Link profile problem? User-generated reviews website suffering after Penguin

[WOMO]

Hi all,

We run a user-generated reviews website and we link to the websites of businesses with reviews. Many of them also link back to their reviews page (and in fact, we give them a widget to encourage this).

I have a couple of questions about this;

Most of these links are to legitimate, but fairly small and unknown businesses - which means a lot of our inbound (and outbound) links are low quality. Could this be hurting us?

Given that the links are 2-way, could this be viewed as spam?

Some businesses (including a couple with high traffic) have included our widget in their website footer - so there are thousands of (low quality) links from a single domain. Problem?

The reason I'm asking is that our traffic suffered in the Panda update, and is again suffering with Penguin - despite the fact that we have a lot of unique content in the form of user-reviews. We've never engaged in any black-hat techniques.

Any ideas or advice would be much appreciated. SEO novice here!

[WOMO]

Thanks heaps Charles and lesterj as well.

I've had a look into Google's view on widgets and it looks like you might be right so we've just changed the code on the widget so that the link back to us is nofollow (somewhat counter-intuitive!)

We've also just submitted a disavow on the worst offending links/domains.

.... so fingers crossed! Guess we have to wait for Google to crawl all of these sites to see an impact though.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

From what you've told us, it sounds like the biggest issue is probably the widget links. Google has specifically stated that they don't consider widget links to be very natural. They are not links that people are editorially deciding to put on their sites. So, sites that have a majority of the links coming back to them as widget links are being hit by Penguin. The simple solution to this is to simply use the nofollow tag for the link in the widget, and that should put you within the guidelines of what Google wants. It also should solve your reciprocal link issue if that's even an issue. It's not going to be a reciprocal link if the link going to you has a nofollow. You could also possibly add nofollow links to the links going out to the companies.

I don't know that reciprocal linking is your real issue here because reciprocal linking itself isn't a huge problem. It's when it's done as a linking scheme and it makes up the majority of your links. So, I would recommend adding a nofollow tag to the widget. Don't remove the widget itself because you want to use your experience, but put a nofollow on the widget and then go from there and try to generate some real links that are not just from the companies that are linking to you to get reviews.

[Charlessipe]

The issues you identified can certainly cause problems with your rankings.

1. Links from a lot of low quality sites is what the Penguin update is targeting. You may want to research Google's disavow tool and determine if you need to use it to disavow a lot of low quality links.
2. You don't want to link out to bad neighborhoods because that makes your site appear less trustworthy. You may want to add no-follow to all your outbound links that are user generated. SEOMoz nofollows links in profiles unless you meet certain criteria (200 Mozpoints). 
3. A high percentage of reciprocal links may hurt your rankings. I believe that adding no-follow to your outbound links will help with this. If you do not editorially recommend a site, then Google prefers that you no-follow the link.
4. A high percentage of site-wide footer links from the widget can hurt you. Google may consider your ratio of your links that are site-wide and be suspicious if your ratio of site-wide links are unnaturally high. Many people try to buy links in the sidebar of blogs and Google wants to minimize the effectiveness of this. If you do a widget, you may want to no-follow the links to your site and focus on the value you get from free advertising, referral traffic, and increased brand awareness.

[Modi]

This is what Matt cutt says " If you can't or don't want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should nofollow those links. This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web."

As its a 2 way link - so either Gooogle may take it as reciprocal paid links too.. This is ideal to avoid 'dofollow' links - if the other site links to you too. Why to unnecessarily create confusion to eyes of Google to treat them as unnatural link / spam links

For more see this video:- http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x4UJS-LFRTU

[WOMO]

Thanks heaps Gagan,

Any ideas on what we should do? I guess we could remove the links - but then that reduces the user-experience. We could also use no-follows, but I've read elsewhere not to use these.

[Modi]

If its a 2 way link - then it comes in definition of reciprocal links.

As per Google :- One of the examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results: Excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you")

may be your site falls (unintentionally) in this category

For the other part - If the proportion is 70:30 or even worse, where 70% are low quality sites linking to you - then yes.. PS - This 70% is basis my understanding of Link building field

However, if the number of quality or high DA/PR sites are more - then they may be offsetting the spam links. Have to look at the link quality and start building from good quality sites