WordPress Plugin Backlink?
-
When developing a WordPress plugin, is it OK to include a dofollow backlink with the name of the source site as the anchor text? Or would Google consider this spammy?
-
Taking a hit for manipulative tactics is usually something of a percentage game, one you don't want to play. The competitor may have an older domain and a stronger backlink profile. Sooner or later, even the larger brands get hit.
It was was a few years ago, almost to the day, that JC Penney was outed by the New York Times. This prompted a manual action. Your competitor may well fall to the next Penguin filter.
I've seen manipulation in a number of industries, sometimes it just takes time. Other times it takes someone with a little more clout. Though we can likely count on Penguin becoming a part of the algorithm, and we will most likely see another Penguin filter.
-
That is funny how that worked out. I used to live in Far North Dallas when I worked with a previous agency. Feel free to drop a private message.
-
Hi JaBacchetta,
Matt Cutts is quite clear about follow and nofollow links in widgets - see attached YouTube movie. Why your competitor was able to do a similar kind of thing and didn't got penalised is always the question.Are you 100% sure he hasn't received a warning. Maybe your competitor states upfront very clear a link is included.
Also it is unknown when you receive a visit from a crawler. So could be your competitor was just visit before the plugin went live, and you were visit after it was just live. I would also advice to take out the follow link a use a nofollow version.
How you will recover is depending on to many factors as the algoritme changes every day / week. Good luck with it.
-
Travis, by the way, looked up your company in Grapevine, TX... looks like we live right down the street from each other. I'm in the Keller area.
Small world.
-
Thanks for the replies. I'm going to get a bit more specific...
If you look at this page, in the top right sidebar, you'll find our WordPress widget in action. It shows a "Quote of the Day" with a quote from our website, and then it links to our site using our site's name as the anchor text. My thoughts on this are that we're providing value to other publishers, and they're feeding our content to their site (which qualifies as an endorsement of the content that we offer, which in turn validates a dofollow link). We're also using our site's name as the anchor text, rather than a keyword-stuffed link. This technique is clearly white-hat, in my opinion.
But, apparently Google did not like the idea. Since releasing the plugin 10 days ago, our rankings have dropped significantly across the board.
We're using 97thFloor as our SEO agency at the moment. Initially they said they thought the plugin might be a good idea, but they called me today to tell me to nofollow all the links, since our total backlinks had tripled in the last week, which they believe caused the rankings to drop.
We updated the plugin tonight to include nofollow on the backlink.
Interestingly, one of our competitors in the niche released a similar plugin, seen here. And their dofollow link is actually black-hat, with the anchor text being "more Quotes". They have not taken a hit at all. Is this because they've already got an established backlink profile?
And, now that we've nofollowed our plugin link, is it likely that our rankings will improve back to their original positions?
Appreciate any thoughts on this. Thanks!
-
Very. Bad. Idea. This is exactly the kind of manipulative linking process that Google punishes with the Penguin part of their algorithm. At best, use a nofollowed link, but I'd be very reluctant to do this at all if these will be sitewide links and will be a really large proportion of your total backlink profile.
If you stop and think about this for a moment, you'll see why this is so risky. Certainly many who might use your plugin have quality sites. But many more of the sites that will be linking to you are likely to be questionable or downright spammy. Plus, almost none of them are likely to be related to what your site is about.
All these things combine to create the very definition of unnatural linking in Google's eyes.
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
That likely falls into the Link Scheme category. I wouldn't recommend it.
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
-
High Rank and Traffic of low DA and Backlinks
Hi guys, is a pleasure being a part of this community, hope in learning a lot with you guys, i just started a year learning about SEO and it been a big journey. I was looking at some competition of some websites that i been optmizing, and i found a website that called my attention and i cant figure out whats going on, it haves huge traffic but in terms of technicall SEO is really week, and not just this but also in terms of DA and backlinks (most of them spammy - 20 backlinks), the domain in question is bhnews.com.br I notice that doesnt have any social media, not analytics, etc. The only thing that i notice is that there is a website or a company called "BH news" (televesion), but its not related with it, since the type of information that bhnews.com.br presents is "lottery" results. So this kind of situation confuses me a lot, because is a lot of hard work in optmizing a website to rank in google, and than i come a across with this type of website with 20 backlinks (most of anchor or name of domain), and than haves like 2M visits per month and ranks for keywords related with the this type of sites of lottery. Can someone tell me if there is some kind of black seo, or something that is making this rank so high? regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jogobicho0 -
301 Redirect Backlinks from Forbes,CNN.
Hello, I have seen on many places people are selling 301 Redirect Links Via Top Authority websites Like Forbes,CNN etc . How do they do it? and is it safe to have such links? I have researched a lot but not found any useful information to implement it. Any Idea how to do it? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ademirates0 -
Forcing Google to Crawl a Backlink URL
I was surprised that I couldn't find much info on this topic, considering that Googlebot must crawl a backlink url in order to process a disavow request (ie Penguin recovery and reconsideration requests). My trouble is that we recently received a great backlink from a buried page on a .gov domain and the page has yet to be crawled after 4 months. What is the best way to nudge Googlebot into crawling the url and discovering our link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Choice0 -
How to add more quality backlink with moz tools or any good option
How to add more quality backlink with moz tools or any good option
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Poojath0 -
Tags on WordPress Sites, Good or bad?
My main concern is about the entire tags strategy. The whole concept has really been first seen by myself on WordPress which seems to be bringing positive results to these sites and now there are even plugins that auto generate tags. Can someone detail more about the pros and cons of tags? I was under the impression that google does not want 1000's of pages auto generated just because of a simple tag keyword, and then show relevant content to that specific tag. Usually these are just like search results pages... how are tag pages beneficial? Is there something going on behind the scenes with wordpress tags that actually bring benefits to these wp blogs? Setting a custom coded tag feature on a custom site just seems to create numerous spammy pages. I understand these pages may be good from a user perspective, but what about from an SEO perspective and getting indexed and driving traffic... Indexed and driving traffic is my main concern here, so as a recap I'd like to understand the pros and cons about tags on wp vs custom coded sites, and the correct way to set these up for SEO purposes.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com1 -
Is there a problem here - lots of backlinks from subdomains
Hi - just been looking at a clients backlinks and seeing a couple of hundred from this website - from different subdomains. http://www.wales.info/ is the main url then you have loads of subdomains: e.g. http://esplanade-hotel.wales.info/areasite_list.asp?Curpage=7&q_group=7 - all with follow backlinks pointing at the same bed and breakfast / hotel / hostel. I'm tempted to remove my listing or request nofollow links. Is that the right thing to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Finding and Removing bad backlinks
Ok here goes. Over the past 2 years our traffic and rankings have slowly declined, most importantly, for keywords that we ranked #1 and #2 at for years. With the new Penguin updates this year, we never saw a huge drop but a constant slow loss. My boss has tasked me with cleaning up our bad links and reshaping our link profile so that it is cleaner and more natural. I currently have access to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, SEOMoz, and Link Builder. 1)What is the best program or process for identifying bad backlinks? What exactly am I looking for? Too many links from one domain? Links from Low PR or low “Trust URL” sites? I have gotten conflicting information reading about all this on the net, with some saying that too many good links(high PR) can be unnatural without some lower level PR links, so I just want to make sure that I am not asking for links to be removed that we need to create or maintain our link profile. 2)What is the best program or process for viewing our link profile and what exactly am I looking for? What constitutes a healthy link profile after the new google algorithm updates? What is the best way to change it? 3)Where do I start with this task? Remove spammy links first or figure out or profile first and then go after bad links? 4)We have some backlinks that are to our old .aspx that we moved to our new platform 2 years ago, there are quite a few (1000+). Some of these pages were redirected and some the redirects were broken at some point. Is there any residual juice in these backlinks still? Should we fix the broken redirects, or does it do nothing? My boss says the redirects wont do anything now that google no longer indexes the old pages but other people have said differently. Whats the deal should we still fix the redirects even though the pages are no longer indexed? I really appreciate any advice as basically if we cant get our site and sales turned around, my job is at stake. Our site is www.k9electronics.com if you want to take a look. We just moved hosts so there are some redirect issues and other things going on we know about.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | k9byron0 -
Backlinks
When examining our inventory of backlinks (and our competition's), is it more important to look at overall domain authority or page authority where the backlink comes from?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Relfdy250