How to Explain The Danger of Link Networks
-
A client of mine has been approached by a company that sets up one-off private link networks like this:
Main site: http://www.klausparking.com/
Network sites:
http://www.carparkingtechnology.com/
http://www.carparkingsystem.com/
http://www.victoriaparking.net/
http://www.reginaparking.com/
http://www.torontoparking.net/
http://www.multicarparkingsystem.com/
http://www.carparkingsolutions.com/The company doing this actually promotes this as a patent-pending feature they call "silos". How do I explain the real danger to my client?
-
ouch that's going to be hard unless the client is really open to talking to you and actually wants to trust you.
They usually are guaranteed something when it comes to "services" like that vs traditional seo where you offer audits, "long term", "outreach" and words that tell them that it's going to **"take time" **
What I would do is just tell them that it is their decision if they want to go with them and you as a friend, would like to ask him to check out these (then name articles about it penguin or penalties)
Ask them if they are willing to change their domain in the future once they get dropped by google.
And if their site gets destroyed by google, then they will have to pay you 4 times the amount to help them recover which isn't always guaranteed.
Worked for me, should work for you.
-
Link networks have been slammed time and time again. Here's one I wrote specifically about one of the larger private blog networks:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/unnatural-link-warnings-blog-networks-advice
The problem with these sites is the either don't have any link equity - and thus their links count for nothing - or they get link equity from spammy sites. It only takes one site to get the entire web of sites caught. Google might move slowly on link spam, but they have shown they take strong and unforgiving action, as witnessed by Penguin and similar updates.
Just think about the opportunity cost of using these link networks rather than pursuing a legitimate means of promotion. If you get caught, all your work is gone. Worse, you're in a far worse position than when you started.
I have personally been approached by large brands using link networks who were then penalized. One online company people know came to us having invested heavily into link networks. They lost all that work, they were losing hundreds of thousands each week in sales due to penalty, and it cost them tens of thousands to fix.
I would only try link networks for brand new sites in certain highly-competitive industries - casinos, adult, etc. For anyone else, it's not worth the risk and opportunity cost.
-
Wayne,
I am a small business owner. I have done my own SEO, hired consultants, and worked with SEO firms - the whole gamut. I have a lot of personal experience in this area and bottom line it just isn't worth the resources involved, mainly the money, in my opinion.
I can guess who this company is based on what you said at the end...sort of rings a bell.
Any gains that are made will be short term and typically won't last. Google WILL eventually sniff these sites out. No matter how crafty they are, not matter what they tell you, Google will find it and a) deindex the site or 2) devalue the link from the site. The footprint and/or quality and content will get you. In your examples, almost all these sites are set up the exact same way. Google can smell that a mile away.
I have done this myself as well as paid different companies to do it for me. I have gone through hurdles (and I guarantee you more than they company they are paying will do) to ensure I have virtually zero footprint and to keep good content. I have over 70 now and very few are worthwhile.
At the end of the day, to continue to be worthwhile these sites will need QUALITY content. The amount of content and effort it will take for these sites to provide any sort of SEO boost for them would be better served on their own site's content, viral marketing, social signals, etc.
I am not trying to be pessimistic or paint too broad of a brush stroke but think of it this way. In the above example there are 7 network sites. The cost will really start piling up. Registration fees, hosting, the content (and it won't be quality all the time) and the ongoing cost to maintain these sites get big. So your client has piled all this money into a short term solution that can literally be snatched away overnight.
Spend the money on substance, quality of quantity. I am sitting on 70 worthless sites that I have spend thousands on.
-
It sounds like you are talking about "doorway pages". This practice can get their website penalized, or even de-indexed from Google’s search results.
You can send them to this link on Google Webmaster Central, which explains it all:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2721311
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
-
Want to remove a large amount of links from spam sites. SEO company says we will lose a lot of link juice?
Hi, We have a lot of links that have a spam score above 30% and 60%. I don't know if someone has spammed our website. However our SEO company has said we should remove these carefully over a period of 3 months while they add new good links. I don't quite trust this advice. Are they trying to get more business?? They have put doubt in our mind. Can anyone please shed any light on this?? Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | YvonneDupree0 -
How Can I Safely Establish Homepage Relevancy With Internal Keyword Links?
My website has roughly 1000-2000 pages. However, our homepage is lacking relevancy as to what it is about. One way that I'd like to tackle this problem, is by updating many of our pages with internal linking. I often hear, use exact keyword links with caution, but have assumed this mainly referred to external backlinks. Would it be a disaster to set up our single most relevant keyword on about 300 pages and point it to our homepage? There are breadcrumbs on our site, but the home link uses an image (It's a picture of a house, if you're curious.) Am I better off just to change that to our most relevant keyword? I could use any advice on internal links for establishing better homepage relevancy. Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | osaka730 -
Noindexed Pages with External Links Pointing to it: Does the juice still pass through?
I have a site with many many pages that have very thin content, yet they are useful for users/visitors. Those pages also have many external links pointing to them from reputable and authoritative websites. If i were to noindex/follow these pages, will the juice/value from the external links still pass through just as if the page didn't have the noindex tag? Please let me know!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | juicyresults0 -
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 -
Using a geolocation service to serve different banners in homepage. Dangers? Best Practices?
Hello, our website is used by customer in more than 100 countries. Becasuse the countries we serve are so many, we are using one single domain and homepage, without country specific content. Now, we are considering to use an geolocation service to identify the customer location and then to change the contents of one banner in the home page accordingly. Might this be dangerous from a SEO perspective? If yes, any suggesiton on how can we implement this to avoid troubles and penalties form the Search Engines? Thanks in advance for any help,Dario
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Darioz0 -
NoFollow tag for external links: Good or bad?
I have a few sites that have tens of thousands of links on them (most of them are sourcing images that happen to be external links). I know that it's a good thing to externally link to reputable sources, but is it smart to place the nofollow tag on ALL external links? I'm sure there is a good chance that external links from posts from years ago are pointing to sites that may now be penalized. I feel as though nofollowing all the external links could come off as unnatural. What are the pros and cons of placing the nofollow tag on ALL external links, and also if I leave it as is and don't put the nofollow tag on them. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
I've done some link building on my website... why is google showing this?
Hi guys, it seems Google is going crazy as always, basically sometimes i'm ranked first page sometimes i'm not there, not sure if it's because of my link building and Google is indexing the links. At the moment in IE i'm top 3-4 for this keyword however the Title tag is not what I set it to be it's basically taking the product name then adding something after it. (I know google sometimes changes to what they want if they feel its more relevant but it isn't in this case) Not sure if this is normal for my keyword to keep appearing then dissapearing in Google. I noticed in FF my keyword isn't there but in IE it is. I've logged out of my Google account deleted all history/cookies etc. Even checked on my friends computer. Hope this makes sense and i'm not going crazy!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | InkCartridgesFast0 -
Is it worthwhile to remove a large quantity of lesser quality links if you are able to do so easily?
So I've recently started working at a new company where I lead up their SEO efforts. In regards to link building I've discovered that a little over 75% of the anchor text on the links to the homepage (at least of the 10k SEOmoz provides) are non branded keywords. We don't appear to have any penalties, however, in my opinion we have what is an unnatural link profile for our homepage. As I investigated further I've noticed that a lot of these links (not all) are from irrelevant blogs where the link is found in the footer. (Clearly this was the result of some less than ideal get links quick strategy that was implemented in the past.) At first I was overwhelmed thinking that I'd have to try and contact these sites individually to see if I could get the link removed, however, I soon discovered that the site these links are actually linking to is not our domain, but is instead a domain that redirects to our site. So this brings me to my question: Should I remove the redirect from this other site to rid myself of these links. The white hat side of me strongly thinks this is a good step forward, however, a small part of me wonders what the ramifications would be. These types of redirects seem to account for a fairly high number of links, however what value that actually contribute is difficult to know. Any thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Poindexter0