Guest Posting On High DA Sites With LOW Alexa Rank

[Jasper68]

Hey

I'm getting myself into some marketing rather than just writing a shit ton of posts.

I'm looking into some guest posting opportunities, and it turns out there are quite a few in my sub-niches...noice!

But interestingly, I have noticed that there are a ton of blogs with moderately good domain authority (DA) but pretty dreadful Alexa traffic rankings.

Now, I don't hold a lot of credence for either metric to be honest. My Alexa rank is now sitting around 613,000 global, and I'm only getting 50 visitors a day and making a few bucks from Amazon.

When were looking for places to guest post or blog comment were after either traffic leaks OR some link juice from a site (taking into account NF backlinks from commenting, I don't worry about that, just comment away).

My question I guess is:

What is more important to you? Domain Authority or Alexa Traffic Rank....maybe neither, both?

Or do you think just get out and grab whatever opportunity you can, market and create connections with anyone and everyone, and forget about metrics that are probably not that important?

Be interested to hear how anyone here evaluates and prioritizes where they put their efforts?

Cheers

 

[CCarter]

Go for Traffic.

At the very least you will get targeted visitors, and Google also considers backlinks from websites that have high traffic (since Google knows how much traffic they send each website) versus websites that get no traffic.

Google also has a new habit of de-indexing websites that do not get traffic from Google. Whenever you see people complaining about indexation within Google the #1 common denominator is all those websites never had traffic, they were just being used for the "authority power" as part of a PBN or link building scheme. Google NEVER de-indexes pages or websites that they are sending traffic to cause of rankings - barring doing something stupid.

With guestposting on websites with traffic - you get TRAFFIC, and immediate traffic that you can make money with TODAY. A simple backlinking strategy approach you might see the results of after 6-12 months - the keyword being MIGHT.

Traffic = Money Today.

Backlinks = SEO Waiting Game.

"FOCUS ON THAT WHICH MOVES THE REVENUE NEEDLE!"

A dollar today is more valuable than a $1 twelve months from now - not just cause of inflation but also because you can take that $1 - work it and generate $1-100 more dollars from that single $1 in the same 12 month time period.

 

[RomesFall]

Go for Traffic.

With guestposting on websites with traffic - you get TRAFFIC, and immediate traffic that you can make money with TODAY. A simply backlinking strategy approach you might see the results of after 6-12 months - the keyword being MIGHT.

THIS. X10000000

If you're doing outreach, always look at the amount of organic keywords and organic traffic they have on Ahrefs, and then run them through SimilarWeb while prospecting and refining your list.

If you're buying links...

When I do buy links, which is very infrequent now. I go for the services that provide REAL guest posts.

Never buy from a provider that won't give you the domain in advance, you can't check whether the site is 'real' and there's no chance you can check to see what kind of traffic they get.

There's so many advantages to this approach, not just for SEO, not just for referral traffic.

You're creating brand awareness, exposure... The sooner someone has an interaction with your brand the better!

 

[Ryuzaki]

Traffic = Money Today.

Backlinks = SEO Waiting Game.

Before I jump off into la-la land, I'll say that this quote above is the correct answer. You're asking a theoretical question and you're getting a hard-line, no B.S. answer. It's a great answer regardless, and I think you'd get it if you rephrased the question too. But you'd also get some other info from another angle.

What is more important to you? Domain Authority or Alexa Traffic Rank....maybe neither, both?

For me, Alexa is going to be more important than Moz's DA, partially because DA is a crockpot of crap soup until you start getting around DA 50. Anyone and they're mother can become DA 15 just by existing. Moz manages to find scraper sites and spam and then never finds the good links, so often you'll have spam sites at DA 30 and unbelievable powerful sites at DA 30 too. DA is crap until DA >= 50, in my opinion.

But is that really what you're meaning to ask? Seems like the real question is "link juice or traffic?" In which case it depends. I'll get into that below.

Or do you think just get out and grab whatever opportunity you can, market and create connections with anyone and everyone, and forget about metrics that are probably not that important?

My answer is both. SEO shouldn't be the forefront of your activities, but you should never ever ever leave SEO out entirely, especially if you're a content site. If we're talking about a 3 page lander that you use for PPC then that's another ballgame. But for 90% of websites, you should be doing proper on-page SEO for every post you publish, no questions asked.

The problem comes when people start focusing on off-page SEO like it's the end-all-be-all. It's not. Marketing is the end-all-be-all. That's what CCarter is saying. The links you get on sites with traffic will never be de-indexed and will only grow in power, all the while sending you traffic and hopefully money.

But that doesn't mean you need to ignore other sites with lower traffic or even lower amounts of juice. Think about these sites:

• The new site today that will dominate tomorrow.
• The scientific journal with little traffic and all the authority in the world.
• The forum on your sub-sub-sub-niche with 30 active members that are die-hard about the topic and will spread your link across social media and other forums and their own blogs.

That's three examples of low traffic and low / big juice sites that I'd still want a link on.

So what you need to do is look at each site and not just filter based on metrics. Your eyeball will tell you if it's some shit site someone tossed up because SEO is free money and it'll be gone in 12 months, or if they care and will caress the site for years to come, if not a decade. There are tons of legit opportunities you'll pass up if you look at numbers instead of looking at websites.

On the flip-side, you'll also stop yourself from pitching people's PBN sites for links because you didn't take the time to look at the sites to see all of the sitewide sidebar links in all lower case leading to "san francisco plumber 90210" and "essay writing service".

You're creating brand awareness, exposure... The sooner someone has an interaction with your brand the better!

And this brings me to my last point. We're talking about this like there's an infinite number of opportunities and most of them will say yes, and we have that choice. But that's not the case. You're not going to get so busy by all of the people saying yes that you're having trouble scaling the content writing.

The trouble will be in scaling the outreach. You'll run out of targets in your direct niche, and not all traffic is equal. So what happens is you either:

• Pitch to lower traffic & lower metric sites for directly interested traffic
• Pitch to unrelated sites to your tangentially related post to get un-interested 'viral' traffic

The 2nd batch can still have your high metrics and high traffic, but the traffic won't matter for direct monies unless you're using a lot of CPC and CPM advertising. They're not likely to buy what you're selling. Those campaigns are basically for SEO only, even though they're high traffic.

The first batch still has the SEO benefit of being highly-relevant in topic flow, but won't send as much traffic and may have low metrics, but the little traffic they send has a much better chance of converting.

So there's a lot more to this story than would be let on. My answer would be:

Take all of the opportunities that aren't idiot SEO sites (ones that are clean and will stay online), regardless of traffic or metrics, until you run out of directly relevant sites. Then you can worry about traffic and metrics when you start going tangential to semi-related niches and unrelated verticals.​

 

[Jasper68]

All these answers are absolute GOLD!!!

I feel like I’m the dick who is asking to have my hand held every step of the way, but answers like these will be invaluable to everyone searching this forum for years to come

Massive thanks for taking the time to respond with these gems.