Some badges will be sitewide, is that OK
-
Hello,
We are making badges to hand out to our alumni.
Some of these links backs are probably going to be sitewide.
Is this tactic still good with respect to the recent G updates?
Thanks
-
Bob, there's nothing 100% safe for the future, Google is a private entity and they make the rules of their own game. However you can 99% sure that links will always be in their algo, just because is the inner nature of the www to have sites interlinked. I imagine that they'll become every day smarter in detecting patterns and automated links or human trying to manipulate the algo, but what they won't never control is human manual editing. It has no (huge) patterns and it's natural which is what they really want.
About your alumnis I don't have the compelte view of your market and situation but if I understand yyour position: they know that they're helping you but you're not giving nothing back to them. I think that since they've studied in your center they've been selected as top alumnis and been given a badge to demonstrate that. If I were them I would like to show it, so ask them to write a post, I think that the value for them here is intangible, jsut ego-boosting you need to play in that ground, I don't know how renowned you are in your market but someone is always happy to be endorsed by a structure (maybe you can offer special linkedin endorsemnent for a really short group with good websites )
-
Irving, the Guru in who answered below, told me to never purposely do reciprocal links. He told me that in this question:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/a-few-reciprocal-links-ok
I'm open to suggestions on whether reciprocal links are OK and I really appreciate the great ideas.
-
Irving,
Thank you for your comment. It sounds like we're stretching the limits here, when making them dofollow even if it's on one page. This is a long term, play-it safe site with high integrity.
What's 100% safe for the future?
-
use long tails that incorporate your main keyword, so it helps your main keyword, but of you get a penalty for some reason it wil lonly affect that long tail and not your main term
If you can get them on homepage or main LP only I would make them dofollow, but if sitewide I would stick to nofollow - and if you do nofollow then you can use whatever anchor text you like since it's a neutered and safe link.
-
Well it is reciprocal by definition but when there is useful editorial content surrounding the link it's different than a page full of links just pointing back and forth at each other.
-
I like it, but wouldn't that be reciprocal linking?
-
I'm not sure what business you are in but you could take a different approach. Instead of asking for links you could do your own editorial "features" of some of your authoritative blog owning alumni. You could push that on your own blog and then collaborate with them about covering the piece on their site with links back to you as the original source.
Might work but it does really depend on your niche and the relevancy of these blog owning alumni.
-
Sounds good, we'll stick to editorial mention.
We could offer the badges to alumni with blogs that have written a post about us and linked back to our site.
Our relationship to our alumni is very delicate, how can we frame this proposal so that it comes across more mutually beneficial? I don't think in our case we can contact our blog owning alumni and ask a lot of them. Is there a way to make this sound better?
-
If you can get the editorial links by all means go for those first b/c then you can get followed links and have zero risk of penalty. But the response above is correct in that you probably don't want to roll this out before the next major google algo update comes supposedly on Friday.
-
Hi Bob, take into account one thing. Google wants links to be manually edited. Editorial link is good when you hide a link in a widget/badge to receive a link which is not editorially made you're "gaming" the algo. That link is not natural under google eyes. (further listening here).
The idea is good, the implementation not so much. Why not get in touch with your top 50 alumni, ask them to put the badge without any link inside and then ask them to write a post about their happiness of being considered a top alumni or their experience in your school? There they can link back to you (or not!) but it would be definitely higher quality, relevant and moreover editorially made!!!
Also I won't be making heavy linking tests while the next, huge Penguin is in the air
-
Here's what we've decided to do. We'll send out 50 badges to the first 50 alumni that wants them. Then we'll email them a custom embed script. We'll have 50 different alt tags.
Does that work or do the image filenames have to be different as well?
Also, is this safe on into the future of Google?
-
This sounds like a cautious approach. If you are only issuing 30-50 anchor text optimized badges and you vary the anchor text I think you're safe as long as relevancy remains intact.
-
What if we only gave out 30-50 badges to our elite alumni and had them all have different anchor text?
-
I agree you are ok to include links in a badge but the main objective of the badge should be to build brand credibility not build links for the search engines. If you nofollow and stick with branded anchor text I think you are safe. It's a no harm no foul approach erring on the side of caution.
-
Hi Bob, I think that badges are really helpful to build a brand and get renowned in your niche, as more alumni use them the more exposure you'll achieve, however I discourage the usage of this kind of backlinks in your seo linkbuilding strategy since they're not editorially made, and since the link is embedded, it doesn't reflect an user real willing to link to a website. In this video from Matt cutts you can see what I am speaking about. IMO it's still fine to use this kind of links but only if you do the following:
- put a nofollow in it
- don't use rich anchor texts but only your brand name
In this way you'll be sure that no penalty may affect you in the future. Just a general guideline always try to achieve editorially made links. Hope this helps!
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
-
Will link juice still be passed if you have the same links in multiple, outreach articles?
We are developing high quality, unique content and sending them out to bloggers to for guest posts. In these articles we have links to 2 to 3 sites. While the links are completely relevant, each article points to the same 2 to 3 sites. The link text varies slightly from article to article, but the linked-to site/URLs remain the same. We have read that it is best to have 2 to 3 external links, not all pointing to the same site. We have followed this rule, but the 2 to 3 external sites are the same sites on the other articles. I'm having a hard time explaining this, so I hope this makes sense. My concern is, will Google see this as a pattern and link juice won't be passed to the linked-to URLs, or worst penalize all/some of the sites being linked to or linked from? Someone I spoke to had suggest that my "link scheme" describes a "link wheel" and the site(s) will be penalized by Penguin. Is there any truth to this statement?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cutopia0 -
Will Reducing Number of Low Page Authority Page Increase Domain Authority?
Our commercial real estate site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) contains about 800 URLs. Since 2012 the domain authority has dropped from 35 to about 20. Ranking and traffic dropped significantly since then. The site has about 791 URLs. Many are set to noindex. A large percentage of these pages have a Moz page authority of only "1". It is puzzling that some pages that have similar content to "1" page rank pages rank much better, in some cases "15". If we remove or consolidate the poorly ranked pages will the overall page authority and ranking of the site improve? Would taking the following steps help?: 1. Remove or consolidate poorly ranking unnecessary URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Update content on poorly ranking URLs that are important?
3. Create internal text links (as opposed to links from menus) to critical pages? A MOZ crawl of our site's URLs is visible at the link below. I am wondering if the structure of the site is just not optimized for ranking and what can be done to improve it. THANKS. https://www.dropbox.com/s/oqchfqveelm1q11/CRAWL www.nyc-officespace-leader.com (1).csv?dl=0 Thanks,
Alan0 -
Domain remains the same IP address is changing on same server only last 3 digits changing. Will this effect rankings
Dear All, We have taken and a product called webacelator from our hosting UKfast and our ip address is changing. UKFasts asked to point DNS to different IP in order to route the traffic through webacelator, which will enhance browsing speed. I am concerned, will this change effect our rankings. Your responses highly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tigersohelll0 -
Does anyone knows when .guru domains will became active or if they are already
Does anyone knows when .guru domains will became active or if they are already
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Block a country, will affect my ranking?
Dear Mozzers, I intend to block some certain countries from viewing my website (including proxy), will it affect my Google ranking? Thank you for your help. BR/Tran
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveTran20130 -
Running Google Ads on the website will impact the Rankings?
Hi, Will Google AdSense those are running above the fold of the website, impact the keywords rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
It appears that Googlebot Mobile will look for mobile redirects from the desktop site, but still use the SEO from the desktop site.
Is the above statement correct? I've read that its better to have different SEO titles & descriptions for mobile sites as users search differently on mobile devices. I've also read it's good to link build, keep text content on mobile sites etc to get the mobile site to rank. If I choose to not have titles & descriptions on my mobile site will Google just rank our desktop version & then redirect a user on a mobile device to our mobile site or should I be adding in titles & descriptions into the mobile site? Thanks so much for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Is it OK to have a site that has some URLs with hyphens and other, older, legacy URLs that use underscores?
I'm working with a VERY large site that has recently been redesigned/recategorized. They kept only about 20% of the URLs from the legacy site, the URLs that had revenue tied to them, and these URLs use underscores. Whereas the new URLs created for the site use hyphens. I don't think that this would be an issue for Google, as long as the pages are of quality, but I wanted to get everyone's opinion on this. Will it hurt me to have two different sets of URLs, those with using hyphens and those using underscores?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Business.com0