Are gallery sites ok post Penguin?
-
We're getting ready to re-launch a redesigned site and I was hoping to use the opportunity to get some quality links. Are some of the higher-quality web design gallery sites still ok to submit to? Did Penguin have any effect on these?
Just looking for opportunities for a little boost from our re-launch.
-
Would the same hold true for comments on blogs? If I'm leaving comments on relevant blogs, would it be ok to leave a link to my website in there, just as long as I'm not using exact-match keywords everywhere?
-
What Google is trying to do with Penguin is to take away (or penalize) any benefit that a website would get from self building links with anchor text.
In the past, if I wanted to rank for "green widgets" I could build a bunch of links containing the anchor text "green widgets", such as "Check out this website about green widgets!" This type of thing would really work well. But, Google has now caught on that this is a blatant attempt to manipulate the search results. They don't want you to rank #1 for green widgets just because you've got good SEO skills. Rather, they want the site that best represents green widgets to rank #1 for that term.
Sites that are getting affected by Penguin are generally ones that have overdone it with their anchor text. Now, no one knows exactly how much is too much (although you'll read lots of theories.) But what we do know is that a natural backlink profile has the majority of their links being their url or their brand name.
The problem is that the brand name is sometimes a tricky thing. If your website is www.greenwidgets.com you could say that your brand name is "green widgets", but to Google, building a bunch of links using the anchor text of "green widgets" may still be anchor text manipulation. For an example, see this post on how WPMU got hit by Penguin for having a bunch of footer links pointing back to them using the anchor text "Wordpress mu".
So, if you're building links (as opposed to earning them totally naturally), be careful not to go overboard on a keyword. Ideally, build links using your url as an anchor. The odd one with a keyword is ok, but until we have more data on what exactly is acceptable I would be very careful in using keywords as your anchor.
-
Can you please explain what it means to "be careful about your anchor text." Regarding anchor text, what is the difference between good and bad anchor text?
Best,
Christopher -
Be careful about your anchor text and I really think you should be ok. If you submitted to a pile of sites using keyword rich anchor text then you are likely to be penalized. But if the majority of your links use your url or brand you should be ok.
Be careful with your brand though if it is something that could be interpreted as a keyword. I've seen a couple of sites get hit by Penguin when they were targeting their brand as their brand was a competitive keyword.
-
Check out the Alexa ranks for the top sites you are considering submitting to and see what kind of an effect Penguin had on their rankings & traffic.
In general, if people are using the website (not just bots/spammers), then it is fine to submit to. Bonus points if it is relevant to your website.
Note: This is not meant to be a complete link building strategy. If the only links you are building come from "web design review" sites, you're gonna have a bad time ranking.
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
-
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
Why is Google not indexing my site?
I'm a bit confused as to why my site just isn't indexing on Google. Even if I type in my brand name, my social channels rank and there's no evidence of my website. I've followed all of the advice I've read and gone into webmaster tools and got the Wordpress yoast plug-in but nothing seems to be making a difference!One thing I've noticed, in Google Webmaster Tools it says "Couldn’t communicate with the DNS server." in site errors. I've called GoDaddy and they said that everything is fine. A bit frustrating. Trying to work out what my next steps should be but feeling a bit lost to be honest! Any help GREATLY appreciated!
Technical SEO | | j1066s0 -
Site not passing page authority....
Hi, This site powertoolworld.co.uk is not passing page authority. In fact every page shows no links unless it has a link from an external source. Originally this site blocked Roger from crawling it but that block was lifted over 6 months ago. I also ran a crawl test last night and it shows the same thing. PA of 1 and no links. I would like to point out that the problem seems to be the same for all sites on the same platform. Which points me in the direction of code. for example there is a display: none tag in the ccs which is used to style where the side bar links are. It's a Blue Park platform. What could be causing the problem? Thanks in advance. EDIT Turns out that blocking the ezooms crawler stopped it from being included.
Technical SEO | | PowerToolWorld0 -
Site links show spam
Hi folks, I'm working on a website that runs on WordPress and was not updated by the owner, this has resulted in a malware injection and now when you search the companies name in Google, the site links appear with words like Viagra, et al. I've seen this a number of times, so I went through the code and have removed all the malware. I presume I now have to wait for Google to recrawl the website and update the site links? Is there anything else I should be doing to speed up the process? Thank you 🙂
Technical SEO | | ChristopherM0 -
What to do if my site was De-indexed?
Hello fellow SEOs, I have been doing SEO for about a year now, I'm not expert, but I know enough to get the job done. I'm learning everyday about better techniques. So enough about that... Tonight I noticed that my site has, I believe, been de-indexed. Its a fairly new site, as we just launched it a few days ago and I went in and did all the title tags and meta. I still have to go in to do the h1 and h2 tags...plus add some alt tags and anchor text. Well anyways, after a couple of days after the title tags were implemented. I was propagating all over the place. Using my keyword tool here...I was number on the first page in Google for 71 or the 88 keywords. My new site was just indexed yesterday and thats when i noticed all my keywords. Well today I noticed that I am no where to be found, even if i type in my company's name. PLEASE help me out...any advice would be appreciated. Thank you. p.s. could my competitors could have done something to my site? just wondering... The website is www.eggheadconsultants.com
Technical SEO | | Jegghead1 -
Should I create mini-sites with keyword rich domain names pointing to my main site?
Hi, I'm new to seomoz (and seo in general) and loving it so far. My main domain name is more of a brandname than a search engine friendly list of keywords. I rank well for some keywords I optimized for, and less so for the more competitive keywords. I was wondering if making one page minisites hosted on keyword rich domain names could help in this respect? What I want to do is just have a single page with a few paragraphs of content and links to the main site. I am not looking for links to boost the main site, just for the minisites to do better for several keywords. Will this help? Is this ok, or against some Google policy? Can this hurt the main site rankings? Thank you! **Edit: **I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords have much less on-page elements than my page, have about the same domain trust and also very little inbound links. The only factor I can see is the exact match of keywords in the domain name.
Technical SEO | | Eladla1 -
Disabling Wordpress Attachment Posts
having issues with every media (photo) we upload creating an additional page on the blog that is being indexed in Google. ie. post: www.mysite.com/ creates this for the photo used: www.mysite.com/blog/category/image-name/attachment/800px/
Technical SEO | | bozzie3110