Backlinks Question

Hi there,

I have started a Web Design Business about 2 years ago and am a relative newbie when it comes to SEO. I have a reasonable knowledge of on site SEO but was shocked recently when I did a check for backlinks on Moz and Neil Patels backlink checker. I realised, even though I have about 25 websites, all with backlinks to my own site on a credits page that none of them are coming up on the checkers? I checked competitors and their clients are appearing as backlinks to their site.

This really got to me, although they appear in our Webmaster tools, they do not on any of these checkers. I am not sure where the problem is but it really put a dent in confidence when I realised this. The links are not on the bottom of the home page as standard as we dont really want to blow our own trumpet, but I dont see how that would be the problem. Even the recent sites we built do not appear.

Also, I have been having a long running argument with my business partner that as the business URL has been repurposed to our business, from a motoring type forum that has been getting hundreds of links from some other motorsport forum in Australia, that it is having a spammy effect on our SEO and Google may have penalised us for this. I have disavowed them twice but they keep coming back. To me it is spammy, to him he does not think it makes a difference.

Really and truly it has annoyed me as it is so difficult to enter the web design market so late and trying to do your best for clients and yourself. That being said, most of my clients are local businesses and are in the top 3 of Google results for the SEO that I have done.

Hope this makes sense, and thank you in advance for your replies.

 

Hard to say for sure without investigating it further with the URL data of your site and of the sites in question.

Though its quite possible all the sites you made have had no work done on them in terms of link building and SEO to raise awareness of those websites, in which case they are simply unknown sites with regard to the link back checking tools.

Although I found most backlink checking tools are just simply very inaccurate, only good tool I found for listing all backlinks is Ahrefs.

 

Yeah. Tough one. The backlink tools don't catch everything. If the links were not very powerful, it's possible they are on sites that the SEO tools don't / have not yet crawled. Also, I'm not convinced Google shows everything.

"Google may have penalised us for this" -- Did you get a message in Search Console? Or do you mean the links were just de-valued?

 

I have heard other SEOs say that some link checkers discount links if coming from the same IP. Opposing that, I've recently read Mueller's comments, that Google does not discount links because they are from the same IP. And then Cutts once stated that they DO discount links from the same IP, if they are numerous.