Do sites like these really work?
-
This company claims to have a good tool. To me it looks like spam. They claim to automate link building and they claim to use Googles Panda to their advantage.
This site does however use link diversity, not sure about how relevant the sources are for each keyword...
Would this fall into black hat or gray area SEO?
-
Umm you just have to look at their homepage to see that it's as spammy as anything. Ask yourself this, does it sound too good to be true?
I would stay well clear of automated tools like this - unless you want another BMR on your hands - http://www.buildmyrank.com/news/its-been-a-great-run
-
Good question, and there is a fuzzy line somewhere. There are some real differences between the blog networks I had used and guest blogging:
- Yes, automation is a big part of the problem. It would be clean for a program to suggest content and links to a blogger, but it would not be ok to insert links automatically.
- Guest blogs typically have much higher quality guidelines, a real author with a name, and they don't exist solely for the purpose of linking to external sites.
There are more and less legitimate ways to guest blog. Sometimes you see two friends who write on one another's blogs, knowing nothing about SEO. Then there are some who haggle over anchor text, number of links, where the links go, and so on. To Google, this is not ok.
Like it or not, sensible or not, Google basically wants site owners to act like links have no value to the linked-to site.
-
I have never used anything like this as well, where I just submit blindly.
Blog networks that are being punished, did they take posts that are not relevant or helpful and spread them? What if they only add your content (links) to relevant blogs where users can benefit?
Whats the difference between these blog sites and http://myblogguest.com/?
I know that on myblogguest.com you manually pick relevant sites and manually contact them. Is that the only difference?
-
That's exactly what a blog network is, and Google is deindexing them and sending webmasters warnings for using them. I don't care whether it's white, black, or grey, but this is clearly a "link scheme" as defined by Google.
I've never used this particular service, so I can't comment on it specifically. I've used a lot like them. You may see some results if you're careful, but it's not like you suddenly rank first for whatever keyword you want. In the end, though, look at all of the wasted, counter-productive effort of people who invested in blog networks that are now shut down.
tl;dr: It's not a long-term strategy.
-
Have you ever used a service like this? Do they own the sites that publish your links? Are the links being placed in relevant places?
-
Im not sure about Googles views on automations. I have used some programs to automate certain things. You can automate things as long as you do it in the white hat way. For example I can use a link building tool to find potential link partners, instead of blasting one email to all of them, I analyze their site and manually contact them.
Im asking this question to get opinions on this type of service, Wanted to see if anyone has ever used it, or something similar to it. Does it work? Is it reliable? (I would say I am 75% agains it)
-
How is it black hat? You still create your own content, they just distribute it for you (getting you the links).
This can easily fall into a gray area.
-
In a nutshell
.. no.
Unless you are experienced with 'black hat' tactics and have been experimenting with them for years then I would stay clear of programs like these.
-
Hi,
I don't know much about the service if offers, but I'd imagine anything 'automated' would be classed as black hat by Google.
When link building I often go by the moto - if it's too good to be true, it probably is. Depressing huh? But it's a good way of keeping link building under control...
Karen
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
-
Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results on 100% responsive site
Has anyone experienced an issue where Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results than their Desktop site crawl on a 100% responsive website that passes all Google Mobile tests?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MFCommunications0 -
Is SEO as Effective on AJAX Sites?
Hey Everyone, I had a potential client contact me about doing SEO for their site and I see that they have an AJAX site where all the content is rendered dynamically via AJAX. I've been doing SEO for years, but never had a client with an AJAX site. I did a little research and see how you can setup alternative pages (or snapshots as Google calls them) with the actual content so the pages are crawlable and will get indexed, but I'm wondering if that is as effective as optimizing static HTML pages or if Google treats AJAX page alternatives as less trustworthy/valuable. Also, does having the site in AJAX effect link building and social sharing? With the link structure, it seems there could be some issues with pointing links and passing link juice to internal pages Thanks! Kurt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kurt_Steinbrueck1 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Temporary Duplicate Sites - Do anything?
Hi Mozzers - We are about to move one of our sites to Joomla. This is one of our main sites and it receives about 40 million visits a month, so the dev team is a little concerned about how the new site will handle the load. Dev's solution, since we control about 2/3 of that traffic through our own internal email and cross promotions, is to launch the new site and not take down the old site. They would leave the old site on its current URL and make the new site something like new.sub.site.com. Traffic we control would continue to the old site, traffic that we detect as new would be re-directed to the new site. Over time (the think about 3-4 months) they would shift the traffic all to the new site, then eventually change the URL of the new site to be the URL of the old site and be done. So this seems to be at the outset a duplicate content (whole site) issue to start with. I think the best course of action is try to preserve all SEO value on the old URL since the new URL will eventually go away and become the old URL. I could consider on the new site no-crawl/no-index tags temporarily while both sites exist, but would that be risky since that site will eventually need to take those tags off and become the only site? Rel=canonical temporarily from the new site to the old site also seems like it might not be the best answer. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kenn_Gold0 -
Site Transfer and Downtime
If I want to transfer my website from yahoo to another web host without having any down time how would I do that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc. We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did: -We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt -Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index -Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.) -removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site. We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect. There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all. The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com. There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist. The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name. Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new? ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line: "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document." This may be what is happening here. And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it. Confused yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
This site got hit but why..?
I am currently looking at taking on a small project website which was recently hit but we are really at a loss as to why so I wanted to open this up to the floor and see if anyone else had some thoughts or theories to add. The site is Howtotradecommodities.co.uk and the site appeared to be hit by Penguin because sure enough it drops from several hundred visitors a day to less than 50. Nothing was changed about the website, and looking at the Analytics it bumbled along at a less than 50 visitors a day. On June 25th when Panda 3.8 hit, the site saw traffic increase to between 80-100 visitors a day and steadily increases almost to pre-penguin levels. On August 9th/10th, traffic drops off the face of the planet once again. This site has some amazing links http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/04/algorithmsdata-vs-analystsreports-fight/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesAgate
http://as.exeter.ac.uk/library/using/help/business/researchingfinance/stockmarket/ That were earned entirely naturally/editorially. I know these aren't "get out of jail free cards" but the rest of the profile isn't that bad either. Normally you can look at a link profile and say "Yep, this link and that link are a bit questionable" but beyond some slightly off-topic guest blogging done a while back before I was looking to get involved in the project there really isn't anything all that fruity about the links in my opinion. I know that the site design needs some work but the content is of a high standard and it covers its topic (commodities) in a very comprehensive and authoritative way. In my opinion, (I'm not biased yet because it isn't my site) this site genuinely deserves to rank. As far as I know, this site has received no unnatural link warnings. I am hoping this is just a case of us having looked at this for too long and it will be a couple of obvious/glaring fixes to someone with a fresh pair of eyes. Does anyone have any insights into what the solution might be? [UPDATE] after responses from a few folks I decided to update the thread with progress I made on investigating the situation. After plugging the domain into Open Site Explorer I can see quite a few links that didn't show up in Link Research Tools (which is odd as I thought LRT was powered by mozscape but anyway... shows the need for multiple tools). It does seem like someone in the past has been a little trigger happy with building links to some of the inner pages.0 -
How important are social bookmarking sites
How important are links from social bookmarking sites from an SEO perspective?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340