Why do these links violate Google's Quality Guideline?
-
My reconsideration request was declined by Google. Google said that some of the links to my site (www.pianomother.com) are still outside its quality guidelines. We provide piano lessons and sheet music on the site. Three samples are given.
1. http://www.willbeavis.com/links.htm
2. http://vivienzone.blogspot.com/2009/06/learning-how-to-play-piano.html
3. http://interiorpianoservice.com/links/
The first one is obvious because it is a link exchange page. I don't understand why the 2nd and 3rd ones are considered "inorganic links" by Google. The 2nd link is a blog that covers various topics including music, health, computer, etc. The 3rd one is a page of the site that provides piano related services. Other resources related to piano including my website are listed on the page.
Please help.
Thanks.
John
-
Hi John,
As the others have said, there are issues with all three types of links. Number 1 is obvious.
Number 2 comes from a site that appears to blog about absolutely anything, as long as they're paid to do so. The site has posts about buying a car in Philadelphia, passport photos, saving money on gas, business protection... and piano lessons. It's pretty obviously a source of income for the blog owner, with these posts placed in between personal updates.
Number three is from a piano website, but they even list "reciprocal links", which was an outdated link building technique in 2006
I would say that Google is well within its own guidelines to suggest that these links are bad.
-
I'll go over the examples and give you some reasons why these links, in particular, were highlighted.
No. 1:
This one is pretty standard in regard to link exchanges. The page might have been okay-ish when you found it, but it's just a standard link exchange page without any sort of theme. Aside from the exact match anchor text for every link, you'll find exact match anchors for Cuban Cigars and Jennifer Aniston News - among others. Seriously, there's anchor text for 'Mentalist'. Men-tal-ist.
No. 2:
Never mind the date, I seldom trust those, but this is classic blog spam. A whole lot of unrelated topics on everyone's favorite spam site, Blogspot. Again, there's exact match anchor text. Finally, the writing style is pretty consistent with typical blog spam.
No. 3:
More exact match anchor text. I see a theme emerging. A lot of the sites in this page are either gone, or suffered some pretty major penalties a while ago. All in all, the houses may be brown stone - but this is a bad neighborhood.
As a general overview, the site does have a lot of exact match anchor text pointing at it. Another thing is I wouldn't send my credit card information to the site, ever. It doesn't give me the impression that it's a good idea to do so.
From what I can see, the site has been caught in just about every filter and algo update since Panda. You should really consider starting over.
-
For those links I would say that #1 and #3 are link exchanges, which are a no-no now. #2 is a paid advertisement, but it is not a no follow, which makes it a paid link. I think all of them can really be considered paid links, so I would either contact the people and have them removed or disavow them all.
-
Hi John,
A quick check of your backlinks IN OSE shows some other questionnable links like submityoursite.org , freeadddirectory.com, addurlshopping.com, txtlinks.com
Did you submit them for non inclusion as well. Perhaps Google is referring to those links not the relevant ones.
Cheers,
SEO5..
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
-
I have plenty of backlinks but the site does not seem to come up on Google`s first page.
My site has been jumping up and down for many months now. but it never stays on Google first page. I have plenty of back-links, shared content on social media. But what could i be doing wrong? any help will be appreciated. Content is legit. I have recently added some internal links is this might be the cause? Please help .
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | samafaq0 -
Bot or Virus Creating Bad Links?
Hey Everyone, We are getting ready to engage a client for some potential marketing/SEO so in preparing for this have ran the site through OpenSiteExplorer. The site is relatively new and there are only two links under the inbound links section. They are relevant and add value, no issues there. Here is where it get strange. When I look under the 'Just Discovered' section there are many (hundreds) new links going back about a month. Virtually all of them have the anchor text 'Louis Vuitton outlet'. Now the client swears he has not engaged anyone for black hat SEO, so wondering who could possibly be creating these links. They do sell some Louis Vuitton items on the site, so I'm wondering if it is possible that some spam bot has picked up the site and began to spam the web with links to the clients site. So far today, 50 or so new links have been created with said anchor text and the clients root URL all on very poor quality, some foreign blog sites. Would like to find out why this is happening and put a stop to it for obvious reasons. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be a bot? Or maybe someone with an axe to grind against the client? Anyone could be doing this on their own, but just seems strange for it to be happening to a new site that does not even rank highly at the moment. Any advice or info is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Whebb0 -
Link idea? good or bad?
OK so my website ranks fairly well for keywords i would say 50-60 % are ranking in the top 3 my DA is 15 and PA is 28 I have a few other sites that i blog on that i own they have a DA of 11 and PA of 20 i was thinking of just guest posting on those using a keyword Anchor text that im not ranking for and seeing what that would do. I was thinking of creating a few other sites and just blog about random stuff for 3-6 months generate traffic and start guest posting redirecting links back towards me. Is this bad?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gslc0 -
Does Anybody Know Who Interflora's SEO Company Is (Or Was)?
In light of the recent penalty put on the Interflora site, does anybody know who their SEO company is or was (or if they were doing it in house)? Also, do you think SEO companies that are responsible for things like this should be named and shamed?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jasarrow0 -
Google 'most successful online businesses'
how come this guy has all but 1 of the top ten results? (UK results - I'm guessing same in USA?) - with thin content on a spammed keyword on multi-sub domains? How can we 'white hat' guys compete if stuff like this is winning?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheInternetWorks0 -
Link Quality and Anchor Text
ok I was wondering how to determine the quality of a link and if there is a way to tell that the site linking to you could be passing on penalized link juice to your site. Also i would like to know some of yalls opinion on using anchor text links in articles and blogs. Now that google seems to have taken some of its "importance" away
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | daugherty0 -
Link package review and recommendations
Hello there, I recently spoke to a contractor that offered me the following package, and i have to ask, in this post-penguin world, does it make sense to pursue this kind of linking? Or will it be considered spam. They said it's a manual submission process and they will 'do their best' to ensure that it's under a related category, but can't promise anything in regards to that. What should i be requesting in this post-penguin world? How do i get quality backlinks that won't harm me given the current environment? Any help is greatly appreciated, here is the package info: 1. 900 links submissions = 450 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links - The links are built by manually publishing 5 Original Articles (500 words each) on 125 different article sites (each published article will have 2 back-links to your site). We can use up to 10 keywords and 10 different URLs of your site to build the links.70% of our Article Sites have PR 2 to 6, all with different C classes IPs. 2. 300 links submissions = 150 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links – The links are built by manually publishing 4 Reviews for your site from 4 different accounts (we can use up to 4 URLs of your site to link back) on 150 Social Bookmarking sites, 90% of the sites have PR 2 to 8, all with different C classes IPs. 3. 480 links submissions = 240 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links – The links are built by manually publishing 3 Original Press Releases on 35 Press Release sites(each published press release will have 2 back-links to your site). We can use up to 6 keywords and 6 different URLs of your site to build the links. All our Press Release Sites have PR 2 to 7 all with different C classes IPs. 4. 220 links submissions = 110 Guaranteed One Way blog links – These links are built by publishing 3 Original Blog Article (300 words each) with 2 back links to your site on 20 different free blog sites. These free blog sites are our sites (new sites with PR 0) which we are promoting to get the highest PR for them and your blog back links too.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | symbolphoto0 -
Instability on the server - punishment in Google?
My site has about 50k pages indexed in Google. We are well respected, and we believe our stories add much value to the user. However, we are having serious problems with my hosting service and the site is unavailable for more than 15 hours. Unfortunately we also have no provision for him to return to work. I wonder if this kind of instability can cause some punishment on Google, if so, I wonder if there is anything we can do to tell Google that we are aware and working to resolve the problem.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lucastudio0