Video & Image Spam?
-
We have 50 product videos and 100 product images to distribute. For the sake of increasing nofollow Linking Root Domains, my manager wants to distribute them in the following manner:
- 10 Company profiles on 10 video sites, each with 5 videos. The sites to be used are sites like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, etc.
- 10 Company profiles on 10 image sites, each with 10 images. The sites to be used are sites like Photobucket, Flickr, imageshack, Imgur, etc.
My thoughts are that we should stick to one service for video (YouTube) and one service for images (Flickr). We can increase nofollow LRD's by doing some quality blog commenting.
Keep in mind that the product images look great, but the videos are amateur and consist of someone holding the product and discussing it's features. Each vid is around one minute in length.
What do you think of the two approaches and which do you prefer? Do you think creating many profiles will come off too spammy? We are also weathering a Panda penalty and submitting a Reinclusion Request to Google within the next two weeks. Your thoughts are very welcomed and appreciated. Thanks
-
Hey,
So - I actually don't think either of those two strategies are worth considering in order to get more nofollow links. Particularly with YouTube - if you connect your site (by linking) to a video that will inevitably perform poorly on YouTube/vimeo etc - you're just sending negative branding signals about your site back to Google and it wont help you in anyway.
So - my first questions should be - why do you need more nofollow links? A very small percentages (think it's 3% or something) of the webs links are actually nofollow,- and these are typically accrued naturally through profiles, comments, wikipedia articles etc. The only reason i can think of why you might want to be increasing them at a small scale like this would be to cover up a thin and questionable backlink profile. If this is the case, then i don't think this strategy will help to mask the unnatural links/suggest improved quality - especially if you've already been slapped by Panda. Multiple profiles will look spammy and i can't see them helping you in any tangible way.
Probably a better use for your Product videos will be on the site - hosted on a secure third party platform (not YouTube), to show Google that you're expanding your media types and creating richer content. Coming out of a Panda penalty - this seems like a much better thing to be doing and will send the right signals. Additionally - i would use the great images on your site, rather than using other services to post your content for the sake of nofollow links.
Like you suggest, you can increase nofollows from quality comments and profiles generally - but i come back to the question of the underlying purpose here.
So - My suggestion is: Put all the content on your own site only- and securely host the videos with a third party solution (vimeo pro, wistia etc) rather than using YouTube. You don't need to give away content to get nofollow links - but if you're trying to make a bad backlink profile look good - that isn't the way to do it.
Hope that's useful!
Phil
-
Hey, thanks for the reply Nakul
The current link profile is anything but natural and is the main cause of our penalty woes. We are now in the painstaking process of removing as many as possible.
What is the reasoning behind your opinion? Do you think that using multiple sites can possibly hinder our RR? Or, will a larger profile on one property be the most beneficial option?
-
Considering the penalty issues and whether the rest of your link profile is natural or not, I actually recommend sticking with what you are thinking, 1 for YouTube and 1 for Flickr rather then distributing it onto multiple sites for now.
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
-
Whitehat site suffering from drastic & negative Keyword/Phrase Shifts out of the blue!
I am the developer for a fairly active website in the education sector that offers around 30 courses and has quite an actively published blog a few times a week and social profiles. The blog doesn't have comments enabled and the type of visitor that visits is usually looking for lessons or a course. Over the past year we have had an active input in terms of development to keep the site up to date, fast and following modern best practises. IE SSL certificates, quality content, relevant and high powered backlinks ect... Around a month ago we got hit by quite a large drop in our ranked keywords / phrases which shocked us somewhat.. we attributed it to googles algorithm change dirtying the waters as it did settle up a couple of weeks later. However this week we have been smashed again by another large change dropping almost 100 keywords some very large positions. My question is quite simple(I wish)... What gives? I don't expect to see drops this large from not doing anything negative and I'm unsure it's an algorithm change as my other clients on Moz don't seem to have suffered either so it's either isolated to this target area or it's an issue with something occurring to or on the site? QfkSttI T42oGqA
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | snowflake740 -
How do I get more video reviews on a new site?
Hi, I'm working on a site that has video reviews of various places. It's general information/experience that most people possess and production-wise they are selfies. These videos are then transcribed and, voila... searchable content. My problem is this... how do I get large numbers of people to go to the trouble to make a 2 minute selfie? I thought about HARO, since one could work in a plug for something, but they have a site traffic threshold that this new site isn't at. Any and all ideas on how to efficiently generate this content for a new site with very little traffic would be appreciated. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 945010 -
Common passwords used for spam accounts?
This is a bit of a longshot. I know that many of the spam forum accounts, blog posts etc that have in the past been used for SEO are generated automatically. Does anyone know of any common passwords that are often used when setting up these accounts? I only ask as, trying to clean up the backlink profile for my website, I found myself in desperation keying in random passwords trying to access the spam accounts created on various forums by our former SEO agency. Eventually I got lucky and worked out the password for a series of forum accounts was, not very imaginatively, 'seo'. Having worked out this, I was able to delete the spam signatures on about 10 forums. But there are many other accounts where I have no idea of the password used. I guess I'm just wondering if there are standard stock passwords used in the past by many SEOs? Not likely to get an answer to this one, I know, but worth a shot.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mgane0 -
Google messages & penalties
I just read the following comment in a response to someone else's question. The Responer is an SEOMoz Authority whose opinion I respect and have learned from (not sure if it's cool to mention names in a question) and it spurred my curiosity: "...Generally you will receive a warning from Google before your site is penalized, unless you are talking about just specific keywords." This is something I have been wondering about in relation to my own sudden ranking drop for 2 specific keywords as I did not receive any warnings or notices. I have been proceeding as if I had over used these keywords on my Home page due to an initial lesser drop, but identifying the cause for the huge drop still seems useful for a number of reasons. Can anyone explain this further?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gfiedel0 -
Website Vulnerability Leading to Doorway Page Spam. Need Help.
Keywords he is ranking for , houston dwi lawyer, houston dwi attorney and etc.. Client was acquired in June and since then we have done nothing but build high quality links to the website. None of our clients were dropped/dinged or impacted by the panda/penguin updates in 2012 or updates previously published via Google. Which proves we do quality SEO work. We went ahead and started duplicating links which worked for other legal clients and 5 months later this client is either dropping or staying in local maps results and we are performing very badly in organic results. Some more history..... When he first engaged our company we switched his website from a CMS called plone to word press. During our move I ran some searches to figure out which pages we needed to 301 and we came across many profile pages or member pages created on the clients CMS (PLONE). These pages were very spammy and linked to other plone sites using car model,make,year type keywords (ex:jeep cherokee dealerships). I went through these sites to see if they were linking back and could not find any back links to my clients website. Obviously nobody authorized these pages, they all looked very hackish and it seemed as though there was a vulnerability on his plone CMS installation which nobody caught. Fast forward 5 months and the newest OSE update is showing me a good 50+ back links with unrelated anchor text back links. These anchor text links are the same color as the background and can only be found if you hover your mouse over certain areas of the site. All of these sites are built on Plone and allot of them are linked to other businesses or community websites. These websites obviously have no clue they have been hacked or are being used for black hat purposes. There are dozens of unrelated anchor text links being used on external websites which are pointing back to our clients website. Examples: <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">autex Isuzu, </a><a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">Toyota service department ratings, </a><a class="clickable title link-pivot" style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">die cast BMW and etc..</a> Obviously the first step is to use the disavow link tool, which will be completed this week. The second step is to take some feedback from the SEO community. It seems like these pages are automatically created using some type of bot. It will be very tedious if we have to continually remove these links. I hope there is a way to notify Google that these websites are all plone and have a vulnerability, which black hats are using to harm the innocent... If i cannot get Google to handle this, then the only other option is to start fresh with a new domain name. What would you do in this situation. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | waqid0 -
Is it okay to use hiddencontaining meta information that is a video transcript?
I have been using the tools at DotSub.com to transcribe our YouTube videos. They are free, work really great and I highly recommend them. Today I received an email from DotSub with recommendations for SEO on video. I have a question about #5 on their list. Here it is: "Step 5: Embed the video transcript into the non-visible meta-data of the page" "Always embed the video transcript in the page meta-data This is done by placing
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | danatanseo
the content of the transcription within a non-visible HTML element (a hidden
div). While most search engines do not weight non-visible content as high as
visible content, this will still provide additional SEO for your page. Do
this whether you include the full transcript visibly on your page or not." This is something I have never heard before. And, like many of you, I have always heard that putting anything "hidden" in the HTML is a very bad idea. Is this different? Do any of you do this? Is it really a recommended technique? Thanks all! Dana0 -
Img alt tags and creating a small image in the background ? New Golf Clothing Company.
On a page I am trying to make it have a better on page analysis for a keyword. Is it worth creating a small image that you cant see in the background 5 pixels by 5 pixels with the keyword img alt, or does google see this negatively? I know they say to create good content for the reader / viewer but an image wouldnt be suitable as it is a category page within my ecommerce website. http://www.funktiongolf.co.uk/mens-golf-clothing-21-c.asp e.g Mens golf Clothing category
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | funktiongolf0 -
How is this achieved - SPAM
Hello everyone. Here's my problem: I just searched for "link inside iframe counts for backlinking?" and on #5 there's a site that caught my attention because of it's Description Snippet. http://www.freelancer.com/job-search/iframe-links-count-backlinks/ This page is totally irrelevant to my query if you take time and read what's on it, however it ranks well. It's clever because the page contains all the required elements: one h1 with keyword in it, some short paragraph under it, similar links (totally irrelevant though), a selection of people who are supposed to be relevant to my question but they are not, all the good stuff. I looked in the source code and i found this: link href="[http://www.freelancer.com/rss/search.xml?keyword=iframe+links+count+backlinks](view-source:http://www.freelancer.com/rss/search.xml?keyword=iframe+links+count+backlinks)" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Latest projects" Please take the time and look at this feed and you'll see something totally wrong here. Could someone please explain how this works? I'ts a total spam however they managed to trick the system... Looking forward to hearing your answers. Alex
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pwpaneuro0