Are sidewide badge links can harm your website?
-
Hey all,
I wanted to check if links that have built naturally over the past years, linking from a badge (image) sitewide, can harm the linked website?
Here is some more information:
1. It's from a competition that the winners were able to add the badge with the link to their site (the link to our website was to a subpage, not homepage).
2. There are around 15 websites with the badge as a link. The website has around 200 root domain links. There will not be any more websites with the badge, just these 15.
3. The sitewide links percentage are 5% of the overall number of pages linked to our website.
Based on the last penguin update (4th of October, 2013), can our website be harmed from the badge link building?
-
Based on the last several Google Penguin updates, if your site was going to be harmed or your rankings were going to go down, they probably would have gone down already. That said, that doesn't mean that you could still be penalized.
If there are sitewide badge links, they need to look natural. I wouldn't use any specific keyword anchor text, I would use your website name or brand or URL as the anchor text in the link. Don't make it look like you're trying to "game" Google by having too much exact match anchor text.
If these links are only a small percentage of the overall links that you have pointing to your site, then there won't be a problem. But if you have only 5 percent like you're saying then it should be fine.
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
-
Will you get more 'google juice' if your social links are in your websites header, rather than its footer?
Hi team, I'm in the process of making some aesthetic changes to my website. Its getting quite cluttered so the main purpose is to clean up its look. I currently have 3x social links in the header, right at the top, and i would really like to move these to the footer to remove some clutter in the header. My concern is that moving them may have an impact on the domains ranking in google. Website: www.mountainjade.co.nz We've made some huge gains against our competitors over the past 6 months and I don't want to jeopardise that. Any help would be much appreciated as i'm self taught in SEO and have learnt through making mistakes. This time however, with Moz, i'd rather get some advice before I make any decisions! Thanks is advance, Jake S
Technical SEO | | Jacobsheehan0 -
Site-wide Links
Hey y'all, I know this question has been asked many times before but I wanted to see what your stance was on this particular case. The organisation I work for is a group of 12 companies - each with its own website. On some of the sites we have a link to the other sites within the group on every single page of that site. Our organic search traffic has dropped a bit but not significantly and we haven't received any manual penalties from Google. It's also worth mentioning that the referral traffic for these sites from the other sites I control is quite good and the bounce rate is extremely low. If you were in my shoes would you remove the links, put a nofollow tag on the links or leave the links as they are? Thanks guys 🙂
Technical SEO | | AAttias0 -
Dofollow and Nofollow links
What is the difference between dofollow and nofollow links? I know that some sites/blogs only let you post nofollow links. In such a case how do I know if a comment I posted on a certain site will be a nofollow or dofollow? How about big traffic sites such as Huff Post. Do they only allow nofollow links?
Technical SEO | | greenfoxone0 -
Broken link
I know SEO Moz has a lot of info about 404 301 302 etc but I am trying to figure out easy way to fix two of the broken links from flash. I am redirecting following links with wordpress redirect plug in http://soobumimphotography.com/gallery.php?GalleryID=126&GalleryName=Wedding&OrderNum=1 http://soobumimphotography.com/gallery.php?GalleryID=126&GalleryName=Wedding&OrderNum=1 What would be the best way to solve this? Is there anyway I can remove those?
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
Two companies merge: website A redirect 301 to website B. Problems?
Hi, last december the company I work for and another company merged. The website of company A was taken offline and the home page was 302 redirected to a page on website B. This page had information about the merger and the consequences for customers. The deeper pages of website A were 301 redirected to similar pages on website B. After a while, the traffic from the redirected home page decreased and we thought it was time to change the redirect from a 302 into a 301 redirect to the home page. Because there are still a lot of links to the home page of website A and we wanted to preserve the link juice. Two weeks ago we changed the 302 redirect from website A into a 301 redirect to the home page of website B. Last week the Google webmaster tools account of website B showed the links from the 301 redirected website A. The total amount of links doubled and the top anchor text is the name of company A instead of company B. This, off course, could trigger an alarm at Google. Because we got a lot of new links with a different anchor text. A tactic used by spammers/black-hats. I am a bit worried that our change will be penalized by Google. But our change is legit. It is to the advantage of our customers to find us if they search for the name of company A or click on a link to website A. We didn´t change the change of address of domain A in Google webmaster tools yet. Is it a good idea to change the change of address of domain A into domain B? Are there other precautions we can take?
Technical SEO | | NN-online0 -
Remove Links or 301
Howdy Guys, Our main site has been hit pretty hard by penguin and we are just wondering what steps we should now take. For the past 2 months we have been working through our back link profile removing spammy / un-natural links, we have documented everything in a spreadsheet... We recently submitted a reconsideration request to Google and they have now responded saying we still have bad links. I'm just wondering would be it easier just to 301 redirect our site to another TLD we have for our main site? Or Do we keep working through our links 1 by 1 and removing them? Has anyone had any success in 301ing? Thanks, Scott
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Broken LInks Tool?
Hi I am trying to find broken links on my site, Is there a tool for this? Free or Paid tool is fine thanks.
Technical SEO | | daracreative0 -
Why would you remove a canonical link?
Currently, my client's blog makes a duplicate page every time someone comments on a post. The previous SEO consultant told the developer to not put a canonical link directing it to the main blog post. Did taking out the canonical link result in these duplicate pages? My question is why would she recommend this action? Is it best to now add in the canonical link in or should we implement a 301 redirect or insert a index: no follow? Would adding a canonical link keep duplicate pages from happening in the future?
Technical SEO | | Scratch_MM0