Too many nofollowed blog comments with exact anchor text
-
Back in my dumb days, I decided to use Fiver to get 25 backlinks from .edu sites. Well, they were all nofollowed, and they share space with hundreds of other sites spamming them. Top top it off, all the spam links for my site are exact-match anchor text: embroidered patches.
If you look at my link profile in OSE, it looks so polluted with these. I'm just looking for post-Penguin opinions about this--if it has the potential to hurt.
Since Penguin, I have moved to the #1 position for the KW embroidered patches, but I am still scared that future algorithm tweaks will incorporate this blog comment spam.
What do you think?
-
Since Penguin, I have moved to the #1 position for the KW embroidered patches
Nice work! WooHoo!
-
That's a good idea about the sitewide links thing. I have 12,900 links from one site, so that must be a sitewide thing. The good news is, the rest of my link profile is good, with a lot of varying anchor text. Maybe that's why I haven't been hurt by this one bad thing.
-
"it would be a good time to build some natural links to counterweight the existing ones."
yes exactly, and use completely different anchor texts, stay away from any variations of "embroidered patches"
look at some of the sites that are linking to you and if there are some easy quick wins, like a sitewide link on a bad site with a large index, and has webmaster contact info ask to get it taken down. Sometimes offering $20 via paypal helps get a webmasters attention.
-
Black and white zoo animals--funny. Those are really the only bad links; it's just that they are on high-authority sites, so when you look at my link profile, they're dominating the first two pages, so it looks so bad. But the rest of the links are fine, so I guess I won't worry too overly much.
-
This could potentially cause your website to suffer but it's all about ratio and balance. If the majority of your website's link profile is made up of these types of links, then it would be a good time to build some natural links to counterweight the existing ones.
As long as the positive metrics outweigh the negatives, generally, you should be fine. Just building some links with varying anchor text to the same page should ensure that you're website doesn't get hit further down the line by one of Google's black and white zoo animals.
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
-
Too many dofollow links = penalty?
Hi. I currently have 150 backlinks, 90% of them are dofollow, while only 10% are nofollow. I recently hit position #10 for my main keyword, but now it is dropped to #16 and a lot of related keywords are gone. So I have a few questions: 1. Was my website penalized for having an unnatural backlink profile (too many dofollow links), or maybe this drop in positions is just a temporary, natural thing? 2. Isn’t it too late for making the backlink profile look more natural by building more nofollow backlinks and making it 50%/50%? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NathalieBr0 -
Managing Inbound Anchor Texts
Hey all, I have a web-shop selling server hosting and my home page has over 5000 inbound links from my customers. My question is that most of these have the same anchor text to my homepage which links to my homepage META tags and a few keywords there. Is this good practice? Should the anchor text vary per customer and if so how? I would say no as this is too difficult to manage and doesn't add to the 'user experience' if it does vary but always good to ask others!! Also, as the customers aren't totally relevant to my own product (although the anchor text is) would this also be hurting my ranking? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | darrenbooy0 -
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 -
Would you utilize an industry blog you own in linkbuilding and outreach activities for the same industry?
Much of my company's client base is in the same industry. They are not direct competitors, but do function in different parts of the same industry overall. My company also owns a blog that has been dormant for the past several years with great content that spans the industry's topics I'm interested in revamping this blog as a place where we can do some blogging on behalf of our clients sites and also invite other industry experts to contribute in exchange for contributions to their sites and links back in their content from time to time. I'm curious what your thoughts are on doing something like this. We would maintain a totally white hat approach to the content by avoiding over-linking and probably nofollowing a lot of our links in most cases. I believe it's an excellent resource in our ever-expanding link building and outreach capacity, but I also don't want to do something that's going to be looked at poorly by Google. Please don't rip into me for this being a blackhat or unnatural tactic as it will be fully moderated by our team and will only publish high quality, industry-relevant content. What are your thoughts on how we could pull something like this off and what some of the dangers might be?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CaddisInteractive0 -
Which Large Guest Blog Network is Cutts talking about?
Did you guys see Cutts Last tweet? Today we took action on a large guest blog network. A reminder about the spam risks of guest blogging: goo.gl/cnkoFA Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) Which Large Guest Blog Network is he talking about?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Felip30 -
How should I look to gain traffic for a blog hosted on our own site?
Ok I know what you're going to say.. social media etc right? The problem is we do that already but we're stuck in an industry that just isn't very sexy! People reading twitter/facebook don't want to read about toilets in their spare time, or keep it as a hobby. If you search bathroom blog (uk google), you will see we are about 5th, it gets us no traffic, as I imagine it's not a popular term so I can see you starting to ask why we write a blog in the first place. We write the blog because at the moment the whole industry is dominated by pile it high sell it cheap online stores and all their blogs are written for google only so finding decent or unbiased advice is rare. Seriously, these guys are creating fake blogs and paying for links inside other blogs all over the place in order to boost their rankings so we figure if you really want some good advice people can't find it. If they find our blog they will get some good advice and good content.. and then the hope is that they give us a call and we can see if we can help them. The problem is these guys are hogging all the keywords.. and it seems the bathroom industry has very few keywords that people search! Now I know we are in it for the long haul.. so taking time doesn't bother me, but I was wondering if there were any tried and tested places to post a blog that could get us at least seen so that people could see how different our content is? Or if all else fails, can anyone suggest the right keywords to aim at besides the "bathroom suites" etc that these huge online stores dominate?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | willryles0 -
Do backlinks with good anchor text from bad sites help?
Hi, In the Netherlands, the SEO competition for terms like loans is very competitive. I see a website in this industry that seems to be doing very well based on links with good anchor text from sites that seem quite worthless to me, such as: http://www.online-colleges-helper.com/ and http://www.alohapath.com/ My question is: is it worth pursuing this type of links? I assume these must be paid links, or am I wrong? I'd really rather not go down this route but I don't want to be outranked by someone who is using these types of links... Many thanks in advance for any type of insight! Annemieke
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AnnemiekevH0 -
Too many links with the same Anchor-text?
My first question at SeoMoz: Recently my gambling site has been experimenting a subtle yo-yo effect for our most sought-after keyword. A month ago we legitimately added a PR-6 inbound link with that keyword (tragamonedas) from an institutional site of our own development. We are worried that google might have regarded that move as an illegitimate link acquisition, since those apparent troubles with our keyword appear to have started right after that link was processed. Is it too late to change the anchor text, in case that action might deliver positive results? Also, we might have focused too much on the very same keyword in our link building campaign. Can a constant repetition of the same anchor harm our indexing reputation? Thank you in advance and good SEO luck, Andi.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | castano0