Are gallery sites ok post Penguin?
-
We're getting ready to re-launch a redesigned site and I was hoping to use the opportunity to get some quality links. Are some of the higher-quality web design gallery sites still ok to submit to? Did Penguin have any effect on these?
Just looking for opportunities for a little boost from our re-launch.
-
Would the same hold true for comments on blogs? If I'm leaving comments on relevant blogs, would it be ok to leave a link to my website in there, just as long as I'm not using exact-match keywords everywhere?
-
What Google is trying to do with Penguin is to take away (or penalize) any benefit that a website would get from self building links with anchor text.
In the past, if I wanted to rank for "green widgets" I could build a bunch of links containing the anchor text "green widgets", such as "Check out this website about green widgets!" This type of thing would really work well. But, Google has now caught on that this is a blatant attempt to manipulate the search results. They don't want you to rank #1 for green widgets just because you've got good SEO skills. Rather, they want the site that best represents green widgets to rank #1 for that term.
Sites that are getting affected by Penguin are generally ones that have overdone it with their anchor text. Now, no one knows exactly how much is too much (although you'll read lots of theories.) But what we do know is that a natural backlink profile has the majority of their links being their url or their brand name.
The problem is that the brand name is sometimes a tricky thing. If your website is www.greenwidgets.com you could say that your brand name is "green widgets", but to Google, building a bunch of links using the anchor text of "green widgets" may still be anchor text manipulation. For an example, see this post on how WPMU got hit by Penguin for having a bunch of footer links pointing back to them using the anchor text "Wordpress mu".
So, if you're building links (as opposed to earning them totally naturally), be careful not to go overboard on a keyword. Ideally, build links using your url as an anchor. The odd one with a keyword is ok, but until we have more data on what exactly is acceptable I would be very careful in using keywords as your anchor.
-
Can you please explain what it means to "be careful about your anchor text." Regarding anchor text, what is the difference between good and bad anchor text?
Best,
Christopher -
Be careful about your anchor text and I really think you should be ok. If you submitted to a pile of sites using keyword rich anchor text then you are likely to be penalized. But if the majority of your links use your url or brand you should be ok.
Be careful with your brand though if it is something that could be interpreted as a keyword. I've seen a couple of sites get hit by Penguin when they were targeting their brand as their brand was a competitive keyword.
-
Check out the Alexa ranks for the top sites you are considering submitting to and see what kind of an effect Penguin had on their rankings & traffic.
In general, if people are using the website (not just bots/spammers), then it is fine to submit to. Bonus points if it is relevant to your website.
Note: This is not meant to be a complete link building strategy. If the only links you are building come from "web design review" sites, you're gonna have a bad time ranking.
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
-
Backlinks from an Association Site
My company is joining an Industrial Association. Part of the membership is a link to our site from theirs. I've found that going to their site triggers a "threat alert" through our company malware detection system and shows a link that may be infected with malware. With all of that said I have (2) questions... Since this is a paid membership, will Google penalize us for having a link to our company from this association's website? Since a link on their site has potential malware issues, should we add our link to their site or could it be harmful to us? Any helpful advice is appreciated.
Technical SEO | | SteveZero121 -
Site dropped from SERP
Hello, I've been ranking a site for the last 5 months with good success, ranking on the first page for a high traffic keyword. In the beginning of September however, my site completely dropped out of the SERPs for several of those keywords yet my site was still indexed and there was no penalty applied to my site via search console. I would assume this maybe because of the update during the time.My site came back again a week later and it was ranking much higher on the first page (#2). Today, I just checked the SERPs and my site is now gone again. It was there this morning but now as of two hours ago it is gone, as well as one of my main competitors. My site is still indexed and no penalties via search console. Does anyone know what causes these types of issues? Im assuming my site will come back in a week or so with hopefully the same or better ranking, but when I have disruptions like this it really hurts my organic traffic. Any input is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KathleenDC0 -
Our client's site was owned by former employee who took over the site. What should be done? Is there a way to preserve all the SEO work?
A client had a member of the team leave on bad terms. This wasn't something that was conveyed to us at all, but recently it came up when the distraught former employee took control of the domain and locked everyone out. At first, this was assumed to be a hack, but eventually it was revealed that one of the company starters who unhappily left the team owned the domain all along and is now holding it hostage. Here's the breakdown: -Every page aside from the homepage is now gone and serving a 404 response code -The site is out of our control -The former employee is asking for a $1 million ransom to sell the domain back -The homepage is a "countdown clock" that isn't actively counting down, but claims that something exciting is happening in 3 days and lists a contact email. The question is how we can save the client's traffic through all this turmoil. Whether buying a similar domain and starting from square one and hoping we can later redirect the old site's pages after getting it back. Or maybe we have a legal claim here that we do not see even though the individual is now the owner of the site. Perhaps there's a way to redirect the now defunct pages to a new site somehow? Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Site Crawling with Firewall Plugin
Just wondering if anyone has any experience with the WordPress Simple Firewall plugin. I have a client who is concerned about security as they've had issues in that realm in the past and they've since installed this plugin: https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/wp-simple-firewall?filter=4 Problem is, even with a proper robots file and appropriate settings within the firewall, I still cannot crawl the site with site crawler tools. Google seems to be accessing the site fine, but I still wonder if it is in anyway potentially hindering search spiders.
Technical SEO | | BrandishJay0 -
Wordpress Page vs. Posts
My campaigns are telling me I have some duplicate content. I know the reason but not sure how to correct it. Example site here: Bikers Blog is a "static page" referencing each actual "blog post" I write. This site is somewhat orphaned and about to be reconstituted. I have a number of other sites with a similar problem. I'm not sure how to structure the "page" so it only shows a summary of the blog post on the page not the whole post. Permalinks is set as "/%postname%/" I've posted on Wordpress.org with no answer. Since this is an SEO issue I thought maybe someone with WP experience could chime in. Thanks, Don
Technical SEO | | NicheGuy0 -
Squidoo vs Personal Site
Hey guys I'm Nikolas a newb, just signed up to the pro membership trial after alot of digging on the seomoz blog for months . First off let me tell you alittle about my story and seo knowledge. I started off online on the well known squidoo site with revenue sharing, because of my day job I had alot of time to work on my articles and build up to a nice monthly salary of just over 1k in less than 5 months which doubled and trippled in the last few months. Seo is like a 6th sense to me , onpage offpage and the lots. Most of what I read here is not new to me or something I didn't already know about, but its good to freshen up and remember things, as theres alot to search engine optimization. I have built up to over 500k unique visitors in less than a year and have decided to move on to my own site 4 months ago. The niche is the exact same one I have targeted on squidoo. My site had alot of issues at the start the classic 301 redirection ht_access fix I had to do,content management system building low quality content pages via tags that i have fixed(noindex) and removed with 404s, build up original unique valuable posts, interlink ,onpage and offpage seo the basics I did for squidoo. The problem here is that I can't seem to get any traction from google where as my squidoo search engine traffic is 80% , my sites google traffic is 5-10%. I have the same number of articles on both sites, similar topics , similar onpage offpage optimisation basically identical but have alot better content on my new site. My bing, yahoo and referral traffic is rising everyday but as I know google is 85% of the market share I am leaving alot of money on the table. I hope that most of you more dedicated seo's can give me a tip or two and explain exactly what is going on with my situation and if possible take a look at my site hardwarepal .
Technical SEO | | NikolasNikolaou0 -
Is it a good idea to make 301 from a site which you know google has banned certain keywords for to a new site with similar content
Here is a short question re. 301. I read Dovers article on how to move an old domain to a new one. Say you have been a little inexperienced regarding linkbuilding and used some cheap service in the past and you have steadily seen that certain keywords have been depreciating in the SERP - however the PR is still 3 for the domain - now the qustion is should you rediect with a 301 in .htaccess to a new domain when you know that google does not like certain keywords with respect to the old site. Will the doom and gloom carry over to the new site?
Technical SEO | | Kofoed0 -
Xenu Alternative for Large Sites
We're launching a new site and we're trying to crawl it to check for any problems. It's millions of pages and Xenu seems to start encountering errors as the numbers mount past 500,000. Does anyone know of an alternative, free or paid, that could handle the size better?
Technical SEO | | eLocalusa0