Should sitewise links always be branded
-
Hello,
A client has 8 sitewide links with the same anchor text - their main keyword. They have 84 linking root domains total. 3 of the 8 are his own sites. 4 of the sitewide links are in the footer (all 3 of his own sites interlink in the footer) In the last 5 months, rankings for the the top 2 short-tail keywords have dropped even though they should rank higher.
In a few days they're going to do some major rearranging with one of the 8, adding nofollows sitewide because of a partnership disagreement.
Would there be any negative consequences, do you think, to right away changing all of the footer links of the 3 sites that the site owner owns to branded anchor text (domain.com)?
Should we change all the sitewides to branded anchor text?
There have been no problems in GWT.
-
Jamesscaggs,
Do you know if I should avoid making too many anchor text/nofollow changes at one time with more than one sitewide backlink?
-
Should we avoid making too many anchor text / nofollow changes at one time?
-
It's not an exact match domain. The domain contains part of the main keyword phrase
-
Branded sitewide footer links should be ok as long as your domain isn't an EMD. If you do have an EMD then I would not use site-wides and go with advice of Irving about making them homepage only.
-
yea you can definitely do that, I would still get them homepage only since that is the page that passes the most PR anyway and sitewides are dangerous. There is a higher threshold for anchor text with your brand name because Google expects people to link to you that way and it's the name of your company right, your domain name isn't your main keyword I am assuming.
-
I'm thinking branding to clean up the anchor text profile.
We wouldn't want to get suppressed for searches for our brand though.
-
I would definitely not use anchor texts you don't want to be suppressed for. Branding is safest but you could use very long tail with main anchor text so you still have the main keywords but if you get penalized it won't be for the main term.
I would ask the webmaster to make them homepage only and not sitewide.
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
-
Does adding more outgoing links on a high PA page decrease the juice passed to previous links?
Hi, I'm not sure how PA DA exactly works when the goal is to create backlinks to your site in order to have the most impact on passing PA DA juice (if there is such a thing) to ones money site. For example let's say you have a blog and the PA is 40 DA is 30. Let's say I create a backlink pointing to my site on the homepage of this blog, in which I desire better rankings for, and the links I created are only 1-3 outgoing links on this post which is again on the homepage. Then say in a months time, I want to add another post on the homepage (so the 40 PA and 30 DA stays the same) creating a backlink to one of my other money sites. Does adding this second round of backlinks result in sending less juice to the first? This is what I want to know. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | z8YX9F800 -
Is a scholarship seen as buying links?
We work in the student loan debt industry, so providing a scholarship for our viewers makes total sense for our business. Would links to this page be seen by Google as buying links? Does this fall anywhere into gray-hat tactics? My gut tells me no because helping people with student debt is what we do. The scholarship really synergizes with our business model, but who knows..?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DemiGR0 -
Different Hosting Accounts for Linking?
I have several different sites which link to each other (for valid reasons...sister companies etc). Would it be better if these were hosted from different web hosting firms? And if they are hosted by the same hosting company would it be better if they had different accounts and different IP addresses? Not sure I understand C blocks etc. Any tutorial on here about that? I wouls assume it would look better to Google if the links were not from the same IP address. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ebtec0 -
Do image "lightbox" photo gallery links on a page count as links and dilute PageRank?
Hi everyone, On my site I have about 1,000 hotel listing pages, each which uses a lightbox photo gallery that displays 10-50 photos when you click on it. In the code, these photos are each surrounded with an "a href", as they rotate when you click on them. Going through my Moz analytics I see that these photos are being counted by Moz as internal links (they point to an image on the site), and Moz suggests that I reduce the number of links on these pages. I also just watched Matt Cutt's new video where he says to disregard the old "100 links max on a page" rule, yet also states that each link does divide your PageRank. Do you think that this applies to links in an image gallery? We could just switch to another viewer that doesn't use "a href" if we think this is really an issue. Is it worth the bother? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Link Building with a Scholarship
One of my clients is using a scholarship to build links. We have a nofollow PR campaign getting ready to start and are doing some social marketing for the scholarship page on the site. We are also trying to get backlinks from highschools and colleges that link to scholarship opportunities. So far this has been a slow process. Does anybody have any advice for speeding any of this up? Has somebody ever done a campaign like this before? Is there some kind of database with financial aid contact info for a lot of schools? I contact a lot of schools and always tend to get put on the backburner.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
How can i stop such links being indexed
Hi, How can i stop such links being indexed The first link is what i want to stop indexed. We have 1,000's of people writing articles and the below URl shows how many articles each did http://www.somename.com/article/15633 But this is the URl which shows the exact articlehttp://www.Somename.com/article/step-step-installation-ibm-lotus-notesAs both start as thishttp://www.Somename.com/article/How can i set noindex? Should we set for each URL manually one by oneThanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Google Indexing Feedburner Links???
I just noticed that for lots of the articles on my website, there are two results in Google's index. For instance: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html and http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Now my Feedburner feed is set to "noindex" and it's always been that way. The canonical tag on the webpage is set to: rel='canonical' href='http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html' /> The robots tag is set to: name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" /> I found out that there are scrapper sites that are linking to my content using the Feedburner link. So should the robots tag be set to "noindex" when the requested URL is different from the canonical URL? If so, is there an easy way to do this in Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Internal links to blog posts
I am linking manually to blog posts in my site from my Home page. Our site isn't set up with an auto "Recent Posts" that shows on Home. Should I use the exact blog post title as the anchor text or do I need to create something that is not an exact match to the title of the post?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gfiedel0