Video & Image Spam?
-
We have 50 product videos and 100 product images to distribute. For the sake of increasing nofollow Linking Root Domains, my manager wants to distribute them in the following manner:
- 10 Company profiles on 10 video sites, each with 5 videos. The sites to be used are sites like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, etc.
- 10 Company profiles on 10 image sites, each with 10 images. The sites to be used are sites like Photobucket, Flickr, imageshack, Imgur, etc.
My thoughts are that we should stick to one service for video (YouTube) and one service for images (Flickr). We can increase nofollow LRD's by doing some quality blog commenting.
Keep in mind that the product images look great, but the videos are amateur and consist of someone holding the product and discussing it's features. Each vid is around one minute in length.
What do you think of the two approaches and which do you prefer? Do you think creating many profiles will come off too spammy? We are also weathering a Panda penalty and submitting a Reinclusion Request to Google within the next two weeks. Your thoughts are very welcomed and appreciated. Thanks
-
Hey,
So - I actually don't think either of those two strategies are worth considering in order to get more nofollow links. Particularly with YouTube - if you connect your site (by linking) to a video that will inevitably perform poorly on YouTube/vimeo etc - you're just sending negative branding signals about your site back to Google and it wont help you in anyway.
So - my first questions should be - why do you need more nofollow links? A very small percentages (think it's 3% or something) of the webs links are actually nofollow,- and these are typically accrued naturally through profiles, comments, wikipedia articles etc. The only reason i can think of why you might want to be increasing them at a small scale like this would be to cover up a thin and questionable backlink profile. If this is the case, then i don't think this strategy will help to mask the unnatural links/suggest improved quality - especially if you've already been slapped by Panda. Multiple profiles will look spammy and i can't see them helping you in any tangible way.
Probably a better use for your Product videos will be on the site - hosted on a secure third party platform (not YouTube), to show Google that you're expanding your media types and creating richer content. Coming out of a Panda penalty - this seems like a much better thing to be doing and will send the right signals. Additionally - i would use the great images on your site, rather than using other services to post your content for the sake of nofollow links.
Like you suggest, you can increase nofollows from quality comments and profiles generally - but i come back to the question of the underlying purpose here.
So - My suggestion is: Put all the content on your own site only- and securely host the videos with a third party solution (vimeo pro, wistia etc) rather than using YouTube. You don't need to give away content to get nofollow links - but if you're trying to make a bad backlink profile look good - that isn't the way to do it.
Hope that's useful!
Phil
-
Hey, thanks for the reply Nakul
The current link profile is anything but natural and is the main cause of our penalty woes. We are now in the painstaking process of removing as many as possible.
What is the reasoning behind your opinion? Do you think that using multiple sites can possibly hinder our RR? Or, will a larger profile on one property be the most beneficial option?
-
Considering the penalty issues and whether the rest of your link profile is natural or not, I actually recommend sticking with what you are thinking, 1 for YouTube and 1 for Flickr rather then distributing it onto multiple sites for now.
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
-
Spam Score & Redirecting Inbound Links
Hi, I recently downloaded a spreadsheet of inbound links to my client sites and am trying to 301 redirect the ones that are formatted incorrectly or just bad links in general (they all link to the site domain, but they used to have differently formatted urls on their old site, or the link URL in general has strange stuff on it). My question is, should I even bother redirecting these links if their spam score is a little high (i.e. 20-40%)? it already links to the existing domain, just with a differently formatted URL. I just want to make sure it goes to a valid URL on the site, but I don't want to redirect to a valid URL if it's going to harm the client's SEO. Also not sure what to do about the links with the --% spam score. I really appreciate any input as I don't have a lot of experience with how to deal with spammy links.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac260 -
Image redirection: Will it helps or hurts?
Hi all, There are some old images (non-existing now) from our website which have backlinks. We would like to redirect them to some live images to reclaim the backlinks. Is this Okay or sounds suspicious to Google? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How do I get more video reviews on a new site?
Hi, I'm working on a site that has video reviews of various places. It's general information/experience that most people possess and production-wise they are selfies. These videos are then transcribed and, voila... searchable content. My problem is this... how do I get large numbers of people to go to the trouble to make a 2 minute selfie? I thought about HARO, since one could work in a plug for something, but they have a site traffic threshold that this new site isn't at. Any and all ideas on how to efficiently generate this content for a new site with very little traffic would be appreciated. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 945010 -
Advice needed! How to clear a website of a Wordpress Spam Link Injection Google penalty?
Hi Guys, I am currently working on website that has been penalised by Google for a spam link injection. The website was hacked and 17,000 hidden links were injected. All the links have been removed and the site has subsequently been redesigned and re-built. That was the easy part 🙂 The problems comes when I look on Webmaster. Google is showing 1000's of internal spam links to the homepage and other pages within the site. These pages do not actually exist as they were cleared along with all the other spam links. I do believe though this is causing problems with the websites rankings. Certain pages are not ranking on Google and the homepage keyword rankings are fluctuating massively. I have reviewed the website's external links and these are all fine. Does anyone have any experience of this and can provide any recommendations / advice for clearing the site from Google penalty? Thanks, Duncan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Image Optimization & Duplicate Content Issues
Hello Everyone, I have a new site that we're building which will incorporate some product thumbnail images cut and pasted from other sites and I would like some advice on how to properly manage those images on our site. Here's one sample scenario from the new website: We're building furniture and the client has the option of selecting 50 plastic laminate finish options from the Formica company. We'll cut and paste those 50 thumbnails of the various plastic laminate finishes and incorporate them into our site. Rather than sending our website visitors over to the Formica site, we want them to stay put on our site, and select the finishes from our pages. The borrowed thumbnail images will not represent the majority of the site's content and we have plenty of our own images and original content. As it does not make sense for us to order 50 samples from Formica & photograph them ourselves, what is the best way to handle to issue? Thanks in advance, Scott
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ccbamatx0 -
Redirecting an image url to a more SEO friendly image url
We are currently trying to find the best way of making the images on one of our sites more SEO friendly, the easiest way for us would be to redirect the image URL to a more SEO friendly image URL. For example: http://www.website.com/default/cache/file/F8325DA-0A9A-437F-B5D0A4255A066261_medium.jpg redirects to http://www.website.com/default/cache/file/spiral-staircase.jpg Would Google frown upon this as it's saying the image is one thing and then points the user somewhere else?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RedAntSolutions0 -
Are the Majority of SEO Companies 'Spammers, Evildoers, & Opportunists'?
This may not be the most productive Q&A discussion, but I've had some really interesting experiences this last month that have made me even more distrusting of "SEO" companies. I can't help but think of this post (not much has changed since '09). Even though it takes a pretty extreme stance, I agree with the core of it - _"The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web." _ I didn't start doing this type of work wanting to have such a negative opinion of SEO companies, but I just keep having the same experience: I'll get referred to someone who isnt' happy with their SEO company. They send me their web address, I check out the site, and seriously can't believe what I find. MISSING PAGE TITLES, EVERY CANONICAL URL ISSUE IMAGINABLE, AND 10'S OF THOUSANDS OF BOT SPAM EMAT LINKS FROM PAGES LIKE THIS...AND THIS and just recently a company a called one of my clients and conned him into paying for this piece of spam garbage, obviously scraped from the site that I made for him. and what's worse, sometimes for whatever reason these companies will have all the client's FTP and CMS logins and it can be hell trying to get them to hand them over. There's no webmaster tools set up, no analytics, nothing.... These businesses are paying a good chunk of change every month, I just can't believe stuff like this is so common...well acutally, it's what i've come to expect this point. But I used to think most SEO companies actually had their clients best interest at heart. Does every honest consultant out there run into this same type of stuff constantly? How common is this type of stuff really? Now, on to the positive. This community rocks, and I feel like it represents real, ethical, solution-oriented, boundary-less SEO. So thank you Mozzers for all you do. and I love using the tools here to help businesses understand why they need an honest person helping them. If anyone has thoughts on the topic, I'd love to hear 'em...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SVmedia3 -
Who's still being outranked by spam?
Over the past few months, through Google Alerts, I've been watching one of our competitors kick out crap press releases, and links to their site have been popping up all over blog networks with exact match anchor text. They now outrank us for that anchor text. Why is this still happening? Three Penguin updates later and this still happens. I'm trying so hard to do #RCS and acquire links that will ensure our site's long-term health in the SERPs. Is anyone else still struggling with this crap?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | UnderRugSwept2