Some badges will be sitewide, is that OK
-
Hello,
We are making badges to hand out to our alumni.
Some of these links backs are probably going to be sitewide.
Is this tactic still good with respect to the recent G updates?
Thanks
-
Bob, there's nothing 100% safe for the future, Google is a private entity and they make the rules of their own game. However you can 99% sure that links will always be in their algo, just because is the inner nature of the www to have sites interlinked. I imagine that they'll become every day smarter in detecting patterns and automated links or human trying to manipulate the algo, but what they won't never control is human manual editing. It has no (huge) patterns and it's natural which is what they really want.
About your alumnis I don't have the compelte view of your market and situation but if I understand yyour position: they know that they're helping you but you're not giving nothing back to them. I think that since they've studied in your center they've been selected as top alumnis and been given a badge to demonstrate that. If I were them I would like to show it, so ask them to write a post, I think that the value for them here is intangible, jsut ego-boosting you need to play in that ground, I don't know how renowned you are in your market but someone is always happy to be endorsed by a structure (maybe you can offer special linkedin endorsemnent for a really short group with good websites
)
-
Irving, the Guru in who answered below, told me to never purposely do reciprocal links. He told me that in this question:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/a-few-reciprocal-links-ok
I'm open to suggestions on whether reciprocal links are OK and I really appreciate the great ideas.
-
Irving,
Thank you for your comment. It sounds like we're stretching the limits here, when making them dofollow even if it's on one page. This is a long term, play-it safe site with high integrity.
What's 100% safe for the future?
-
use long tails that incorporate your main keyword, so it helps your main keyword, but of you get a penalty for some reason it wil lonly affect that long tail and not your main term
If you can get them on homepage or main LP only I would make them dofollow, but if sitewide I would stick to nofollow - and if you do nofollow then you can use whatever anchor text you like since it's a neutered and safe link.
-
Well it is reciprocal by definition but when there is useful editorial content surrounding the link it's different than a page full of links just pointing back and forth at each other.
-
I like it, but wouldn't that be reciprocal linking?
-
I'm not sure what business you are in but you could take a different approach. Instead of asking for links you could do your own editorial "features" of some of your authoritative blog owning alumni. You could push that on your own blog and then collaborate with them about covering the piece on their site with links back to you as the original source.
Might work but it does really depend on your niche and the relevancy of these blog owning alumni.
-
Sounds good, we'll stick to editorial mention.
We could offer the badges to alumni with blogs that have written a post about us and linked back to our site.
Our relationship to our alumni is very delicate, how can we frame this proposal so that it comes across more mutually beneficial? I don't think in our case we can contact our blog owning alumni and ask a lot of them. Is there a way to make this sound better?
-
If you can get the editorial links by all means go for those first b/c then you can get followed links and have zero risk of penalty. But the response above is correct in that you probably don't want to roll this out before the next major google algo update comes supposedly on Friday.
-
Hi Bob, take into account one thing. Google wants links to be manually edited. Editorial link is good when you hide a link in a widget/badge to receive a link which is not editorially made you're "gaming" the algo. That link is not natural under google eyes. (further listening here).
The idea is good, the implementation not so much. Why not get in touch with your top 50 alumni, ask them to put the badge without any link inside and then ask them to write a post about their happiness of being considered a top alumni or their experience in your school? There they can link back to you (or not!) but it would be definitely higher quality, relevant and moreover editorially made!!!
Also I won't be making heavy linking tests while the next, huge Penguin is in the air
-
Here's what we've decided to do. We'll send out 50 badges to the first 50 alumni that wants them. Then we'll email them a custom embed script. We'll have 50 different alt tags.
Does that work or do the image filenames have to be different as well?
Also, is this safe on into the future of Google?
-
This sounds like a cautious approach. If you are only issuing 30-50 anchor text optimized badges and you vary the anchor text I think you're safe as long as relevancy remains intact.
-
What if we only gave out 30-50 badges to our elite alumni and had them all have different anchor text?
-
I agree you are ok to include links in a badge but the main objective of the badge should be to build brand credibility not build links for the search engines. If you nofollow and stick with branded anchor text I think you are safe. It's a no harm no foul approach erring on the side of caution.
-
Hi Bob, I think that badges are really helpful to build a brand and get renowned in your niche, as more alumni use them the more exposure you'll achieve, however I discourage the usage of this kind of backlinks in your seo linkbuilding strategy since they're not editorially made, and since the link is embedded, it doesn't reflect an user real willing to link to a website. In this video from Matt cutts you can see what I am speaking about. IMO it's still fine to use this kind of links but only if you do the following:
- put a nofollow in it
- don't use rich anchor texts but only your brand name
In this way you'll be sure that no penalty may affect you in the future. Just a general guideline always try to achieve editorially made links. Hope this helps!
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
-
Irrelevant backlinks - will 301 redirect cleanse the relationship?
My client has thousands of clients for whom they provided websites that used to reside in a subdirectory of their own domain. They moved them to their own domains but there are tens of thousands of backlinks on those sites pointing back to the original domain. Those backlinks are completely irrelevant and are probably hurting them by sending the wrong signals to Google on what this site really is about. My question is will the 301 redirect be enough to cleanse the relationship between my client and all their clients' sites or should I ask the client to clean up all those backlinks on their clients' sites and remove their domain from the target urls? That's a huge job, obviously.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse0 -
Using folder blocked by robots.txt before uploaded to indexed folder - is that OK?
I have a folder "testing" within my domain which is a folder added to the robots.txt. My web developers use that folder "testing" when we are creating new content before uploading to an indexed folder. So the content is uploaded to the "testing" folder at first (which is blocked by robots.txt) and later uploaded to an indexed folder, yet permanently keeping the content in the "testing" folder. Actually, my entire website's content is located within the "testing" - so same URL structure for all pages as indexed pages, except it starts with the "testing/" folder. Question: even though the "testing" folder will not be indexed by search engines, is there a chance search engines notice that the content is at first uploaded to the "testing" folder and therefore the indexed folder is not guaranteed to get the content credit, since search engines see the content in the "testing" folder, despite the "testing" folder being blocked by robots.txt? Would it be better that I password protecting this "testing" folder? Thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
I've seen and heard alot about city-specific landing pages for businesses with multiple locations, but what about city-specific landing pages for cities nearby that you aren't actually located in? Is it ok to create landing pages for nearby cities?
I asked here https://www.google.com/moderator/#7/e=adbf4 but figured out ask the Moz Community also! Is it actually best practice to create landing pages for nearby cities if you don't have an actual address there? Even if your target customers are there? For example, If I am in Miami, but have a lot of customers who come from nearby cities like Fort Lauderdale is it okay to create those LP's? I've heard this described as best practice, but I'm beginning to question whether Google sees it that way.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley2 -
Will Nofollow in Nav Cause a Problem?
I have seen conflicting information regarding the use of rel=nofollow on internal links, but the gist of it seems to be that it's not a good idea. The top linked page on a particular site is a consultation page. Contact is not far behind. Both are linked from the header and footer or sidebar. At first, I thought no-following them would be the perfect solution. After what I've read, it seems I need to remove some of the instances of linking instead of nofollowing. Any e firsthand experience or feedback?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
Will I lose traffic from Google for re-directing a page?
I’m currently planning to a retire a discontinued product and put a 301 redirect to a related product (although not identical). The thing is, I’m still getting significant traffic from people searching for the old product by name. Would Google send this traffic to the new pages via the re-direct? Is Google likely to display the new page in place of the old page for similar queries or will it serve other content? I’d like to answer this question so that I can decide between the two following approaches: 1) Retiring the old page immediately and putting a 301 redirect to the new related pages. This will have the advantage of transferring the value of any link signals / referring traffic. Traffic will also land on the new pages directly without having to click through from another page. We would have a dynamic message telling users that the old product had been retired depending on whether they had visited out site before. 2) Keep the old product pages temporarily so that we don’t lose the traffic from the search engines. We would then change the old pages to advise users that the old product was now retired, but that we have other products that might solve their problems. When this organic traffic decreases over time, then we will proceed with the re-direct as above. I am worried though that the old product pages might outrank the new product pages. I’d really appreciate some advice with this. I’ve been reading lots of articles, but it seems like there are different opinions on this. I understand that I will lose between 10% - 15% of page rank as per the Matt Cutts video.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Is a 301 to a 301 ok?
I have a site that has a lot of url differences. Due to coding we sometimes have to 301 to a page that is 301'd to another. Is there any danger in doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
How Will This Google Change Effect Us?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304459804577281842851136290.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alhallinan0