Will getting backlinks to landing page from low quality sites negatively affect SEO?
-
I've recently started an initiative at my company to get our customers to publish a blog post about our company and to include a link to a landing page which sits on a subdomain attached to our main domain. The reason for directing visitors to the post to a landing page is to help with conversion.
I've recently been thinking that couldn't the backlinks to this landing page from our customers' blogs (generally small sites) have a negative impact on the overall SEO of my companies domain?
Thanks in advance.
-
Thanks for the advice Kurt and I'll make sure to be careful. It doesn't look like we will invest too much more in this strategy as it is quite resource intensive.
-
Thanks Dennis. I have a close relationship with these customers so I make sure the anchor text is fine. Thanks for the help.
-
Thanks for the help George. We aren't buying these links, just speaking to our customers and trying to convince them to write about their use of our service. I think we will be fine.
-
I would differentiate between low quality sites and small sites without much authority (yet). When I hear low quality, I think of a spammy site that doesn't have quality, original content. There are plenty of small blogs out there which aren't extremely popular, but do put out quality, original content. Getting links from small sites that produce decent content is perfectly fine. Getting links from a bunch of spammy sites, could eventually hurt you.
As to your strategy, you'll want to be careful. If you are offering incentives for people to post about your site, those links are technically considered paid links and are unnatural. According to the Google guidelines, those links should be nofollow. If they aren't and you are trying to gain link authority through these posts, you're playing a game of whether your way of buying links is something Google will be able to figure out (or your competitors will report). If Google does figure it out, those links may be devalued and your site could be penalized. Just be aware of the risks.
If you just want people posting about your site and sending traffic, then ask them to nofollow the links when they publish the posts and you'll be within Google guidelines.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
Definitely not something Id be worried about, as long as you set the proper rules and restrictions on what they can post/how long it is/how they link
Main thing I'd worry about is anchor text so just set proper choices for them.
-
Hi Justin,
Personally I think you'll be fine as you've described the initiative working. Google doesn't expect every link to a website to be from a high authority, otherwise it would look unnatural. In reality, there will be a mix of high and low authority pages/domains that link to every website. However, if the blog posts are being spun out on blog networks, or if your customers sites have been penalised by Google then it probably isn't going to help you much.
What isn't clear is whether you're effectively buying these links, and whether they will pass PageRank or not. I encourage you to read Google's guidelines on this: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en.
George
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
-
Is there a way to get a list of all pages of your website that are indexed in Google?
I am trying to put together a comprehensive list of all pages that are indexed in Google and have differing opinions on how to do this.
Technical SEO | | SpodekandCo0 -
Changing Ecommerce Site Display style will it impact on seo & performance?
Hello Expert, Do redesign website will affect seo? At initial level drop in visitor, pageviews? Actually I am redesign my ecommerce site but we are not changing 1) url's 2) we are not changing content 3) we are not changing server 4) we are not changing navigation. We are changing display style at homepage, category page, subcategory page, product page, checkout step. So still it will impact on website visitors & pageviews? 2) How google will react on int 3) How visitor will react? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Johny123450 -
SEO optimation for smal gambling site
i have a web site we are a third party web connecting player to the big gambling site.. How can i optimize the SEO in our page?
Technical SEO | | 323SM0 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
How do I keep Google from crawling my PPC landing page?
Question, I don't want Google to catch my PPC landing pages, but I'm wondering if I make the page no-follow, no-index will it still crawl my landing page for quality score? Just to clarify I do want it to crawl the landing page to boost my quality score on PPC, but I do not want it to index it for SEO. Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
Devalued links or negative affect?
Hi there, I'm looking into an issue with a site that was hit after Penguin was introduced. The site lost 70% of traffic over night. The site in question seemed to have a large number of backlinks with over optimized anchor text which seems to most likely be the reason for drop in rankings. But there is also some links from blog networks here too unfortunately, so my question here really is do Google just devalue these links and discount them from consideration in their ranking algorithm or do the links still count but instead of adding positive affects in SERPs add a negative affect? My reason for this question is I'm trying to determine whether it's worth saving this website or just starting fresh with a new domain. That does bring me to another question, if I have to start fresh on a new domain is it a possibility to reuse the content from the old site? (providing I remove the URLs from Google via Webmaster tools). Any help/advice/answers here would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | jayderby0 -
Feedback for the onpage seo for this site
Hi, Can the seo gurus here, suggest me if any on page factors affect my site? http://www.ridpiles.com/ Recently i have added, the following post to the main home page, http://www.ridpiles.com/2012/02/different-types-of-cures-for-piles/ This page is somewhat different than the title keyword. As the main page titile is "hemorrhoids treatment". The newly created blog post is on "cure for piles" Does this blog post has any affect on the on page factors due to different title? And do i require any changes regarding the on page seo? Will be waiting for your replies.
Technical SEO | | Indexxess0 -
Managing SEO during web site migration
We have an old web site which currently has good traffic and search ranking. However, the old design is not helping us convert traffic into customers and we have decided to re-design the web site. Due to challenges resolving 4XX issues in the current setup, we will be moving the site to a new CMS and hosting provider. The domain will remain the same. The plan is to create exactly the same pages in the new CMS, as what we have today. And to use the same URLs for each page. Content will remain the same in step one. We will only apply a new layout and design. Besides keeping the URLs the same as in the old system. What else should we be aware of when doing a web site migration, that might impact our search ranking?
Technical SEO | | petersen0