Blogging on Drupal Blogs. White Hat or ?
-
Recently, we noticed a website in our site rise higher in SERP shortly after launching. The key strategy they are using is to Blog on High PR Drupal Blogs, which allow you to create profile and write articles.
What does the community here think of such tactic. Is it a grey area, or considered a White Hat technique?
-
You're asking if, independent of content, can the a CMS, such as Drupal ( or Joomla or Wordpress, etc) help your rankings, is that right?
The answer to that would be no. A CMS can hurt your SEO and it can make SEO easier or more difficult but which CMS is used is not a search engine ranking factor.
-
Thanks Chris.
In terms of their tactics, they use article spinning, which we all know will not work in long run.
The one question is around the type of Drupal sites. Lot of these are from non-English sites, covering cooking, imperialism etc etc. whereas the links are to an online coupon site, and seems irrelevant. I would think that the domain/type of blog would play a role in passing PageRank. Further, they have thousands of links (using Scrapebox) I believe, as they have single user create these links. Source of this information is Ahrefs (and Open Site Explorer) data. There could well be other things that help them, and we dont see it.
My biggest question is does posting high quality content to High PR Drupal blog help.
Thanks again for your valuable inputs
-
Potter,
There' nothing inherently wrong with that and ypically, you wouldn't consider the site's platform to play a part in a site's ranking ability.
Writing good quality articles and getting them posted individually on other blogs is not considered black hat. Done correctly, this is high-quality marketing effort that can build brand recognition and promote social sharing.
The other side of the coin would be writing low-quality articles and posting them to article marketing sites in the hopes that they'll be distributed to hundreds of other sites. Whether that this tactic is black hat or not may be open to interpretation, but as an effective SEO strategy, it's not something you want to bank on and it could leave you open to a google penalty in the future.
The third side of the coin would be creating empty profiles on forum-type sites just to get a link from the profile to your site. This can often be done on a large scale by low-end link builders, there aren't usually articles involved, and the links back to the site usually have very targeted anchor text. This would be considered a black hat effort and they stand a chance of getting knocked out of the search results for it, at some point in the future.
There may be other things that are helping that site rank better than yours other than what you mentioned. Just as likely, there are things that you should be doing to help yourself that you're not doing. If the other guy is just doing the second and/or third things mentioned above and their site is out performing yours, then you need to get to work doing some real marketing and yours will easily reclaim its position.
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
-
How to make second site in same niche and do white hat SEO
Hello, As much as we would like, there's a possibility that our site will never recover from it's Google penalties. Our team has decided to launch a new site in the same niche. What do we need to do so that Google will not mind us having 2 sites in the same niche? (Menu differences, coding differences, content differences, etc.) We won't have duplicate content, but it's hard to make the sites not similar. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
What are effective ways of finding people to link to my blog post?
So I spent ages creating amazing content and have loads of interest in it from my social media and people visiting my site are reading deep into it. I have so far not been able to get anyone to link to it. What am I doing wrong???
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Johnny_AppleSeed0 -
Domain.com/XXX or domain.com/blog/XXX ?
i have a business and a side blog on the website. is it fine to turn my blog to domain.com/XXX instead of domain.com/blog/XXX? does it in anyway of these affect the SEO?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon0 -
Post-Penguin 2.0 Gust Blogging
I'm really just curious about everyone’s thoughts on post-Penguin 2.0 guest blogging. Is it still a viable option for link building? Is there anything you should proactively do to make it "safe"? What makes a guest blog post "advertorial" (or would it never be, if it is clearly marked as a guest post with a writer's bio)? Will moderate guest blogging on highly related, top ranked sites ever be a prime target for Google updates? I feel like guest blogging is still a viable way to build links, as long as it is on high quality and highly relevant sites that post content people actually read. Limit the number of links to 1-3 for every post, use generic or branded text as anchor text rather than your "top keyword" anchor text of old, and make the content interesting (educational or funny, not just for the sake of getting links) and completely unique to the site you are posting on. Just my 2 cents. Anyone else?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jaredkipe0 -
Setting up a Blog for more inbound links
Site A is my Main Site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CLTMichael
Site B is my Blog. Is using site B to link back to site A a good idea or should site A have it's own blog going after keywords?1 -
Recovering From Black Hat SEO Tactics
A client recently engaged my service to deliver foundational white hat SEO. Upon site audit, I discovered a tremendous amount of black hat SEO tactics employed by their former SEO company. I'm concerned that the efforts of the old company, including forum spamming, irrelevant backlink development, exploiting code vulnerabilities on BB's and other messy practices, could negatively influence the target site's campaigns for years to come. The site owner handed over hundreds of pages of paperwork from the old company detailing their black hat SEO efforts. The sheer amount of data is insurmountable. I took just one week of reports and tracked back the links to find that 10% of the accounts were banned, 20% tagged as abusive, some of the sites were shut down completely, WOT reports of abusive practices and mentions on BB control programs of blacklisting for the site. My question is simple. How does one mitigate the negative effects of old black hat SEO efforts and move forward with white hat solutions when faced with hundreds of hours of black gunk to clean up. Is there a clean way to eliminate the old efforts without contacting every site administrator and requesting removal of content/profiles? This seems daunting, but my client is a wonderful person who got in over her head, paying for a service that she did not understand. I'd really like to help her succeed. Craig Cook
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOptPro
http://seoptimization.pro
info@seoptimization.pro0 -
Understanding competitors link building tactics (possibly black hat stuff that seems to work)
So checking out the backlinks on a competitor’s page for a term I’m looking to work on, a page they rank pretty well for, I can’t but happen to note the kinds of sites that grant this company – who are well known in their field – its successes. Many of the links to this page I’m interested in appear within short articles on blogs, really bad Wordpress blogs that are certainly just for SEO use. My questions are: Where do people usually source these blogs which typically contain material on a range of different topics? Are these probably paid links? How do they get so much content out there, albeit similar content, to so many of the hastily cobbled efforts? Would that be an agency with connections or a blogging community site? How can any search engine lend credibility to my competitor’s links when the article below has nonsense for penis enlargement stuff. Seriously?!? How are they not being penalised? It’s frustrating because these aren’t the tactics I want to employ but they seems to offer success, but also, if your link is in an article that followed by another on penis pills, how I can take Google seriously in its stated aim of making things this prone to manipulation.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0