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..?
-
Am I missing something? From the why you described it, I really don't see how this can be considered "buying a link" at all. If you told University X, we will do a scholarship specifically for your students, onliy if you link to it, then, sure, that makes sense. However, if the scholarship isn't directly tied to a particular school, then I don't see the problem.
If this is considered buying links and can be penalized, then wouldn't that mean any contests, give-a-ways or sponsorships that a site creates, and then that someone else links to would be violating google's guidelines?
- Ruben
-
Thanks Chris for the response. I agree with you as well, I think the links are coming only because its a legitimate scholarship opportunity from a business that focuses on helping people with their student debt issues. If Google see this as spammy, it seems to me they would be making a mistake on how our particular business should promote itself. I dont know what can be said about our commitment to the student loan disaster than "We really do want to help our users, to show that here's $2,000 to help pay for school".
A couple larger universities shared our scholarship on FB and Twitter and got us a lot of traffic and new links as well, seems pretty authentic to me and I believe google should look at this way as well.
-
Thanks for these links. Lots of useful info I should have searched first i guess. I agree with your take home message.
-
As I see it DemiGR, if you have an event such as the giveaway of a scholorship and you promote that event as any legitimate event might be promoted--via social media, via press release, via your website, via press--and others recognize the value in promoting it themselves and they link to it (or not) as they see fit, it seems it would build brand awareness and awareness for the event and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Promote the event, not the link and if the right event is promoted in the right way, links may happen.
-
I agree with Andy. Google is probably aware of this tactic. Although the links aren't completely "editorial" in the purest sense, if you are chasing links from universities or colleges, many of them won't link to your scholarship page unless the award you are providing is relevant and valuable to their students - eg faculty of medicine linking to an award for med students. Many of the bigger schools don't even list awards below a certain amount.
This issue has come up for discussion in the Q&A before:
http://moz.com/community/q/creating-a-scholarship-for-seo
http://moz.com/community/q/link-building-with-a-scholarship
and on YouMoz (promoted to main page):http://moz.com/blog/5-link-building-tactics-to-improve-your-local-rankings
**Take home message: **Scholarships can be a part of your link building activities but make them legit and make sure that it isn't the only thing that you are doing.
-
There is no telling if Google are going to see this as a problem or not - until it's too late.
If you are doing this only for the fact you want to offer a scholarship and not expecting links, then the safe thing is to ask for the links to be no-followed. It's hardly a drastic step and it keeps you safe.
Remember, Google aren't going to have a conversation with you about what you are doing - it will either happen or it wont.
-Andy
-
The organization revolves around helping people with their student loans. We offer resources on how to avoid student debt, how to take action on student debt, and other tips for college kids. The scholarship is something we would have done whether we got 5000 links to it or zero, so we arent doing it for the purpose of getting links. That being said, its a really nice side benefit because we are getting some good links from it.
The scholarship helps promote our business and out commitment to helping address the student loan crisis in the USA. We could request the links be no-followed, but that seems to be drastic unless its clear Google penalizes this, no? Its not as if we are an auto repair shop offering a scholarship.
-
Thank you Andy - you've struck a chord with me here. Good point, well made!
-
"My gut tells me no because helping people with student debt is what we do"
Well, is it being done for links? This is something that is quite a common link building tactic, so Google are probably already on to it. That said, you can always request any links to be nofollowed - that should stop Google seeing it as a link tactic.
It does fall within the darker side of link building as it isn't really an editorially gained link - other sites have been penalised for 'buying-links-in-a-not-really-buying-links' manner before.
-Andy
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
-
Will link juice still be passed if you have the same links in multiple, outreach articles?
We are developing high quality, unique content and sending them out to bloggers to for guest posts. In these articles we have links to 2 to 3 sites. While the links are completely relevant, each article points to the same 2 to 3 sites. The link text varies slightly from article to article, but the linked-to site/URLs remain the same. We have read that it is best to have 2 to 3 external links, not all pointing to the same site. We have followed this rule, but the 2 to 3 external sites are the same sites on the other articles. I'm having a hard time explaining this, so I hope this makes sense. My concern is, will Google see this as a pattern and link juice won't be passed to the linked-to URLs, or worst penalize all/some of the sites being linked to or linked from? Someone I spoke to had suggest that my "link scheme" describes a "link wheel" and the site(s) will be penalized by Penguin. Is there any truth to this statement?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cutopia0 -
Should we optimise our internal links?
Hi again, We recently had a technical search audit done by a specialist agency and they discovered a number of internal links that caused redirects to happen. The agency has recommended we update all of these links to link directly to the destination so we don't lose out on link equity. We'd just like to know if you think this would be a worthwhile use of our time. Our web team seem to think that returning a 301 to a crawler means that the crawler will stop indexing the original URL and instead index the redirected destination? Thanks all. Clair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iescape2 -
Does Navigation Bar have an effect on the link juice and the number of internal links?
Hi Moz community, I am getting the "Avoid Too Many Internal Links" error from Moz for most of my pages and Google declared the max number as 100 internal links. However, most of my pages can't have internal links less than 100, since it is a commercial website and there are many categories that I have to show to my visitors by using the drop down navigation bar. Without counting the links in the navigation bar, the number of internal links is below 100. I am wondering if the navigation bar links affect the link juice and counted as internal links by Google. The Same question also applies to the links in the footer. Additionally, how about the products? I have hundreds of products in the category pages and even though I use pagination I still have many links in the category pages (probably more than 100 without even counting the navigation bar links). Does Google count the product links as internal links and how about the effect on the link juice? Here is the website if you want to take a look: http://www.goldstore.com.tr Thank you for your answers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onurcan-ikiz0 -
Hammered by Spam links
When we moved from one host to another in Wordpress engine, we had this insertion weird redirect thing happen. We 410'd the page cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi, but it hit us hard in the anchors. If you go to ahrefs, we are literally all Asian in anchors text. Anybody have any suggestions, thank goodness it looks like it finally stopped. I am looking for creative ways to repopulate our back end with the right stuff. Any thoughts would be great! Heres a example: allartalocaltours.com/tumi-tote-401.html ↳customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi ↳www.customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi ↳lockwww.customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattguitar990 -
Wrong titles in site links
Hello fellow marketers, I have found this weird thing with our website in the organic results. The sitelinks in the SERP shows wrong written text. As in grammatically incorrect text. My question is where does Google get the text from? It is not the page title as we can see it. kKsFv0X.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | auke18101 -
Disavow Links Notification
No manual actions on our sites, just Penguin related. I put in a disavow for one site in October and Webmaster Tools kept a message up for some time saying the disavow links file for that site had been updated. I put in a disavow for another site of ours last week and I've had no such message. I checked and the file is there. Was this an intentional change on Google's part? Just want to make sure something's not messed up here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
PR links
Its seems that at lot of or competitors are using PR site to place articles with links. They are using the same article across many sites with the same anchor text link - But they seem to be doing very well in the rankings.... I have steered away from this type of linking as I assumed Google wouldn't be keen on this type of activity but I seem to be wrong.... Any views on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Aside from creative link bait, what's a solid link building strategy involve?
All things considered, directories, blogs, articles, press releases, forums, social profiles, student discount pages, etc, what do you consider to be a strong, phased, link building strategy? I'm talking beyond natural/organic link bait, since many larger accounts will not allow you to add content to their website or take 6 months to approve a content strategy. I've got my own list, but would love to hear what the community considers to be a strong, structured, timeline-based strategy for link building.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevewiideman1