Is hiring bloggers to review my products while back linking to my website bad for SEO?
-
For many months I have been following this strategy of hiring high domain authority bloggers to review my products and link back to my website.
For a month or two my rankings improved but now I suddenly lost rankings. Can Google penalize me for hiring bloggers to review my products? Bloggers do mention in the blog that the product was requested for editorial review.
Any tips will be helpful.
Regards
Deb -
1. It's great that you haven't been manually penalized! Unfortunately, yes I have seen pages drop off the map entirely before for specific keywords. Most keyword tracking tools only search the first 100 results, so if you don't make it inside that bubble it will display a null value like (--). It basically means you need to up your game. Most often you can make it well inside those first 100 results by applying on-site SEO tactics. Update your meta data, make sure relevant pages are linking internally to the page you're trying to rank, and improve the amount of unique quality content on page. Put some focus on the user experience.
2. You can disavow them, but I would strongly recommend you first check which ones are marked nofollow. You don't want to disavow those because they're already compliant with webmaster guidelines. For the rest, communicate with the bloggers you've paid and see if they can switch it to nofollow. Give them a couple of weeks. I don't think you need to jump straight to the disavow file if you can get a significant percentage of those links marked nofollow. I generally avoid using disavow files as much as possible because it's like the nuclear option. Last resort.
Moz has a pretty sweet tool with their spam score. I love how easy it makes it for the novice-intermediate SEOs to do a good job keeping their site quality up without needing a ton of oversight from a director or SEO manager. Check out Moz's article on spam score to get an idea how it works: https://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk
I think if you have 4 or less that's pretty rock solid. It's an approximate value, so don't hyperventilate if you can't get it down to 0. Even this blog has a spam score of 1/17.
-
Hi Bret, Thank you for answering my questions so well. I will be taking the following steps please respond shortly if I am on the right track:
1. I did not get a manual penalization message in my search console. So I think Google just devalued those links.
But one of the keywords completely disappeared from SERP, how is that possible without any manual penalization, have you come across this before?
Thanks for sharing the John Muller Youtube playlist, it looks very helpful. Already subscribed to the google webmasters channel
2. I will be disavowing only the links I earned through paid product reviews.
Besides these paid links, how do I identify the naughty links to my site, do I check the spam score of these backlinking sites in OSE(open site explorer). What is the spam limit I should be sticking to? Moz has a metrics from 1-17.Thanks for taking the time out to help me out. Really appreciate it! Happy Friday!
-
Hey Debashish, I'll try to answer your questions in order so they make the most sense, because they're good ones and they mirror perfectly the same questions we all see in this industry.
1. We really need to define penalization here first. Unless you're getting a message in Google Search Console telling you that your site has been manually penalized, then you haven't been penalized. Next we're going to make an assumption, which is that you gained some ranking benefit from illicitly garnered backlinks. And finally, we're going to assume that Penguin caught on and devalued those links. This means you haven't been penalized per se, but you're no longer deriving optimization benefits from those links. So 'recovery' in this sense is going to mean something different.
Recovery from a manual penalization does not mean you will return to your previous rankings and organic traffic. It means that you are no longer being blacklisted by Google and your site is being indexed by Google again. But in both cases, what a client wants to know is "when will my previous rankings return" and the answer is that they will not. If you were ranking highly before due to inadvisable link schemes and those beneficial links were devalued or disavowed or removed, then you aren't going to see a return those strong rankings. You're going to have to fix things so you're obeying webmaster guidelines, then begin competing in another way that's within guidelines to bring yourself back to the top.
John Mueller gives this response every time he's asked this question in his Hangout series, and he gets asked it A LOT. You can see those videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUMqH8IyzOMBc_Z8i-S6-tVJ. This channel is a really fantastic resource for learning some intermediate to advanced SEO tactics via Q&A with John Mueller himself.
2. You can submit a disavow file via Google Search Console. Again, this is going to tell Google that you don't want any of those links to be associated with your site for the purpose of ranking. What some SEOs are guilty of doing when clients were hit with Penguin penalties was to disavow ALL backlinks instead of just the naughty ones, and this got them back in the index but completely nullified a lot of valuable and credible links.
Consider that it takes 4-12 months to implement and begin to reap the benefits of well thought out white-hat optimization strategies, and use that as your timeline for 'recovery', because again you're not going to see an immediate return to your previous rankings and will need to implement new tactics.
-
Thanks so much for the advice. I will take immediate action.
So I am going to ask my bloggers to mark these links with "nofollow"
Some of my web pages which were ranking in 2nd page have disappeared from search probably due to this penalization. Because I remember from my work that I have not done any major changes to the website accept ask bloggers to link back with a product review, which did help to boost rankings for a month as I mentioned earlier.
Need to ask you 2 more questions:
1. How long do think it will take to recover from this penalization once the links are marked "nofollow".
2. Can I somehow de value or disregard (or nofollow i know no follow doesn't make sense but I guess you understand what I mean?) these links from my end of the website or do the backlinking website webmaster has to devalue the link? -
Yes, Google can penalize you for hiring bloggers. They view this is a link scheme (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356) and it's something that SEOs have been doing for a long time. Google has gotten better and better at catching these types of schemes, so it would not surprise me in the least if you were caught up by Penguin, which now operates in real time and simply devalues links instead of putting your entire domain into a sandbox.
To keep your strategy in line with Google's webmaster guidelines, you should request that those links be marked "nofollow". There is still a lot of value to this kind of outreach even with a "nofollow" added, so I wouldn't recommend you necessarily stop doing what you're doing as the bloggers have been honestly informing their audience that an editorial review was requested.
Some of the ways nofollow links can still help you:
1. quality referral traffic
2. backlinks generating backlinks over timeBest of luck, let me know if you have additional questions. Thanks!
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
-
Unsolved My website www.boultaudio.com, but my toxic backlinks kept on increasing, even if i disavow the links? @s
My website best wearable brand is showing decrease in High Quality Backlinks.
Link Building | | blayze010 -
Unsolved Are links from staff profile pages no longer good for SEO?
Hey there, We run a small site that lists lawyers and we have an opportunity to ask the lawyers to display a 'badge' on their own website's staff page, linked back to the page on our site that they are listed on. Initially I thought this would be good link building (i.e. the lawyer's own staff/profile pages on their website linking to our site where they are listed = a highly relevant link). I was less concerned about the authority of the law firm's sites, though these will range from sometimes low-ish to medium. I just assumed that Google would see the value in the lawyer wanting to link to our site where they are listed. However, our SEO has said that these days Google doesn't give much/any value to these types of links from individual staff pages. His advice was to try and get the badge added to one of their service pages (or their About page) which will be unlikely as the badge is person-specific. I thought I'd ask if this was everyone else's experience regarding Google not valuing links from individual staff pages? Thanks for you help 🙂
Link Building | | Andy-H0 -
Back links from sites like Wix & Wordpress.
Sorry for the newb question. If you get a back-link from a blogger on wordpress will you get any of the 'link juice' from the platform. i.e) from the Wordpress site. I'm talking about bloggers whose URL's would be like...www.wordpress.com/bloggersitename I imagine not, but it would be good to know for sure. Isaac.
Link Building | | isaac6630 -
Are these links to my site bad?
I am the owner of two diffrent ecommerce sites. Lets call them A and B. Site A is a larg site with ower 5000 pages. In the footer off site A there is a link to site B. Is it bad for site B to get 5000 links (to homepage) from site A? Should i remove these types off links? Thanks for your help!
Link Building | | Spletnafuzija0 -
How do i determine if an SEO person i hired is good and should continue on
I know SEO is important and i am hiring an SEO person, as well as company. however, they both seem to contradict each other and so im lost as to know who is good and bad. what should i look for in their work report, and what questions should i ask. Background: i have tried to read alot (100+ articles) on the new panda and penguin so at least i know what people are talking about without being clueless. So my site got hit recently with the updates and got penalised, and i think that is predominantly because of the backlink profiles, before being built too much around keywords. so my understanding is that backlinking now should be natural, diverse (many alt tags instead of a few), concentrate on branding and less on keywords. The person: she believes in branding, and acknowledge the problem with my previous backlink profile. so now she said the backlink ratio should be around 40-50% based on the brand. so she has been doing alot of backlinks wtih alt tags for my website url, name, as well as my name. She said once that ratio is close to that target of 40-50% i should see a jump in ranking, which woudl be in around a month of work. but here is my concern 1 - the other company said she is spamming, which kinda scarred me already 2 - while in principle, what she has said is backed up by my reading materials, it seems she only concentrate on three alt texts so far, my url, my business name, and my name. i thought they need to be diversified 3 - the links seem to come from alot of places. she said it does not need to be high quality now as we just need to get that ratio/profile correct, and then we can concentrate on the high quality links later. she is doing around 40 links per day. which apparently take 8 hours per day. 4 - i guess i worry that that if all these new links suddenly become spams later, does that mean i woudl need to either build more links to offset the more spam links, or have to spend more time removing bad links Please advise. is she performing spamming. how do i check her links/works. is there a tool. is it wise to build more links, or is it better to identify previous bad links and remove them? Thank you for your help.
Link Building | | btrinh0 -
Should you always link back?
I am asking this for two reasons: Courtesy: Is it common courtesy to reciprocate with a link back if somebody has linked to your site? SEO: Does linking back affect your rankings at all? A blog has linked to one of my clients' sites as part of a round-up of "top 100 best" within their industry. They have also sent us an email suggesting that we add a link from our site saying that we've been listed. Of course, I understand that it is in my clients' interest for us to advertise on their site that they've been listed in a Top 100 list... However, it got me thinking (as more of a general question) - does reciprocating a link ever affect it's value at all? ie. Is two-way linking ever considered part of a link exchange in the eyes of Google, and does it penalize you at all for that?
Link Building | | WiredCanvas0 -
Can I Gather Inbound Links from Different Subject External Websites?
I am working on link building campaign and trying to gather inbound links from various subject external websites. I have big confusion with this effort. I am working on eCommerce website and getting inbound links from technology related website. So, Does it really matter for better performance? I want to give one example to get more idea. I am selling table lamps on my website and trying to get inbound links from that kind of websites which are highly dominating to table lamps or lighting industry. But, This is not only one case. Sometime, I have opportunities to create inbound links from different subject website. Simply, If I will compile one content for UGC section on SEOmoz and links to my website with table lamps so, Will it help me to rank for table lamps keyword? Exact match hyperlinks on external website always matter::: That I aware about it. But, what about subject orientation. I am Table Lamps monster & you are SEO monster. So, Will Google give benefit to that kind of links which are dominating different subject? I have solved some issues about quality of website after installing SEOmoz toolbar in my browser. Because, I or We are visiting multiple websites during daily stuff and may find out opportunities to drop our website link over there. But, I have fear to drop my website link in any website. Does it really matter quality or website & How can I judge it better rather than SEOmoz toolbar? I have added such a big question with proper declaration but, I want to jump in to link building campaign and want to earn good value after my long term effort.
Link Building | | CommercePundit0 -
Back linking: Relevance or Domain Authority?
For back linking, what is more important for increasing rank for organic searches on Google? I've noticed that linking on sites with high domain authority that have some or no relevance boost my keyword ranking. However, does back linking on relevant sites help if their domain authority is not so high?
Link Building | | Modbargains0