sites and you quickly realise that while a website is setup with a geographical TLD and is fully served for that language's audience, the server is located in the US - where so much hosting is. Regardless, this has not stopped the site's ability to rank.
Similarly, evidence of links from a different country working can unfortunately be found in places like SAPE - the russian link network. I've seen countless of websites rank #1, #2 with links from these websites in Russia, Uzbekistan and so on - Google wouldn't be targeting these links if they didn't work.
However, my mindset has always been to acquire links from places that are going to send the most targeted and relevant traffic to your site. In the scenario you've given, this would most likely mean trying to earn as many Japanese backlinks as possible. Links from other places may increase organic visibility, but more often than not referring traffic from links you've earned can be far more qualified and convert more often - so I would aim to get them via links from the country.
Just my £0.02
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Footer backlink for/to Web Design Agency
I read some old (10+ years) information on whether footer backlinks from the websites that design agencies build are seen as spammy and potentially cause a negative effect. We have over 150 websites that we have built over the last few years, all with sitewide footer backlinks back to our homepage (designed and managed by COMPANY NAME). Semrush flags some of the links as potential spammy links. What are the current thoughts on this type of footer backlink? Are we better to have 1 dofollow backlink and the rest of the website nofollow from each domain?
Link Building | | MultiAdE1 -
DA not increased as backlinks generated...
Hi,
Link Building | | p4pakao
I would like to discuss my issue as my site's some backlinks are generated but DA is still there. Can anyone make me understand the reason?0 -
Backlinks and PDFs
Hi, we are trying to improve on the number of links to our website. A supplier has added a PDF file which is case study to their website. In the PDF it has a link to our website, will this count as a link or not? Thanks
Link Building | | danieldunn100 -
Backlink from foreign language websites good for SEO
I was wondering if backlinks from foreign language webistes can help me in ranking? For example: I ve got website in slovak language and I would place article with backlink on the foreign language website. In which language should be the text surrounding the keyword?
Link Building | | joeko1 -
Will Google penalize for backlinks on non-indexed pages?
Have a client who has a bunch of links from spammy sites that aren't even indexed by Google. Will Google penalize (i.e. Penguin) for backlinks from spammy sites that aren't indexed? I'm guessing "Yes, Google still crawls non-indexed sites and may penalize the sites linked to from the banned site." Anyone have any data or experience with this? Anyone have a non-indexed or banned site? Does Google still crawl it?
Link Building | | AdamThompson0 -
How important are different class c subnets and ip's
We're thinking of launching several blogs in our niche and 'building them up' organically, and then linking naturally from them to our sites (very conservatively). I was wondering if we should buy entirely separate hosting for these blogs and how important are separate ip addresses and class c subnets (shown on majestic SEO tools for instance). Is it possible to create a set of authoritative blogs in a niche and have them be a little 'neighborhood' within the same shared hosting provider (obv similiar class c or even same ip).
Link Building | | ilyaelbert0 -
How Many Backlinks Per Day
I am starting to do some manual back-linking for a medium competition word with high traffic. I plan to start back linking with like niche blogs with non spam comments, like niche directories, like niche forums, and guest blogging. My domain is over 3 years old and ranks for multiple keywords, but I'm going to concentrate specifically on this keyword, but need to know how many links to back-link a day. Again none of these will be spam, but will be of real quality. I was thinking 10-20 a day, but unsure.
Link Building | | treeoflife0 -
Should I Just Copy A Competitor's Backlinks?
Forgive the newbie question, but now that I have found SeoMoz and OpenSiteExplorer, should I just piggy back on my competitors backlinks? What would be the downside? By way of explanation, I've never had the need to explore SEO before. Our site, Widgets.com has always ranked highly for all Widgets keywords because we have the keyword in our domain and our site has been around since 1998. But out of the blue this summer, a site, let's call them WidgetsCircus.com suddenly began outranking us on widgets keywords, and pretty much every keyword we can imagine in our little widget universe. Now that I have run OpenSiteExplorer, I can see how they've done it. They've pretty much spent the last year commenting on blog posts all over the place, editing wiki pages, etc., and built thousands of links for all these widget keywords. So, I'm wondering: why shouldn't I just go down the list of links and do exactly what they've done? Where they commented on a blog, why don't I just comment right along side them. Obviously, this has worked for them! Wouldn't it work for us too? Or is that too simple?
Link Building | | brianmcc0