Can I be penalized for offering incentives for links and social followers?
-
A competitor of mine is using contest/loyalty software like ContestBurner or PunchTab to generate social followers and links. This has been very successful, and over the past several months his rankings have improved.
Does anyone know if Google is "OK" with this type of program? I'm trying to decide if I should start one myself.
-
I would think that the links have more value than the likes, as Google still isn't able to truly crawl Facebook. Like George said, I'd hold off from following any of these quick get rich schemes as they might hurt your website in the log term.I would instead say you should engage your audience and get them to comment on your posts and talk back to you more. Having a more engaged audience will have more benefits over a bunch of quiet followers long term.
-
Link bait is always one of the most challenging yet very rewarding task.
I do agree with George below though -
Try implementing your own contest - if you need help with any ideas let me know.
your pal
Chenzo
-
If Penguin has taught us anything it's that low-quality links will hurt you. So whatever you do, I suggest being very careful. If you think you might be getting low-quality links or shares, don't do it because it's not worth it in the long run. Also, Facebook has recently begun purging fake "likes" and Twitter often purges fake followers. I'm not saying "don't experiment" if that is something you are wanting to do and you are willing to accept the risks, but I am saying you should stick to quality versus quantity.
Maybe it's time to run your own contests.
-
ContentBurner looks dodgy as hell!!! - Punchtab looks ok.... Social and likes are becoming more and more important - at this stage I'm not sure if Google has a way of tracking "fake" or "forced" social followers/likes. The whole point of a social campaign is to generate interest it is better to have 100 engaged followers than 10000 followers who ignore your brand. Look at paddypower or dawsons music as they have successful social campaigns.
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
-
How can I stop serious traffic lost on my website
I need help resolving technical SEO issues on my website CamRojud. I have tried allSEO tactics but no improvement yet. Can someone in the forum guide me through please.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Dawodus0 -
Boosting Equity-Passing Links?
Hello Moz folks, We have a SEO client who has exponentially fewer equity-passing links(inbound and internal) than their two major competitors, which I'm sure is a MAJOR factor in their rankings. In fact, the numbers are so drastically different seems to indicate that these competitors are participating in some sort of black hat link farm. For example: Internal and Inbound Equity-Passing Links Our client - 2274 Competitor 1 - 496k Competitor 2 - 143k How is this possible or legit? I don't understand. Our well-known client has been in business for 10+ years and they have a content-rich, WordPress website consisting of thousands of pages that have been optimized for search, including keyword-rich URLs, page titles, metas, H1 tags, etc. The things that keep coming to mind are the need for more links and more content. One thing that comes to mind is that the client launched a new site about 1.5 years ago and changed their domain prefix from http to https. I'm not sure if this would have an impact on inbound link equity or not. 301 redirects are in place so from what I understand, all of the old http pages should have passed at least partial domain equity to the new https site. I'm also wondering if changing the structure of WordPress categories, tags and author pages could somehow dynamically increase the page count and amount of perceived content. We may be overly restrictive with Google Search Console. Anyway, I'm at a loss and don't understand how our competitors, with seemingly similar content, could have exponentially more links and are dominating the search results. Thanks for your help and sage advice. Your input is very much appreciated. Eric pSzXl
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EricFish0 -
Could lots of links pointed to 301 & 302 redirects be a problem?
Hello, We've got hundreds of links found in screaming frog that are pointing towards 301 & 302 redirects. Could this be hurting rankings? We've got very few 404s. A lot of the problem is breadcrumbs of categories pointing to 302s, but the original category pages that are 302ed are not indexed so we may be OK. We can't change the 302 redirects, it's part of the cart. Could all these non-updated hyperlinks be the cause of continual ranking drop in Google? We've gone from the top 3 to the second page for our main terms. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Should I Disavow Links if there is No Manual Action
Hello, I just recently took on a client that had hired a very black hat seo and used their service for roughly two years. He outsourced link building and the link profile is full of spun articles and blog commenting on chinese websites etc… The anchor texts/pages used for all this spamming no longer rank, but there is no penalty in Webmaster tools manual actions. I was thinking about disavowing some of the obviously spammy backlinks that exist but would that be raising a red flag that could lead to a manual action and even more negative movement? Have you ever heard of anything like the situation i'm dealing with where its obvious the pages have been hit but there is no manual action? What do you all think/suggest? And Should I disavow some terrible links and potentially open a can of worms?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Prime850 -
Cross-Site Links with different Country Code Domains
I have a question with the penguin update. I know they are really cracking down on "spam" links. I know that they are wanting you to shift from linking keywords to the brand name, unless it makes sense in a sentence. We have five sites for one company in the header they have little flag images, that link to different country domains. These domains all have relatively the same domain name besides the country code. My question is, linking these sites back and fourth to each other in this way, does it hurt you in penguin? I know they are wanting you to push your identity but does this cross-site scheme hurt you? In the header of these sites we have something like this. I am assuming the best strategy would probably be to treat them like separate entities. Or, just focus on one domain. They also have some sites that have links in the footer but they are set up like:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AlliedComputer
For product visit Domain.com Should nofollows be added on these footer links as well? I am not sure if penguin finds them spammy too.0 -
Beating the file sharing sites in SERPs - Can it be done and how?
Hi all, A new client of mine is an online music retailer (CD, vinyls, DVD etc) who is struggling against file sharing sites that are taking precedence over the client's results for searches like "tropic of cancer end of things cd" If a site a legal retailer trying to make an honest living who's then having to go up against the death knell of the music industry - torrents etc. If you think about it, with all the penalties Google is fond of dealing out, we shouldn't even be getting a whiff of file sharing sites in SERPs, right? How is it that file sharing sites are still dominating? Is it simply because of the enormous amounts of traffic they receive? Does traffic determine ranking? How can you go up against torrents and download sites in this case. You can work on the onsite stuff, get bloggers to mention the client's pages for particular album reviews, artist profiles etc, but what else could you suggest I do? Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Could a sitewide footer EXACT MATCH anchor text link hurt or potentially penalize a site?
I am pretty sure this would hurt rankings yet I just want another's opinion on it. Would a sitewide footer link with exact match keyword anchor text to the page you want to rank for your main keyword hurt you? Basically if it were a link to the homepage, yet you wanted to make the anchor text your main objective keyword, would it hurt to have this in the footer along with the logo link at the top of a page that is just "home" anchor text?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jbster130 -
Internal Link Structure
Hello Everyone, I'd be grateful for a little feedback please; This is my site, the home page
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TwoPints
of which is targeting the phrase jobs in **** (I'm sure you can fill i the gap
:)) I've made a few changes recently which has included having the
Contract jobs in **** | Permanent Jobs in **** | Temporary Jobs in **** & Today’s
jobs in **** links added to the homepage... Perhaps foolishly and impatiently, I did all of these at the
same time, whilst also changing the sites internal link structure, specifically
for all links to the homepage, which previously were like <a<br>href="/">Home and have now been changed to <a<br>href="/">jobs in ****</a<br></a<br> Meaning that I have 4500 internal links with the anchor text
'jobs in ****' But rather than seeing an improvement n my SERPs ranking, I have
gone from page 2 of Google to page 6, and falling...... Apart from being inpatient, what have I done wrong? Many thanks0
