Can a company group have reciprocal links on their company websites without being penalised by Google?
-
A client which is part of a group of businesses all within one industry but have different purposes has come to us aith a "brilliant idea" that they all have a blog on their website that links to every business within their group. We are pretty sure that this will be seen as "black hat" by Google, but just wanted to see what you all thought? Thanks!
-
It's not the best idea, as mentioned above.
What tends to work is having them as footer links for people who might be interested in the group of companies. The logical answer is to nofollow these, and they may still pass some benefits without the risk of penalty. However, when you look at large publishing groups for example (I know these well as I've worked for a few), they'll quite often list all their main publication websites in the footer, and also have them all followed.
Now it may be that Google has missed them for a penalty, or it may be as massive publishers and possibly advertisers they're getting more leeway. But it's worth saying that they certainly don't seem to have suffered - there was a case study by Viperchill ages ago covering Hearst http://www.viperchill.com/google-control/
-
It's an awful idea and you need to tell them as their SEO expert.
It's an artificial network and will be seen as manipulation of teh links and nothing more. If there's a good reason for the link then nofollow it and have it there for the UX but otherwise no, no, no! (Did I say no lol?)
-
Make BlogPosts just to be able to link to other own-Domains is wasting time and money.
Make Blog Post for Users wich helps answering questions (wich may earn links) is a better idea for a blog.The "brilliant Idea" starts wrong, I usually dont think "what can I do for search engines" (Admit - years ago I did, I was young and needed the money :D)
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
-
Company is spliting up and moving to new domains, trying to keep link juice going forward
A company I am doing SEO work for is splitting into 3 and will be hosted on three separate domains. I am getting 2 of the 3, however, I am not getting the domain that has most links going to it. What is the best practice to carry any link juice going to my divisions to the new domain names? Should I contact sites linking to my divisions content on the old site and ask them to link to my new sites? Should I do 301 redirects to help carry links to my new sites? Also, I found this guide in moz http://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains its from 2009, but is this still considered the best practices for moving to new domains or is there an updated guide I should be using?
Link Building | | T-wrench0 -
Is a no-follow link/sponsored link a good editorial link?
Ok maybe this is a dumb question. I really need some better, more quality backlinks pointing to my site. There is a site that has domain authority of 72, page rank 5 that is offering me a sponsored blog post. Do sponsored posts count as a good editorial link? Also what if they are no-follow (and how would I find out ahead of time), does that still give me link juice?
Link Building | | tutugirl0 -
There is a New link to my Site but I can see it on link report ?why ?
Hi I found out using link campaign and Open site explorer that my competitors where getting links from this page http://www.visitgreece.gr/en/activities/land_sports/golf So I conatc the admins and added our golf courses too Is the dunes and the bay course in the middle of the page But this happened 3 weeks ago and still this linking domain is not appaering in my campaign why is that any ideas ? does it take so much time to appera to SEOmoz ? Or the problem is because they are linking 2 diffrent sites ? my site is www.costanavarinogolf.com Thanks a lot in advance for your help
Link Building | | grzontan0 -
Can changing our links page make our rankings drop through the floor?
Hi all, When I first started at my current job, most of the link building (aside from submitting to free directories left, right and centre) was replying to every spammy reciprocal email and adding them to our links page! Now we're all a bit wiser about such matters (thanks SEOMoz!), I want to get our links page turned into something actually useful. My plan was to get it neatly categorised, with recommendations, cut out unrelated links that would be useless to visitors and call it something like "Our Friends" I thought this might be useful for future link building efforts, but in its current state, it's a complete mess. However, I am worried about cutting out a lot of links if they have been reciprocal ones. Are the sort of sites that would be sending typical spammy link exchange emails for window installation in NY likely to notice our UK education site taking away their link six months later and take away ours? If they do, will losing links from these sites harm us? Perhaps more importantly, is my plan a terrible idea in the first place? Look forward to hearing from y'all!
Link Building | | TEFLScot0 -
Companies Copy Content with links
One of our customers has been getting a whole bunch of really relevant links recently as many of his competitors are actually going to his site copying the text from his page and forgetting to remove the links that are within the text. Its amazing we have links from major UK providers of his products totally for free. This is where linking to the actual page itself is coming into play and we are gaining good back links. Has anyone else experienced this before ?
Link Building | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Google Penalty for strong industry link?
I work as the SEO manager for a company and we recently launched a new site. Along with this I've been doing some intensive SEO over the past 30 days in getting partners to add or change links and had a big impact on our main keyword, document management software. For the past 2 weeks we've been at position 6 but today I noticed that we dropped down to 11th. I'm wondering if I'm getting penalized for too many exact anchor matches because we recently have been featured on an industry site, cmsreport.com with good anchor text and suddenly we have dropped. Is Google penalizing me for this? If so it seems odd that with legitimate PR and posts I get penalized.
Link Building | | Gerad0 -
Can Referral Programs pass Link Juice?
Does using referral programs, such as by using index.php?referral_id=0001 pass any link juice back to the page index.php? I'm creating a web app that ideally I'd like people to be able to link to and bookmark - so that they can pull up their own settings. Is there any way that I can solve both of these at once? The use of PHP GET and the use of SEO. I'd really like to get a solution as I'm developing my new website! Any help would be appreciated!
Link Building | | tomcraig860