Links from foreign sites

[MarieN]

I am considering hiring an SEO firm that is based in another country. I have seen this company do wonders to local US service provider's sites. However, looking at the inbound links I have noticed that their link building strategies is concentrated on domains based in their country of origin. This is a non English speaking country, so it's very obvious... For example, there are links from that country's DMOZ directory and other local directories. Anyone know how the SE's look at this? Also, it seems they are doing a lot of link exchanges and pulling off their links after a while... Thoughts?

[Rosalind]

Anyone know how the SE's look at this?

I can only guess, but it's actually quite natural to pick up a certain percentage of foreign-language links, since a lot of people around the world speak two or more languages. However, would getting a high percentage of foreign links screw up your geolocation? I'm just speculating here, but it seems like one way the geolocation algo could be refined would be by looking at the location of the sites you're linking in and out to.

[MarieN]

Thanks Rosalind, for this particular site around 95% of their 145 inbound links listed in Google (link:site.com) are from one foreign country. Yahoo's site explorer is listing 126K in links and around 75% are foreign.... In reality, no site from the other side of the world would link to a local service provider in a small town in California, but I am not sure the SE's have a way to distinguish this.

[Lord Majestic]

It's all about balance - when you suddenly get so many links from different TLD unlike your competitors who would have balanced profile then your site would sure stand out very clearly - maybe it would cause it to be considered local site to that TLD from which it got many links, so you'd rank highly for searches from that country, however on the other side it may well adversely affect your rankings in searches made by people you actually want to find your site.

The more likely scenario is that those backlinks will be discounted - certainly so if they come from DMOZ clones, it is trivial to detect such cloned sites and personally I think that getting lots of links from them (unless you are already in ODP) may have negative impact.

[martinibuster]

From what I heard I don't think they'll be discounted, particularly with an established domain. A new domain is a different situation. But if it's successful, which I think it may be, the bigger consideration is the long term viability of those links. You have to be prepared to walk away from that domain if it gets burned by the search engines.

[MarieN]

"You have to be prepared to walk away from that domain if it gets burned by the search engines."

How about I buy a similar domain and let the SEO link in to that one. Then I do a 301 redirect to my old domain. If the new domain gets burned I'll just remove the 301's.