Is there any BAD SEO implications to acquiring backlinks from customers?
-
What would be the negative aspects to sending customer's requests for a backlink in conjunction with asking how their experience with us was?
Backlinks are one of the toughest for our niche industry to acquire and this seems like one of the best angles to cover, since we have .edu , .mil , .gov , and many bigname companies making purchases from us.
Would if be wrong to offer a small 5% discount during their next purchase if they create a backlink with us? Or if we added a " Customer's we've served " section including their logo or text link?
Thank you!
I hope you're all having an awesome day / week / month!
-
you are fine, as long as there is a genuine reason for the link. If you think that link is useful for the user of that site then do it otherwise do not.
-
Thank you, especially for the FTC link, I didn't even think they dealt with things of this matter, but there it is.
As for the footer links, I'm staying far, far away from that, I'd only create another page for the customer links to go on, and scheme it as a customer's we've served / dealt with section, listing the link / logo as well as the good or bad words they had, maybe even the products they bought, and how those products held up.
It's been a goal of mine for this company to create as much helpful content as I can think of, then to push brain through a playdoh extruder and get even more.
Thanks again! Love the minds here on this site.
-
I would recommend reviewing Google's guidelines on Link Schemes very closely. If you offer a discount if someone links to you, I'd consider that on the same level as a paid link or paid endorsement. The other thing you need to really watch if you're having customers review your business is the FTC guideline regulating the disclosure of paid endorsements if you're planning on offering some sort of payment or discount.
If a customer links to you because you did a great job, then it's cool. If you tell them what URL to link to and what anchor text to use, then it's going to be seen as manipulation. Getting customers to review your business or link to you is a good idea; you just need to make sure you're doing it the right way. You don't need a discount if the customers really loved what you did.
I'm also in the camp of not putting footer links from a client site to mine. If you put it there because you work on a client's site and it's passing juice to your site, then it kind of seems like it's only there to benefit your ranking. I've seen this debate go back and forth, so I'd really like to see other opinions (preferably contradictory to mine) to see why designer/developer links in the footer would be good. I think they would be fine if you no-followed the link, so it wouldn't pass any benefit. If you only wanted it for traffic, then cool, but really how qualified would that traffic be? Curious to see other thoughts.
-
There aren't really any negative SEO implications to having a client's site backlink to yours. The only way there would be is if their site is spammy or something to that effect. This is true both for having a link to their site in yours, and vice versa (which I only bring up because of your last question).
There's also nothing wrong with offering a discount on the next purchase that customer makes. However, I've found that most customers are OK with doing this without having to do that. I've actually set it up so that, in our contracts, we have a clause that says we're allowed to, at our own discretion, add our logo and a link back to our site in the footer of theirs (with certain reasonable restrictions, etc).
Either method works. Asking how they feel about your service is an equally valid method of achieving this. You're good to go!
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
-
Backlink Report Totals Discrepancy
I have been having a tough time getting my customer backlinks developed. However; I noticed when I run a backlink report for http://www.mycustomer.com, www.mycustomer.com and customer.com that I get three different backlink totals. Is there any way to forward to of the above URL's to one or am I doing something wrong when I am developing the backlinks?
Link Building | | InfinityTechnologySolutions0 -
Clean up over optimised backlink profile
A little while back a whole heap (around 5000) of exact match anchor text links showed up in my GWT profile. Now over time quite a few of them have dropped away, but according to Remoovem I've still got a 73% link percentage score for this particular anchor text (which is my main keyword), along with a 55% root percentage. Obviously this is a Bad Thing. What would be the best way to combat this over optimised profile?
Link Building | | schitz011
Disavow the links? Leave them be and work on more exact match links? When I look at some links listed in GWT, I can't find the link to my page anywhere in the source code. Can I ignore those domains or should they also go into a removal program? I've not received any manual penalty or notice in GWT, though I did see a drop of traffic last year around the early may 'Phantom' update. From which the site has never really recovered.0 -
What is a good tool for managing backlinks?
We have several that are not relevant and I need to manage the task of writing each to ask to remove.
Link Building | | Buzzfish0 -
Backlinks that redirect to your site
Hi all, I just wanted to ask you all about backlinks that redirect to your site. I recently used Link Detox Tools to carry out a link analysis. However, some of our backlinks are redirecting to our homepage. Is this ok? Why is this happening? Thanks guys!!!
Link Building | | AAttias0 -
SEO questions
Hi SEOmoz Friends, good day! I am hoping we could these following questions: Why we had 1000+ errors; consist of diff errors (page duplicate title, missing meta desc, too many links, title element too long,404 errors,redirect errors) while raven tools have only 100+ errors which is meta desc error Are those 1000+ errors from moztool are really significant? How to fix each of the error and what will be the result? we tried some way Meta Desc - provided meta desc 404 error - provide live links dup page title - change the other page's title - will it affect the seo ranking of the page? we believe its yes, so is it necessry to fix the error? title element too long - we understand that some of the pages have too long title, to fix the error we need to change the title to shorter ones, but we are afraid if it will affect the seo ranking, just like the previous q too many links - we understand that these links are from the submission we made previously, how will we fix this error? Whats the recommended number of blog posts per page? Hoping to get answers from the experts! Thanks
Link Building | | robinwade0 -
Does anyone do seo on their twitter pages
Hi, i am just wondering if anyone does any seo or anything with their twitter page to gain more followers. I have justover 19,000 followers and since launching the twitter account we are getting about 500 followers per week and i am just wondering if there is anything we should do to improve this. I am not sure if we should be putting keywords into our twitter page or anything else to let people know about our twitter page. any advice would be great. also, when we set up our twitter page we decided to use the following twitter name @2celebritynews just wondering if you are allowed to change this at any stage as we should really have got the twitter page of @in2town if it is not possible to change it then maybe we will need to start over again
Link Building | | ClaireH-1848860 -
SEO Service
Hi there; Can any body direct me towards honest and true link building service. we are in the business of providing audio video services. I prefer individuals. Help will be appreciated.
Link Building | | tanveer11 -
Should I outsource any SEO work or can I do it all?
My website needs a lot of improvement and we are working on it but I also don't want to fall behind on the SEO work. I am guessing that I can do much of it myself through SEOmoz.org but is there a part that busy folks should get others to do? Any feedback will be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Utah Tiger
Link Building | | Boodreaux0