Links with very bad anchor text!
-
I have a client with an online shop with auto parts in Romania, on google.ro. The site is quite old but it hasn't good links.
The only links (about 700 seen in OSE) the site have are from porn sites/forum/blogs with all kind of obscene words in the anchor text. Those links were placed by competitors, i am sure of that.
Now how Google treats those links? Does he know that those links were not placed by any normal human? Does it gives credit to them or doesn't?
The site is on a very competitive niche and it is not ranking so good.
-
You're welcome
You're right there, those links most likely won't be passing on any link juice or benefit . They could potentially be harmful though as there are not any high quality good links pointing in, though there's also the chance that they won't have any negative effect. Cannot know either way with 100% certainty, just can be sure that some high quality relevant authoritive links will help for sure.
Sounds like you're doing things in the right order; getting your website in shape by addressing the on-site issues that you mention, with focusing on the link building once that is sorted out.
Hope it all works out well,
Simon
-
Thanks Simon for your detailed answer.
I still think that Google doesn't give any credit to those links, because he knows that nobody is that stupid to buy those kind of links to his site. I think Google asks the same question as i do. Why would i buy/place crappy links pointing to my site? What is the logic in it.
I know that if i want to rank high i need lots of quality links, and for the moment it is possible to not rank higher because of those links. I'll see when i'll start to build some links, for the moment i have some big problems on site.
Thanks again.
-
Hi Maldinii
This could potentially be harming, though mainly because you say the only links are from bad sites with poor anchor text. If the website also had a reasonable number of good links, then it wouldn't matter, probably.
This is because Google in particular simply discount irrelevant links from poor websites/websites in a bad neighbourhood rather than penalise a site for having those kind of links. Except for when it's apparent that those links have been purchased as a part of a link building scheme to try and artificially inflate rankings, when both link provider and link receiver are at risk from a penalty.
For some reassurance, have a read of this blog post entitled "What if My Competitors Point Spammy Links to My Site?" and in particular, the section "Defending Yourself from Potential Link Attacks".
Also, view the whole of this video from Rand entitled "I'm Being Outranked by a Spammer" which has some relevant information for you around what I've described here, which is poor spammy links being discounted by Google, so no harm will likely be done purely from having these links. Still need to have some good links coing in though otherwise the overall SEO will be poor and indeed, you probably won't rank highly.
There isn't much that can be done about those unwanted links pointing in, which is a reason why it won't usually attract a penalty purely for having those links.
What you can do is to start some ethical link building, create some great valuable unique content and distribute it well to start attracting some of the right kind of links from relevant authoritive websites.
I hope that helps
Regards
Simon
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 linking anchor text with automated ASP.NET link building
Hi Everyone I really need some help here, the problem I have must be one that many have. I have a simple e-commerce style website so 1 product page can in fact get 40-50 internal links to it. These links come from a mixture of: 1. The parent category pages that the product sits on (Rugged PDA) and in turn the 10 filter pages of this category page (Rugged PDA, ordered by battery size). 2. Alternative product list on other product pages, So many products link to each other as alternatives. From Google analytics we can see that visitors like to browse product to product seeing 5 alternatives on each page with titles like "Smaller", "more rugged" etc. 3. Manufactuer pages, so we have a link to each product from each manufacturer home page where we talk lots about each manufacture we resell. We also have links from images used in the website. So its a nice usable website but we're finding that Google is still telling us in Webmaster tools that it thinks some links are dubious and we're trying to find out why. We only now have 190 external links to the website, most are internal and from the website or our blog on a subdomain. The problem we think is that we generate the category and products pages all dynamically so the anchor text is looking the same. Will this potentially create issues for us? Dave
Link Building | | Raptor-crew0 -
More than 2K dofollow links, from one site with one anchor text?
A week ago one person of our team added a link with anchor text on a web directory website PR5, but from this one link, Google indexed more than 2K links from this website with same anchor text, and then our keyword ranked first on SERP. The problem is that this clearly look like SPAM to Google, so which way is better to remove this link, with disawow tool, or to contact the web directory site owner?Could anyone give me any advice for this?
Link Building | | cvissi0 -
Anchor text for deep links?
Hi,
Link Building | | rayvensoft
I was wondering if anybody had some advice on what to do for deep link anchor text in the post penguin world? For the homepage, I am going with almost exclusively branded text with only small variations once in a while. For the deep links I was thinking of doing a mix of branded text with some additional text such as: "My Brand Name" + Red or "My Brand Name" + Blue Does anybody know if this is the best way to go, or is there any other advice? Thanks in advance.0 -
Penguin Recover: Remove links vs Burry Links
The best is to do both. However with those with limited resources, would building more links with branded and naked URL anchor links be a better solution than painstakingly asking every webmaster to remove links.
Link Building | | reprisemedia10 -
I have 87,636 links to my website from a single domain, is this bad?
Hi guys I have 87,636 links from one website, of which 75,189 of those link to my homepage using my website name as the anchor. Another has 29,811 links back to my website, again the majority of the links using my website name as the anchor. Is this a bad thing? Let me explain how this has happened - a company by the name of Daylife uses our RSS feed and distributes this to hundreds of their clients, which include indiatimes, usatoday, dallasnews etc, now I noticed that the majority of these websites all link back to our website with the same anchor text used several times on a single page. Attached is an example. Would this be a bad thing seen as the majority of these links have the same anchor text and link to my homepage? Looking at my GWT there is an estimated 183,373 backlinks that are all like this. Our traffic has dropped since Mr Panda hit and I am trying to find out if this could be adding to the problem. Thank you for you time links.jpg
Link Building | | hstdigital0 -
How to have an internal call to action with an anchor that employs the correct internal linking practices?
I wanted to put a call to action in my internal profiles, but I'm not able to get out of the classic "check out" and "learn more" links. Right now the best copy I've been able to come up with is: <nickname>is using StyleJam for his web design portfolio - check out the benefits </nickname> Where "check out the benefits" is a link to my home page. I wanted to understand first of all how important this is, and second what techniques you use for internal calls to action. TIA.
Link Building | | ngw0 -
Article Links
I write and publish artcles. Typically I publish them on a few top article sites like EZineArticles. The articles then get picked up by other sites, often numbering in the hundreds. All of the articles are published with a link back to our website using a keyword. Are there any SEO risks in this type of link proliferation?
Link Building | | JimSkychief0