How important are links after Panda
-
I have noticed that the sites in my niche that were at the top of the SERP's are still at the top of the SERP's after panda. I have also heard people theorizing that links are no longer important, its now all about bounce rates, time on site, etc. Is there any consensus about how important links are after Panda?
thx
Paul
-
Backlinks are the foundation of the original algorithm. Check out the first paragraph in "Design Goals" section 1.3.1 in Brin's and Page's original paper on google: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html The last couple of lines point to how backlinks are what guide's google to figure out relevance to a significant degree.
However, as people have both witnessed and experienced, google's punishing specific types of links like blog networks right now and also probably taking into consideration notions like what Geoff Kenyon wrote back at the end of January before a lot of the sh*t hit the fan: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization
I think the key is to keep the ratio more heavily weighted towards the brand and the urls of the original website and definitely not having too much of one specific anchor text. However, some companies still seem to be "under google's radar" like this one I noticed recently: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.autson.com. I guess if you "make it appear natural", you can still make it under their radar. At the same time, I would HIGHLY encourage a larger proportion being more naturally built links despite the pain and time it takes.
Google's going to constantly disrupt the business though...how else can they keep their stock price going up by pumping it with all the adwords spends?
-
Links are still very important. Not quantity but quality of sites linking to you. There has been some recent talk on google's statements on anchor text and debate around whether they still consider it or how much relevancy anchor text plays. But at the end of the day links from good sites are very important.
-
I like what "Optimize and Monetize" said. Links is like Oxygen. Think of them as Website Food. That's the nature of the internet. Social signals, internet citations, activity on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and local / niche directories, yellow pages, forums etc based on the nature of your website/business, it all adds up. Panda is just trying to find and discount the effects of the "manipulations" per se. I hope that helps :). Good content, Good links - Works.
-
How important is oxygen to you?
Very important. Links still have value....Panda just created a way to discount and penalize certain types of links. Good for you that you weren't affected. Keep building strong solid manual links and you will continue to see value.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Canonicals from sub-domain to main domain: How much content relevancy matters? Any back-links impact?
Hi Moz community, I have this different scenario of using canonicals to solve the duplicate content issue in our site. Our subdomain and main domain have similar landing pages of same topics with content relevancy about 50% to 70%. Both pages will be in SERP and confusing users; possibly search engine too. We would like solve this by using canonicals on subdomain pointing to main domain pages. Even our intention is to only to show main domain pages in SERP. I wonder how Google handles it? Will the canonicals will be respected with this content relevancy? What happens if they don't respect? Just ignore or penalise for trying to do this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
What happens when a de-indexed subdomain is redirected to another de-indexed subdomain? What happens to the link juice?
Hi all, We are planning to de-index and redirect a sub domain A to sub domain B. Consequently we now need to d-index sub domain B also. What happens now to the link juice or page rank they gained from hundreds and thousands of backlinks? Will there be any ranking impact on main domain? Backlinks of these sub domains are not much relevant to main domain content. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Are we confusing Google with our internal linking?
Hi all, We decided to give importance to one of our top pages as it has "keyword" in it's slug like website.com/keyword. So we internally linked even from different sub-domain pages more than homepage to rank for that "keyword". But this page didn't show up in Google results for that "keyword"; neither homepage, but our login page is ranking. We wonder why login page is ranking. Has our internal linking plan confused Google to ignore homepage to rank for that primary keyword? And generally do we need to internally link homepage more than anyother page? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Recovered from penguin/panda but which one?
So the good news is that for the first time since April 24th, one of our websites is back in the search results as of around December 12 but I am still unsure as whether it was panda or penguin (or both) that was impacting the site?? Note this was not a manual penalty. I diagnosed it as a penguin issue (drop on April 24th, aggressive on-page optimisation, around 10% of links from spammy directories like addyourfreelinks.com with anchor text built by a questionable agency), but on further advice it was thought that panda was also an issue because it is a hotel microsite so there was duplication with our own brand site and across third party travel sites and there were a number of pages with bare content. I figured it was a good time to clean everything up to address both. Here is a summary of actions taken: submitted disavow file on October 24th with all questionable links including actions taken and comments. Since then I have cleaned up some content so it is less aggressively targeting certain keywords. Amended several third party listings with duplicate content No follow,indexed pages that were directly duplicated with our brand site and over the last month have built a few good quality links. Cleaned up 404's in webmaster tools over the last week I have searched to see if there were any algorithm updates around December 12 but cannot find any mentions. Thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | jay.raman0 -
Was I hit by panda or penguin?
My site, graciousbridal.com was hit pretty hard by google at the end of April. I actually noticed our traffic decreasing around February, then towards the end of April, it got really bad. Our sales this may were half of what they were in may 2011. We have never done any black or gray hat seo, wouldn't even know how to. I know in the past we did blog commenting, but changed up our keywords so it wasn't all the same, maybe we didn't change it enough?? We have another very similar site that I'm now wondering if we were penalized because they are too similar. We always have changed up the copy, but they have most of the same products. This second site barely gets traffic or sales and has about half of the items graciousbridal does. But, I'm wondering now if it's to similar and that is why we were penalized. I can't figure out what we did wrong to have this big of a drop. I really need help with this as this is supposed to be our busiest season of the year. Any advice or direction is greatly appreciated..
Algorithm Updates | | Craig2100 -
How to Link a Network of Sites w/o Penguin Penalties (header links)
I work for a network of sites that offer up country exclusive content. The content for the US will be different than Canada, Australia, Uk, etc.… but with the same subjects. Now to make navigation easy we have included in the header of every page a drop down that has links to the other countries, like what most of you do with facebook/twitter buttons. Now every page on every site has the same link, with the same anchor text. Example: Penguins in Canada Penguins in Australia Penguins in the USA Because every page of every site has the same links (it's in the header) the "links containing this anchor text" ratio is through the roof in Open Site Explorer. Do you think this would be a reason for penguin penalization? If you think this would hurt you, what would you suggest? no follow links? Remove the links entirely and create a single page of links? other suggestions?
Algorithm Updates | | BeTheBoss0 -
Are you seeing changes in your sites today? Panda 2.2?
I've heard rumblings of some Panda sites recovering in the last few days and wondered if the talked about Panda 2.2 has been rolled out. My own site (which actually had a significant boost after Panda) has seen a significant increase in traffic today (started about noon EST yesterday) and a nice increase in Adsense revenue as well. How are your sites doing?
Algorithm Updates | | MarieHaynes1 -
Recovered From The Panda Update?
Does anyone know if there are websites that have recovered from the Panda update?
Algorithm Updates | | dirkla0