Too many nofollowed blog comments with exact anchor text
-
Back in my dumb days, I decided to use Fiver to get 25 backlinks from .edu sites. Well, they were all nofollowed, and they share space with hundreds of other sites spamming them. Top top it off, all the spam links for my site are exact-match anchor text: embroidered patches.
If you look at my link profile in OSE, it looks so polluted with these. I'm just looking for post-Penguin opinions about this--if it has the potential to hurt.
Since Penguin, I have moved to the #1 position for the KW embroidered patches, but I am still scared that future algorithm tweaks will incorporate this blog comment spam.
What do you think?
-
Since Penguin, I have moved to the #1 position for the KW embroidered patches
Nice work! WooHoo!
-
That's a good idea about the sitewide links thing. I have 12,900 links from one site, so that must be a sitewide thing. The good news is, the rest of my link profile is good, with a lot of varying anchor text. Maybe that's why I haven't been hurt by this one bad thing.
-
"it would be a good time to build some natural links to counterweight the existing ones."
yes exactly, and use completely different anchor texts, stay away from any variations of "embroidered patches"
look at some of the sites that are linking to you and if there are some easy quick wins, like a sitewide link on a bad site with a large index, and has webmaster contact info ask to get it taken down. Sometimes offering $20 via paypal helps get a webmasters attention.
-
Black and white zoo animals--funny. Those are really the only bad links; it's just that they are on high-authority sites, so when you look at my link profile, they're dominating the first two pages, so it looks so bad. But the rest of the links are fine, so I guess I won't worry too overly much.
-
This could potentially cause your website to suffer but it's all about ratio and balance. If the majority of your website's link profile is made up of these types of links, then it would be a good time to build some natural links to counterweight the existing ones.
As long as the positive metrics outweigh the negatives, generally, you should be fine. Just building some links with varying anchor text to the same page should ensure that you're website doesn't get hit further down the line by one of Google's black and white zoo animals.
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
-
Guest blogging penalty
We would like to receive a blogging post from guest on our blog which links to their website and vice versa....a link from their blog to our website. Does this affect us in terms of Google's "guest blogging" scenario? We have natural link exchange from our partners...website to website from partners page.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Do any sub-domains act as Private Blog Networks?
Hi All, We can see now that Google rolled 2 unconfirmed algo updates this month and they are penalising spam links and sites which use Private blog networks; as said by some SEO experts. Do any sub-domains act as PBNs because of too much linking...like linking website pages from every page of sub-domains?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Should a business requestion nofollow links from businesses it has commercial relationships with?
I am working for a motor homes company that works with a network of dealers. Having just analysed the site I notice that dealers are sending links to the site - lots of them. They are all follow links and are freely given. ADDED: There are upwards of a million new affiliate backlinks and then a load of pretty normal freely given backlinks with dealers who have commission arrangements, etc., with the company on motorhome sales. Now this doesn't feel right to me because even if it isn't purposefully manipulative, it may appear so because of clear commercial relationships between my client company and the dealer businesses. So I will recommend nofollow althought the site will lose a huge number of backlinks as a result. What are your thoughts on this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
I have a recipe food blog and use wordpress, but my recipes are usually in more than one category...?
The recipes are in most cases in more than one category (usually two) each. Do and (and if so how) need to set each post to one canicol url? E.g A recipe on Peas is in healthy foods (which is the default wordpress cat.) and also Vegetarian Dishes. I use YOAST for wordpress
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kelly33300 -
Site-wide links: Nofollow or eliminate altogether?
As a web developer, it's not uncommon for me to place a link in the footer of a website to give myself credit for the web design/development. I recently decided to go back and nofollow all these site-wide footer links, to avoid potentially looking spammy. I wanted to know if I should remove these links altogether, and just give myself text credit without a link at all? I would like for a potential client who is interested in my work to still be able to get to my site if they like my work - but I want to keep my link profile squeaky clean. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brad.s.knutson0 -
No-Follow Comments from 2010
An old SEO consultant left a lot of comments with exact anchor text links on non relevant blogs back in 2010. At this point most of them are no-follow, but I'm obviously still concerned they are damaging. Is the no-follow enough? Or should I still work to remove them? Is the time worth the effort? Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
How should I look to gain traffic for a blog hosted on our own site?
Ok I know what you're going to say.. social media etc right? The problem is we do that already but we're stuck in an industry that just isn't very sexy! People reading twitter/facebook don't want to read about toilets in their spare time, or keep it as a hobby. If you search bathroom blog (uk google), you will see we are about 5th, it gets us no traffic, as I imagine it's not a popular term so I can see you starting to ask why we write a blog in the first place. We write the blog because at the moment the whole industry is dominated by pile it high sell it cheap online stores and all their blogs are written for google only so finding decent or unbiased advice is rare. Seriously, these guys are creating fake blogs and paying for links inside other blogs all over the place in order to boost their rankings so we figure if you really want some good advice people can't find it. If they find our blog they will get some good advice and good content.. and then the hope is that they give us a call and we can see if we can help them. The problem is these guys are hogging all the keywords.. and it seems the bathroom industry has very few keywords that people search! Now I know we are in it for the long haul.. so taking time doesn't bother me, but I was wondering if there were any tried and tested places to post a blog that could get us at least seen so that people could see how different our content is? Or if all else fails, can anyone suggest the right keywords to aim at besides the "bathroom suites" etc that these huge online stores dominate?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | willryles0 -
Guest Post Blogging And Exchanging Links
Hi, I hope you are all well. Would there be any problem with exchanging a guest blog, so two websites doing a guest post for each other and both sites linking back to each other. I don't think this would be an issue on a small scale though I just wanted to see what everyone else thought. Are there any other things I should bear in mind when doing this as well? Kind Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JonathanRolande0