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 -
How long will this Site be punished? (place your bets!)
Got hit with a manual penalty in Feb2014. Got it removed in 6 months (before the Penguin refresh). Whole site got deindexed at one point including BRAND searches. (Brand searches has since come back) Disavowed over 20k domains (yea spam was bad). But still have a good amount of authority links such as huff post, edu, wiki, apple apps, reddit etc. About 97% of our links are on page 2 or beyond. Cant get past that spot 11 'Wall'. The suppression machine is not kind. We even had a very popular article get tons of shares, media pick up, and the original article would not rank on the first page for its title. Our 'brand + keyword' gets about 2k searches a month. Just 'keyword' gets nothing, which i find amusing. So whats the prognosis doc? Another year, 3 or never? Anyone else in same boat? Wait for the next penguin refresh and hope for the best? Cheers eXfPjzX.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IsHot0 -
Does anyone knows when .guru domains will became active or if they are already
Does anyone knows when .guru domains will became active or if they are already
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Disavowin a sitewide link that has Thousands of subdomains. What do we tell Google?
Hello, I have a hosting company that partnered up with a blogger template developer that allowed users to download blog templates and have my footer links placed sitewide on their website. Sitewides i know are frowned upon and that's why i went through the rigorous Link Audit months ago and emailed every webmaster who made "WEBSITENAME.Blogspot.com" 3 times each to remove the links. I'm at a point where i have 1000 sub users left that use the domain name of "blogspot.com". I used to have 3,000! Question: When i disavow these links in Webmaster tools for Google and Bing, should i upload all 1000 subdomains of "blogspot.com" individually and show Google proof that i emailed all of them individually, or is it wise to just include just 1 domain name (www.blogspot.com) so Google sees just ONE big mistake instead of 1000. This has been on my mind for a year now and I'm open to hearing your intelligent responses.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages. We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices). We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page. Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank. Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!0 -
Volusion store product pages will not index
Hello, I have moved over to Volusion and was wondering if you guys know of any SEO practices that are Volusion specific. i have been working on this site now for 2 months and my impressions and rankings have dropped substantially My 301 redirects where in place before I flipped over and my keywords / titles/ tags etc.. are in place. However i am still not making any progress in the engines. I have noticed that my products are not being indexed per Webmaster tools. I have heard that volusion has something set up to where you must purchase their SEO package in order to rank. I am really at my wits end and currently I thinking about taking a loss and reverting back to my old Shoppe Pro site. Any help would be very appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kerry0217
.0 -
Will ranking be improved or hurt by changing 1/5 of part numbers to key words
Note: I bold major content for your quick skim for your convenience. Does this help you decide if its a fit for your response? My site has been devastated by the Panda or unknown reasons so I need to think outside the box. I distribute industrial products with average brand recognition. I only have about 5 competitors selling this same brand. My other brand competitors are billion dollar companies that pay a lot for PPC and have sites with 10 times the product offering. Since my brand recognition is not as important as the function.I'm thinking about changing the part numbers to reflect function. This will affect about 1/5of the parts ( about 500 out of 3,000 parts) . My concern is will ranking be hurt or helped by changing these parts with these strong keywords in front of the part for such a high % of the site. The strong keywords cost $10 for a chance at a $200 sale with repeat business. Example: Current part is: 10-10 Black Plastic; which is a Big Red Truck with my brand part # as 10-10 and comes in different colors of plastic. . Keyword is Big Red Truck. I would like to put my manufactures brand in the description. My same brand competitors sell 10,000 parts and my logic is that if I have the brand in 1/5 of my parts ranking would be improved because of the % of brand per the site versus my same brand competitors.. So I would change the part # to : **Brand 10-10-Black Plastic Big Red Truck ** In conversation I would state the part as: Brand: 18 characters, Part #: 8, Material:12, Keyword: 27 If the keyword should be first I could change to: K,B P,M. Which is recommended?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wales0 -
Is it fine to use an iframe for video content? Will it still be indexed on your URL?
If we host a video on a third party site and use an iframe to display it on our site, when the video is indexed in SERPs will it show on our site or on the third party site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0