Is a scholarship seen as buying links?
-
We work in the student loan debt industry, so providing a scholarship for our viewers makes total sense for our business. Would links to this page be seen by Google as buying links? Does this fall anywhere into gray-hat tactics?
My gut tells me no because helping people with student debt is what we do. The scholarship really synergizes with our business model, but who knows..?
-
Am I missing something? From the why you described it, I really don't see how this can be considered "buying a link" at all. If you told University X, we will do a scholarship specifically for your students, onliy if you link to it, then, sure, that makes sense. However, if the scholarship isn't directly tied to a particular school, then I don't see the problem.
If this is considered buying links and can be penalized, then wouldn't that mean any contests, give-a-ways or sponsorships that a site creates, and then that someone else links to would be violating google's guidelines?
- Ruben
-
Thanks Chris for the response. I agree with you as well, I think the links are coming only because its a legitimate scholarship opportunity from a business that focuses on helping people with their student debt issues. If Google see this as spammy, it seems to me they would be making a mistake on how our particular business should promote itself. I dont know what can be said about our commitment to the student loan disaster than "We really do want to help our users, to show that here's $2,000 to help pay for school".
A couple larger universities shared our scholarship on FB and Twitter and got us a lot of traffic and new links as well, seems pretty authentic to me and I believe google should look at this way as well.
-
Thanks for these links. Lots of useful info I should have searched first i guess. I agree with your take home message.
-
As I see it DemiGR, if you have an event such as the giveaway of a scholorship and you promote that event as any legitimate event might be promoted--via social media, via press release, via your website, via press--and others recognize the value in promoting it themselves and they link to it (or not) as they see fit, it seems it would build brand awareness and awareness for the event and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Promote the event, not the link and if the right event is promoted in the right way, links may happen.
-
I agree with Andy. Google is probably aware of this tactic. Although the links aren't completely "editorial" in the purest sense, if you are chasing links from universities or colleges, many of them won't link to your scholarship page unless the award you are providing is relevant and valuable to their students - eg faculty of medicine linking to an award for med students. Many of the bigger schools don't even list awards below a certain amount.
This issue has come up for discussion in the Q&A before:
http://moz.com/community/q/creating-a-scholarship-for-seo
http://moz.com/community/q/link-building-with-a-scholarship
and on YouMoz (promoted to main page):http://moz.com/blog/5-link-building-tactics-to-improve-your-local-rankings
**Take home message: **Scholarships can be a part of your link building activities but make them legit and make sure that it isn't the only thing that you are doing.
-
There is no telling if Google are going to see this as a problem or not - until it's too late.
If you are doing this only for the fact you want to offer a scholarship and not expecting links, then the safe thing is to ask for the links to be no-followed. It's hardly a drastic step and it keeps you safe.
Remember, Google aren't going to have a conversation with you about what you are doing - it will either happen or it wont.
-Andy
-
The organization revolves around helping people with their student loans. We offer resources on how to avoid student debt, how to take action on student debt, and other tips for college kids. The scholarship is something we would have done whether we got 5000 links to it or zero, so we arent doing it for the purpose of getting links. That being said, its a really nice side benefit because we are getting some good links from it.
The scholarship helps promote our business and out commitment to helping address the student loan crisis in the USA. We could request the links be no-followed, but that seems to be drastic unless its clear Google penalizes this, no? Its not as if we are an auto repair shop offering a scholarship.
-
Thank you Andy - you've struck a chord with me here. Good point, well made!
-
"My gut tells me no because helping people with student debt is what we do"
Well, is it being done for links? This is something that is quite a common link building tactic, so Google are probably already on to it. That said, you can always request any links to be nofollowed - that should stop Google seeing it as a link tactic.
It does fall within the darker side of link building as it isn't really an editorially gained link - other sites have been penalised for 'buying-links-in-a-not-really-buying-links' manner before.
-Andy
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
-
Internal links to landing pages
Hi, we are in the process of building a new website and we have 12 different locations and for theses 12 locations we have landing pages with unique copy on the following: 1. Marketing...2 SEO....3. PPC....4. Web Design Therefor there are 48 landing pages. The marketing pages are the most important ones to us in terms of traffic and priority. My question is: 1. Should we put a dropdown of the are pages in the main header under locations that link to the area marketing pages? 2. What is the best way to link all the sub pages such as London Web Design? Should these links just be coming off the London marketing page? or should we have a sitemap in the footer that lists every page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Poor internal linking?
Hi guys, Analyzing a large e-commerce site 10,000 pages on Magento and not getting much organic traffic to level 3 sub-category pages, the URLs are like: Primary Keyword Target: BODY MOISTURISERS https://www.adorebeauty.com.au/skin-care/bath-body/moisturisers.html Primary Keyword Target: LIP MASKS https://www.adorebeauty.com.au/skin-care/masks/lip-masks.html Plus another 40 other URLs at level 3 with low organic performance. Authority of the domain is strong, so it's not an authority issue I believe its internal linking. Besides linking form the blog and breadcrumbs is there anything we can do to improve internal linking to these level 3 pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nattyhall0 -
Internal Links - Dofollow or Nofollow and why?
Hey there Mozzers, I am a question about internal links. If I am writing a article about something and want to link to another one of my articles inside my blog, do i have to make that link nofollow or dofollow? If possible tell me why also. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
OSE link report showing links to 404 pages on my site
I did a link analysis on this site mormonwiki.com. And many of the pages shown to be linked to were pages like these http://www.mormonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Planning_a_trip_to_Rome_By_using_Movie_theatre_-_Your_five_Fun_Shows2052752 There happens to be thousands of them and these pages actually no longer exist but the links to them obviously still do. I am planning to proceed by disavowing these links to the pages that don't exist. Does anyone see any reason to not do this, or that doing this would be unnecessary? Another issue is that Google is not really crawling this site, in WMT they are reporting to have not crawled a single URL on the site. Does anyone think the above issue would have something to do with this? And/or would you have any insight on how to remedy it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThridHour0 -
How can i stop such links being indexed
Hi, How can i stop such links being indexed The first link is what i want to stop indexed. We have 1,000's of people writing articles and the below URl shows how many articles each did http://www.somename.com/article/15633 But this is the URl which shows the exact articlehttp://www.Somename.com/article/step-step-installation-ibm-lotus-notesAs both start as thishttp://www.Somename.com/article/How can i set noindex? Should we set for each URL manually one by oneThanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Widget Links Still Acceptable?
I own a funny video site that is getting about 1-4 of it's videos embedded on various sites daily. In todays form, is widget link still acceptable? This would show up under the video embed. Example: Funny Dog Video From Site Brand Or is it best nowadays to just have Video Provided By Site Brand
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | superlordme0 -
Indirect SEO boost from links
I have 2 ecommerce sites, each with a blog. I am increasing my linkbuilding efforts, but I don't want to build too many links directly to my 2 sites over a short period of time. I have decided that I will add a certain number of links to sites/pages that are already linking to my main sites (for example, a blog post on my blog, guest post on another blog, article submission, etc.). How much of a benefit can I expect in terms of rankings? Has anyone tested this out or experimented with something like this? What are the pros and cons? I appreciate thoughtful comments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Adding Links Under Embedded Videos?
What's the current opinion of adding do-follow links under video embed codes? Like what Vimeo does. Is this allowed, or does Google/Matt Cutts suggest always no-following these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DojoGuy0