Some badges will be sitewide, is that OK
-
Hello,
We are making badges to hand out to our alumni.
Some of these links backs are probably going to be sitewide.
Is this tactic still good with respect to the recent G updates?
Thanks
-
Bob, there's nothing 100% safe for the future, Google is a private entity and they make the rules of their own game. However you can 99% sure that links will always be in their algo, just because is the inner nature of the www to have sites interlinked. I imagine that they'll become every day smarter in detecting patterns and automated links or human trying to manipulate the algo, but what they won't never control is human manual editing. It has no (huge) patterns and it's natural which is what they really want.
About your alumnis I don't have the compelte view of your market and situation but if I understand yyour position: they know that they're helping you but you're not giving nothing back to them. I think that since they've studied in your center they've been selected as top alumnis and been given a badge to demonstrate that. If I were them I would like to show it, so ask them to write a post, I think that the value for them here is intangible, jsut ego-boosting you need to play in that ground, I don't know how renowned you are in your market but someone is always happy to be endorsed by a structure (maybe you can offer special linkedin endorsemnent for a really short group with good websites
)
-
Irving, the Guru in who answered below, told me to never purposely do reciprocal links. He told me that in this question:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/a-few-reciprocal-links-ok
I'm open to suggestions on whether reciprocal links are OK and I really appreciate the great ideas.
-
Irving,
Thank you for your comment. It sounds like we're stretching the limits here, when making them dofollow even if it's on one page. This is a long term, play-it safe site with high integrity.
What's 100% safe for the future?
-
use long tails that incorporate your main keyword, so it helps your main keyword, but of you get a penalty for some reason it wil lonly affect that long tail and not your main term
If you can get them on homepage or main LP only I would make them dofollow, but if sitewide I would stick to nofollow - and if you do nofollow then you can use whatever anchor text you like since it's a neutered and safe link.
-
Well it is reciprocal by definition but when there is useful editorial content surrounding the link it's different than a page full of links just pointing back and forth at each other.
-
I like it, but wouldn't that be reciprocal linking?
-
I'm not sure what business you are in but you could take a different approach. Instead of asking for links you could do your own editorial "features" of some of your authoritative blog owning alumni. You could push that on your own blog and then collaborate with them about covering the piece on their site with links back to you as the original source.
Might work but it does really depend on your niche and the relevancy of these blog owning alumni.
-
Sounds good, we'll stick to editorial mention.
We could offer the badges to alumni with blogs that have written a post about us and linked back to our site.
Our relationship to our alumni is very delicate, how can we frame this proposal so that it comes across more mutually beneficial? I don't think in our case we can contact our blog owning alumni and ask a lot of them. Is there a way to make this sound better?
-
If you can get the editorial links by all means go for those first b/c then you can get followed links and have zero risk of penalty. But the response above is correct in that you probably don't want to roll this out before the next major google algo update comes supposedly on Friday.
-
Hi Bob, take into account one thing. Google wants links to be manually edited. Editorial link is good when you hide a link in a widget/badge to receive a link which is not editorially made you're "gaming" the algo. That link is not natural under google eyes. (further listening here).
The idea is good, the implementation not so much. Why not get in touch with your top 50 alumni, ask them to put the badge without any link inside and then ask them to write a post about their happiness of being considered a top alumni or their experience in your school? There they can link back to you (or not!) but it would be definitely higher quality, relevant and moreover editorially made!!!
Also I won't be making heavy linking tests while the next, huge Penguin is in the air
-
Here's what we've decided to do. We'll send out 50 badges to the first 50 alumni that wants them. Then we'll email them a custom embed script. We'll have 50 different alt tags.
Does that work or do the image filenames have to be different as well?
Also, is this safe on into the future of Google?
-
This sounds like a cautious approach. If you are only issuing 30-50 anchor text optimized badges and you vary the anchor text I think you're safe as long as relevancy remains intact.
-
What if we only gave out 30-50 badges to our elite alumni and had them all have different anchor text?
-
I agree you are ok to include links in a badge but the main objective of the badge should be to build brand credibility not build links for the search engines. If you nofollow and stick with branded anchor text I think you are safe. It's a no harm no foul approach erring on the side of caution.
-
Hi Bob, I think that badges are really helpful to build a brand and get renowned in your niche, as more alumni use them the more exposure you'll achieve, however I discourage the usage of this kind of backlinks in your seo linkbuilding strategy since they're not editorially made, and since the link is embedded, it doesn't reflect an user real willing to link to a website. In this video from Matt cutts you can see what I am speaking about. IMO it's still fine to use this kind of links but only if you do the following:
- put a nofollow in it
- don't use rich anchor texts but only your brand name
In this way you'll be sure that no penalty may affect you in the future. Just a general guideline always try to achieve editorially made links. Hope this helps!
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
-
Sitewide links and owned site
Hi everyone, I need the community opinion on something. I am webmarketer and SEO for a pure player who runs a couple of e-commerce sites. On one side we have bigsite.com. It makes all our revenue. I have been in charge for years. Results are good. We have smallsite.com. It is starting. But small revenues for the moment. We have a new SEO working on this. My question is : We always had a banner on bigsite.com's homepage, sending valuable traffic to smallsite.com.T he new SEO, has footer sitewide links from smallsite.com to bigsite.com homepage. Considering both sites share same ssl, server and company name, I am quite sure this is out of google's guide lines and would hurt bigsite.com. Do you agree that this is wrong from the new SEO, and that it could hurt my work and the search results for bigsite.com and smallsite.com, as well as team work ? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kepass0 -
Is ok to add 'no follow' to every outbound link?
How do you handle outbound links from your site?.. do you no follow them all to be on the safe side?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nick-name1230 -
Will using my Homepage as a KW target improve my Inner page Ranking?
Hello your help please! I have 2 KWs that i have targeted Inner pages for and they have got them to page 2 in SERPs, but now its getting difficult to move them up to page 1. Will targeting the home page with a higher authority, for the same terms, help or hinder the inner pages current position? Many Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Will changing my wordpress permalinks add SEO value?
I'm considering changing my permalinks from: http://www.musicliveuk.com/corporate-entertainment-1 http://www.musicliveuk.com/corporate-entertainment-2 to: http://www.musicliveuk.com/corporate-entertainment-london etc... (these are example pages and don't actually exist) as I want to optimise pages for specific cities. This will create a load of 404 errors which I will have to 301 redirect (I presume that's the best way of doing it?). Does having the keyword in the url help and is the added SEO value (if their is any) worth it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Charity project for local women's shelter - need help: will Google notice if you alter the document title with Javascript after the page loads?
I am doing some pro-bono work with a local shelter for female victims of domestic abuse. I am trying to help visitors to the site cover their tracks by employing a document.title change when the page loads using JavaScript. This shelter receives a lot of traffic from Google. I worry that the Google bots will see this javascript change and somehow penalize this site or modify the title in the SERPs. Has anyone had any experience with this kind of javascript maneuver? All help would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jkonowitch0 -
Sitewide blog link and Article links
Hi Guys I just wanted to give you all a heads up on something I adjusted recently that worked really well and wanted to ask for your own experiences on this. 1. We have a blog that adds regular content and within the blog we link from the keyword we are targeting. Standard stuff right ! We were struggling for movement on a keyword so I removed the links from the articles and added a link on the site wide blogroll. The link on the blogroll included the keyword but was a longer descriptive link. Low and behold we got a first page listing when the changed it.The change in ranking was made a few days later. I have always been given the impression that site wide isn't that great ? So explain this one . Of course there are many other factors etc 🙂 What are your experiences and thoughts on what happened here ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0 -
I have a great idea for a contest that will generate links...but how do I promote it when I have little traffic?
I'm working on a new real estate site and I've got some great ideas to generate links. One of these ideas is a pretty neat contest. (I'd tell you what it is, but really...this is one of those ideas where people will go, 'Man! I wish I thought of that', so I want to do it first before anyone else steals my idea. 🙂 ) The contest involves readers submitting photos and other readers voting on them. I anticipate it will generate some good press both locally and internationally if I can get enough submissions. But, the question is, how do I get contest submissions when I don't have good traffic yet? Once I've got some good submissions, I'll contact some media, spread it amongst my personal fb friends, etc. Any ideas are welcomed!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes1 -
Will this internal linking feature cause canonicalization issues?
This is a canonicalization type question, so I believe it should be a pretty straightforward answer. I just haven't had much experience with using the canonical tag so I felt I should ask so I don't blow up my site 🙂 Ok, let's say I have a product page that is at: - www.exampledomain.com/products/nameofproduct Now on that page I have an option to see all of the specs of the product in a collapsible tab which I want to link to from other pages - So the URL to this tab ends from other pages ends up being: - www.exampledomain.com/products/nameofproduct?=productspecs This will link to the tab and default it to open when someone clicks that link on another page. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I understand canonicalization correctly I believe creating this link is going to cause a duplicate page that has the opportunity to be indexed and detract from our SEO to the main product page. My question is... where do I put the "rel=canonical" tag to point the SEO value back to the main page since the page is dynamically generated and doesn't have its own file on the server? - or do even need to be concerned with this? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on any of the above. Like I said - this is something I am fairly familiar with how it works, but I haven't had much experience with using. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler0