How to Explain The Danger of Link Networks
-
A client of mine has been approached by a company that sets up one-off private link networks like this:
Main site: http://www.klausparking.com/
Network sites:
http://www.carparkingtechnology.com/
http://www.carparkingsystem.com/
http://www.victoriaparking.net/
http://www.reginaparking.com/
http://www.torontoparking.net/
http://www.multicarparkingsystem.com/
http://www.carparkingsolutions.com/The company doing this actually promotes this as a patent-pending feature they call "silos". How do I explain the real danger to my client?
-
ouch that's going to be hard unless the client is really open to talking to you and actually wants to trust you.
They usually are guaranteed something when it comes to "services" like that vs traditional seo where you offer audits, "long term", "outreach" and words that tell them that it's going to **"take time" **
What I would do is just tell them that it is their decision if they want to go with them and you as a friend, would like to ask him to check out these (then name articles about it penguin or penalties)
Ask them if they are willing to change their domain in the future once they get dropped by google.
And if their site gets destroyed by google, then they will have to pay you 4 times the amount to help them recover which isn't always guaranteed.
Worked for me, should work for you.
-
Link networks have been slammed time and time again. Here's one I wrote specifically about one of the larger private blog networks:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/unnatural-link-warnings-blog-networks-advice
The problem with these sites is the either don't have any link equity - and thus their links count for nothing - or they get link equity from spammy sites. It only takes one site to get the entire web of sites caught. Google might move slowly on link spam, but they have shown they take strong and unforgiving action, as witnessed by Penguin and similar updates.
Just think about the opportunity cost of using these link networks rather than pursuing a legitimate means of promotion. If you get caught, all your work is gone. Worse, you're in a far worse position than when you started.
I have personally been approached by large brands using link networks who were then penalized. One online company people know came to us having invested heavily into link networks. They lost all that work, they were losing hundreds of thousands each week in sales due to penalty, and it cost them tens of thousands to fix.
I would only try link networks for brand new sites in certain highly-competitive industries - casinos, adult, etc. For anyone else, it's not worth the risk and opportunity cost.
-
Wayne,
I am a small business owner. I have done my own SEO, hired consultants, and worked with SEO firms - the whole gamut. I have a lot of personal experience in this area and bottom line it just isn't worth the resources involved, mainly the money, in my opinion.
I can guess who this company is based on what you said at the end...sort of rings a bell.
Any gains that are made will be short term and typically won't last. Google WILL eventually sniff these sites out. No matter how crafty they are, not matter what they tell you, Google will find it and a) deindex the site or 2) devalue the link from the site. The footprint and/or quality and content will get you. In your examples, almost all these sites are set up the exact same way. Google can smell that a mile away.
I have done this myself as well as paid different companies to do it for me. I have gone through hurdles (and I guarantee you more than they company they are paying will do) to ensure I have virtually zero footprint and to keep good content. I have over 70 now and very few are worthwhile.
At the end of the day, to continue to be worthwhile these sites will need QUALITY content. The amount of content and effort it will take for these sites to provide any sort of SEO boost for them would be better served on their own site's content, viral marketing, social signals, etc.
I am not trying to be pessimistic or paint too broad of a brush stroke but think of it this way. In the above example there are 7 network sites. The cost will really start piling up. Registration fees, hosting, the content (and it won't be quality all the time) and the ongoing cost to maintain these sites get big. So your client has piled all this money into a short term solution that can literally be snatched away overnight.
Spend the money on substance, quality of quantity. I am sitting on 70 worthless sites that I have spend thousands on.
-
It sounds like you are talking about "doorway pages". This practice can get their website penalized, or even de-indexed from Google’s search results.
You can send them to this link on Google Webmaster Central, which explains it all:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2721311
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
-
Tiered back links
Playing catch up with latest SEO techniques and wanted to ask the community what opinion is with generated tiered back links. For example, in one month having - 50 tier one links, 250 tier two links and 1000 tier three links generated within articles forums, social networks, guestbooks etc. In my view this is blackhat, my question is - is this still acceptable? or will it be damaging my domain? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | w4rdy0 -
Thousands of links - Am I being sabatoged?!
It seems that I am being sabatoged. I have been disavowing links every month because there seems to be more and more spam links that are popping up on my site and I'm not doing ANYTHING to allow that to happen. Does anyone have any insight? A. do you think I am being sabatoged? B. Is there a way to find out who is doing it?!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Veebs0 -
Do dead/inactive links matter?
In cleaning up the backlink profile for my parent's website, I've come across quite a few dead links. For instance, the links in the comments here: http://www.islanddefjam.com/artist/news_single.aspx?nid=4726&artistID=7290 Do I need to worry about these links? I assume if the links are no longer active, and hence not showing up in webmaster or moz reports, I can probably ignore them, but I'm wondering if I should try and get them removed regardless? I've read that google is increasingly taking into account references (i.e. website mentions that are not links) and I don't know if inactive spam links might leave a bad impression of a website. Am I being overly paranoid? I imagine disavowing them would be pointless as you can't attach a nofollow tag to an inactive link.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mgane0 -
Should You Link Back from Client's Website?
We had a discussion in the office today, about if it can help or hurt you to link back to your site from one that you optimize, host, or manage. A few ideas that were mentioned: HURT:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David-Kley
1. The website is not directly related to your niche, therefore Google will treat it as a link exchange or spammy link.
2. Links back to you are often not surrounded by related text about your services, and looks out of place to users and Search Engines. HELP:
1. On good (higher PR, reputable domain) domains, a link back can add authority, even if the site is not directly related to your services.
2. Allows high ranking sites to show users who the provider is, potentially creating a new client, and a followed incoming link on anchor text you can choose. So, what do you think? Test results would be appreciated, as we are trying to get real data. Benefits and cons if you have an opinion.2 -
11 000 links from 2 blogs + Many bad links = Penguin 2.0\. What is the real cause?
Hello, A website has : 1/ 8000 inbound links from 1 blog and 3000 from another one. They are clean and good blogs, all links are NOT marked as no-follow. 2/ Many bad links from directories that have been unindexed or penalized by Google On the 22nd of May, the website got hurt by Penguin 2.0. The link profile contains many directories and articles. The priority we had so far was unindexing the bad links, however shall we no-follow the blog links as well? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | antoine.brunel0 -
Can I just delete pages to get rid of bad back-links to those pages?
I just picked up a client who had built a large set of landing pages (1000+) and built a huge amount of spammy links to them (too many to even consider manually requesting deletion for from the respective webmasters). We now think that google may also be seeing the 'landing pages' as 'doorway pages' as there are so many of them 1000+ and they are all optimized for specific keywords and generally pretty low quality. Also, the client received an unnatural links found email from google. I'm going to download the links discovered by google around the date of that email and check out if there are any that look specifily bad but I'm sure it will be just one of the several thosand bad links they built. Anyway, they are now wanting to clean up their act and are considering deleting the landing/doorway pages in a hope to a. rank better for the other non landing/doorway pages (Ie category and sub cats) but more to the crux of my question.. b. essentially get rid of all the 1000s of bad links that were built to those landing/doorway pages. - will this work? if we just remove those pages and use 404 or 410 codes will google see any inbound (external) links to those pages as basicly no longer being links to the site? or is the TLD still likely to be penilized for all the bad links coming into no longer existing URLs on it? Also, any thoughts on whether a 404 or 410 would be better is appreciated. Some info on that here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=64033 I guess another option is the disavow feature with google, but Matt Cutts video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA&feature=em- kind of makes it sound like this should just be used for a few links, not 1000s... Thanks so much!!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zingseo0 -
Why does my competitor rank so well with so many paid/traded links?
Greetings everyone! I've really been enjoying my Moz membership these past few weeks after studying my data and comparing it with my competitors I think it's high time I started asking some questions. The website I manage has a very good ranking history but over the past year we've seen a slight decline in our SERP positions. I don't think this has anything to do with on-page optimization but rather with our link profile. We have only about 10k links total while they have 175k - our mozranks are nearly identical, but his moztrust is 4.46 and our's is 3.51. I am guessing, on our end, I need to remove some of these low-quality nofollow links (though I'll be honest I have no idea how we obtained them to begin with) but what I don't understand is how our competitor is ranking so well because when I browse their link profile, it is filled with paid link and traded link directories that don't appear to be penalized for what they are. I was under the impression that this was bad SEO, but now I am thinking I should just play his own game and submit to these sites too. Looking for any advice or ideas on a better way to compete... ❤ Jennifer
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Virage0 -
Single Domain With Different Pages Deep Linking To Different Pages On External Domain
I've been partaking in an extensive trial study and will be releasing the results soon, however I do have quite a strong indication to the answer to this question but would like to see what everyone else thinks first, to see where the common industry mindset is at. Let's say SiteA.com/page1.html is PR5 and links out to SiteB.com/page1.html This of course would count as a valuable backlink. Now, what would happen if SiteA.com/page2.html, which is also PR5, links out to SiteB.com/page2.html ? The link from SiteA is coming from a different page, and is also pointing to a different deeplink on SiteB, however it will contain the same IP address. What would the benefit be for having multiple deeplinks in this way (as outlined above, please read it carefully before responding) as opposed to having just a single deeplink from the domain? If a benefit does exist, then does the benefit start to become trivial? This has nothing to do with sitewide links. Serious answers only please.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | stevenheron1