Has anyone used Capterra and will I get penalized for paid links?
-
Hello -
I'm contemplating buying a directory listing on the software promotion website http://www.capterra.com/ . It's a site that gets quite a bit of traffic for people searching for software products and I was interested in promoting my software product there, but I don't want to ruin our very good standing with Google at this time if Google deems Capterra as selling paid links. I'm not interested in this for links but instead as a good source of referral traffic for my software site.
If anyone has used Capterra or has advice on whether Capterra might injure my SERP rankings, I would appreciate it. Thanks,
Jeff
-
Thanks for that reply ... it was very helpful, and I appreciate your company's stance on that.
-
I saw this question and wanted to respond on behalf of Capterra.
We (Capterra) are actually not a paid links site. We have editorial reviews of all content which has to be approved and will often undergo change. We also do not directly link to software websites. The point of listing on Capterra has always been to reach, educate and help our software buyers, not to influence rankings on Google or other search engines. We have worked with thousands of software companies over the last 15 years, and not a single one has noticed/mentioned any change - positive or negative - in their search rankings due to their Capterra listing. I hope this helps! Please let us know if you have any additional questions or concerns.
-
It looks like they redirect the link somehow in their system, but there is no nofollow tag in their links. Here's the page:
-
Will the links be nofollowed?
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
-
Does anyone know what causes the long meta description snippet?
You know the ones I mean... Google have been infrequently displaying some meta descriptions as 3-4 lines long for some time now. But recently, I've been noticing them more. Not sure whether it's just a coincidence that I've been seeing more for my searches, or whether Google are displaying more in this format. Does anybody know what causes Google to prefer the longer meta description or extended meta description for some results?
Algorithm Updates | | Ria_0 -
15% Drop in Traffic. Anyone have theories about the most recent update?
Analyzing our traffic, looks like we were hit site wide, with some article pages that don't have great engagement seeing more damage than others. We've been talking to other sites, and sites that have never seen any penalties and do everything right have also seen about 15-20% drop in traffic. The sites we know that weren't affected are brands (sites you would recognize by name). The only conclusion I can draw from everything (looking at mozcast metrics 'big 10' is that branded websites saw a boost. Does anyone else have any theories about what this most recent update was about?
Algorithm Updates | | nicole.healthline0 -
Will too many [img no alt-text] links harm a link profile?
Hi everyone. I have a client who has a lot of sponsorships etc and therefore a lot of inbound image links (many of them sitewide). Unfortunately most of these don't have alt text, and [img no alt-text] links now make up over 50% of their link profile. Should I be trying to correct this and requesting updates from the people who are linking? Obviously I wouldn't want loads of keyword stuffed alt texts, but maybe I should request alt texts on the brand name or URL instead. Do you think this would make a significant difference and be worth the time it will take to contact all these webmasters? Thanks in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | QubaSEO0 -
Too Many Non-Niche-Specific Links?
Something just occurred to me today. I work in-house for an embroidered patch company, but I respond to a lot of HARO queries about Marketing, SEO, SEM, Web Design, ect. So, we have a lot of links from these types of sites. Additionally, I have done guest blogs on these topics because those are what I'm knowledgeable about. We also have links from customers' personal blogs or websites stating they got their patches from us and are happy, blah, blah, blah. On top of that, we hired someone who ended up getting tons of .edu links by spamming blogs. Oy. I'd estimate only about 10% of our links come from embroidery, sewing, screen printing, promotional products, etc types of sites. I guess it's not really known or documented how much weight Google places on niche-specific links--we just assume that it matters, and I'm sure it does. Our rankings are fine now, but I'm looking for some opinions from other SEOs about how much they think this will matter in the future or how much it matters now. Could this hurt us in the future? .
Algorithm Updates | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Should I use canonical tags on my site?
I'm trying to keep this a generic example, so apologies if this is too vague. On my main website, we've always had a duplicate content issue. The main focus of our site is breaking down to specific, brick and mortar locations. We have to duplicate the description of product/service for every geographic location (this is a legal requirement). So for example, you might have the parent "product/service" page targeting the term, and then 100's of sub pages with "product/service San Francisco", "product/service Austin", etc. These pages have identical content except for the geographic location is dynamically swapped out. There is also additional useful content like google map of area, local resources, etc. As I said this was always seen as an SEO issue, specifically you could see in the way that googlebot would crawl pages and how pagerank flowed through the site that having 100's of pages with identical copy and just swapping out the geographic location wasn't seen as good content, however we still always received traffic and conversions for the long tail geographic terms so we left it. Las year, with Panda, we noticed a drop in traffic and thought it was due to this duplicate issue so I added canonical tags to all our geographic specific product/service pages that pointed back to the parent page, that seemed to be received well by google and traffic was back to normal in short order. However, recently what I notice a LOT in our SERP pages is if I type in a geographic specific term, i.e. "product/service san francisco", our deep page with the canonical tag is what google is ranking. Google inserts its own title tag on the SERP page and leaves the description blank as it doesn't index the page due to the canonical tag on the page. Essentially what I think it is rewarding is the site architecture which organizes the content to the specific geo in the URL: site.com/service/location/san-francisco. Other than that there is no reason for it to rank that page. Sorry if this is lengthy, thanks for reading all of that! Essentially my question is, should I keep the canonical tags on the site or take them off since Google insists on ranking the page? If I am ranking already then the potential upside to doing that is ranking higher (we're usually in the 3-6 spot on the result page) and also higher CTR because we can get a description back on our resulting page. The counter argument is I'm already ranking so leave it and focus on other things. Appreciate your thoughts on this!
Algorithm Updates | | edu-SEO0 -
Is building a WordPress plugin a bad link-building strategy now?
One strategy I was considering for a new site was developing a WordPress plugin that would have the side-effect of generating lots of back links. Given Google's recent over optimization update, this sounds like it could be a really bad idea. The nature of the plugin would be such that it would probably be used on very new blogs with low quality.
Algorithm Updates | | JonDiPietro0 -
Has anyone recovered from Panda?
My two websites were unaffected by the original and 2.0 panda updates, but istring in June my traffic has been down around 30%. In analyzing it appears that my long tail searches have been greatly impacted. So it looks like I am a victim of the mighty panda.My main site, www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc.com is in my opinion a decent looking site, with unique content and no ads, etc., but for whatever reason it has been negatively affected. There might be some duplication of content between certain pages and also my links are all or practically all directory links, though a lot are pretty heavy duty directories. I see a lot of stuff written giving advice on how to recover from Panda. Has anyone actually done so? How did you do it? thx Paul
Algorithm Updates | | diogenes1 -
"Revisit-after" Metatag = Why use it?
Hi Mozfans, Just been thinking about the robots revisit metatag, all pages on my website (200+ pages) have the following tag on them; name="revisit-after" content="7 days" /> I'm wondering what is the purpose of the tag? Surely isn't it best to allow robots (such as Googlebot or Bingbot) to crawl your site as often as possible so the index and rankings get updated as quickly as possible? Thanks in advance everyone! Ash
Algorithm Updates | | AshSEO20110
