Some badges will be sitewide, is that OK
-
Hello,
We are making badges to hand out to our alumni.
Some of these links backs are probably going to be sitewide.
Is this tactic still good with respect to the recent G updates?
Thanks
-
Bob, there's nothing 100% safe for the future, Google is a private entity and they make the rules of their own game. However you can 99% sure that links will always be in their algo, just because is the inner nature of the www to have sites interlinked. I imagine that they'll become every day smarter in detecting patterns and automated links or human trying to manipulate the algo, but what they won't never control is human manual editing. It has no (huge) patterns and it's natural which is what they really want.
About your alumnis I don't have the compelte view of your market and situation but if I understand yyour position: they know that they're helping you but you're not giving nothing back to them. I think that since they've studied in your center they've been selected as top alumnis and been given a badge to demonstrate that. If I were them I would like to show it, so ask them to write a post, I think that the value for them here is intangible, jsut ego-boosting you need to play in that ground, I don't know how renowned you are in your market but someone is always happy to be endorsed by a structure (maybe you can offer special linkedin endorsemnent for a really short group with good websites )
-
Irving, the Guru in who answered below, told me to never purposely do reciprocal links. He told me that in this question:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/a-few-reciprocal-links-ok
I'm open to suggestions on whether reciprocal links are OK and I really appreciate the great ideas.
-
Irving,
Thank you for your comment. It sounds like we're stretching the limits here, when making them dofollow even if it's on one page. This is a long term, play-it safe site with high integrity.
What's 100% safe for the future?
-
use long tails that incorporate your main keyword, so it helps your main keyword, but of you get a penalty for some reason it wil lonly affect that long tail and not your main term
If you can get them on homepage or main LP only I would make them dofollow, but if sitewide I would stick to nofollow - and if you do nofollow then you can use whatever anchor text you like since it's a neutered and safe link.
-
Well it is reciprocal by definition but when there is useful editorial content surrounding the link it's different than a page full of links just pointing back and forth at each other.
-
I like it, but wouldn't that be reciprocal linking?
-
I'm not sure what business you are in but you could take a different approach. Instead of asking for links you could do your own editorial "features" of some of your authoritative blog owning alumni. You could push that on your own blog and then collaborate with them about covering the piece on their site with links back to you as the original source.
Might work but it does really depend on your niche and the relevancy of these blog owning alumni.
-
Sounds good, we'll stick to editorial mention.
We could offer the badges to alumni with blogs that have written a post about us and linked back to our site.
Our relationship to our alumni is very delicate, how can we frame this proposal so that it comes across more mutually beneficial? I don't think in our case we can contact our blog owning alumni and ask a lot of them. Is there a way to make this sound better?
-
If you can get the editorial links by all means go for those first b/c then you can get followed links and have zero risk of penalty. But the response above is correct in that you probably don't want to roll this out before the next major google algo update comes supposedly on Friday.
-
Hi Bob, take into account one thing. Google wants links to be manually edited. Editorial link is good when you hide a link in a widget/badge to receive a link which is not editorially made you're "gaming" the algo. That link is not natural under google eyes. (further listening here).
The idea is good, the implementation not so much. Why not get in touch with your top 50 alumni, ask them to put the badge without any link inside and then ask them to write a post about their happiness of being considered a top alumni or their experience in your school? There they can link back to you (or not!) but it would be definitely higher quality, relevant and moreover editorially made!!!
Also I won't be making heavy linking tests while the next, huge Penguin is in the air
-
Here's what we've decided to do. We'll send out 50 badges to the first 50 alumni that wants them. Then we'll email them a custom embed script. We'll have 50 different alt tags.
Does that work or do the image filenames have to be different as well?
Also, is this safe on into the future of Google?
-
This sounds like a cautious approach. If you are only issuing 30-50 anchor text optimized badges and you vary the anchor text I think you're safe as long as relevancy remains intact.
-
What if we only gave out 30-50 badges to our elite alumni and had them all have different anchor text?
-
I agree you are ok to include links in a badge but the main objective of the badge should be to build brand credibility not build links for the search engines. If you nofollow and stick with branded anchor text I think you are safe. It's a no harm no foul approach erring on the side of caution.
-
Hi Bob, I think that badges are really helpful to build a brand and get renowned in your niche, as more alumni use them the more exposure you'll achieve, however I discourage the usage of this kind of backlinks in your seo linkbuilding strategy since they're not editorially made, and since the link is embedded, it doesn't reflect an user real willing to link to a website. In this video from Matt cutts you can see what I am speaking about. IMO it's still fine to use this kind of links but only if you do the following:
- put a nofollow in it
- don't use rich anchor texts but only your brand name
In this way you'll be sure that no penalty may affect you in the future. Just a general guideline always try to achieve editorially made links. 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
-
OK to have multiple local business structured data on one website?
Hello there, I'm working on implementing local business structured data for a website but we have multiple offices. Is it okay from a Google perspective to add different local business data on different pages of the website, or can I only use one set of local business data site wide? Many thanks, Gill.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cannetastic0 -
When moving a site from HTTP to HTTPS, will i lose value from the 301 redirect?
I am looking at moving my site from HTTP to full HTTPS, so i will 301 redirect any HTTP requests to their HTTPS counterpart. All my pages in the Google index are HTTP, so will that 301 redirect reduce the value of the pages? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOhmygod0 -
Blacklisted website no longer blacklisted, but will not appear on Google's search engine.
We have a client who before us, had a website that was blacklisted by Google. After we created their new website, we submitted an appeal through Google's Webmaster Tools, and it was approved. One year later, they are still unable to rank for anything on Google. The keyword we are attempting to rank for on their home page is "Day in the Life Legal Videos" which shouldn't be too difficult to rank for after a year. But their website cannot be found. What else can we do to repair this previously blacklisted website after we're already been approved by Google? After doing a link audit, we found only one link with a spam score of 7, but I highly doubt that is what is causing this website to no longer appear on Google. Here is the website in question: https://www.verdictvideos.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rodneywarner0 -
How will this affect the rankings and traffic of the new site once this happens?
Hi, we will be moving a clients’ site address from one domain to another and will of course be doing 301 redirects and notifying Google of the site address change in WMT. The problem is, that at some point in the future (say 3-6 months), the old domain will be going live with a new site as the current client does not own the domain and the owner will be wanting it back unfortunately. How will this affect the rankings and traffic of the new site (new domain) once this (old domain with new site) happens? Will the site address change be enough to keep the rankings but it will lose backlink traffic? Or will rankings go down since the 301 redirects will in essence no longer be in affect? Many thanks for your help in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WSIDW0 -
Our domain is ranking quite ok on google.ru, but not at all on Yandex. What could be the main differentiator here?
Hi, The internet let me down on this one. What's the issue? We are ranking quite ok on the most important keywords for our business with our .ru TLD on Google.ru. On Yandex however we don't seem to rank at all. What could be the main differentiating factor here? Could the fact that our servers are in th US play a role? Thank you for your time. Jacob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Unilin0 -
Will a disclaimer affect Crawling?
Hello everyone! My German users will have to get a disclaimer according to German laws, now my question is the following: Will a disclaimer affect crawling? What's the best practice to have regarding this? Should I have special care in this? What's the best disclaimer technique? A Plain HTML page? Something overlapping the site? Thank you all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NelsonF0 -
Moving career site to new URL from main site. Will it hurt SEO for main page?
For one of our clients we are building a career site and putting it under a different URL and hosting service (mainly due to security concerns of hosting it under the same host and domain). almost 100% of the incoming traffic to their current career section (which it is in a sub-folder) receives traffic for branded keywords (brand + job/career/employment), that is, there are no job position specific keywords. The client is now worried that after moving the site, the inbound traffic to the main site will be severely affected as well as the SERP results. My questions are, will the non-career related SERPs be affected? I don't see how will they be but I could be wrong If no, how could we reassure her that the SEO to the main site wont be affected? are there any case studies of a similar case (splitting part of the website under a new URL and hosting service?) Thank you for your help. PS: this is my first post so please forgive me if this has been asked before. I could not find a good response.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rflores0 -
We are changing ?page= dynamic url's to /page/ static urls. Will this hurt the progress we have made with the pages using dynamic addresses?
Question about changing url from dynamic to static to improve SEO but concern about hurting progress made so far.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | h3counsel0