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
-
How does a business have a link back where I can't see the anchor text?
So, I'm running competitor websites through Open Site Explorer and following the link from Moz to where their link is coming from. It has the anchor text 'Christmas Gifts'. When I go to that page there is no mention of this anchor text. No mention of that persons website. No display ad's that could be providing that link. How is this link pointing to their page?
Link Building | | Byron_Bay_Gifts0 -
When will link farms and back sites be penalized or when will the website using them as backlinks be penalized?
After doing some backlink searching on competitors, I see a great deal of competitor's backlinks are obvious linkfarms and just completely unrelated to their field. Also I see a lot of forum comments using links are showing as backlinks, upon inspecting the html element I see they're " no follow " links. Why are they showing up as backlinks with link equity then?
Link Building | | Deacyde0 -
How to choose a third party agency to help with linking building / SEO strategy?
Hi all, we've not been link building for some time now as we are a small team and been concentrating on other things, such as getting our new look site built and implementing Magento etc. We've historically used external companies to help with link building & SEO... some experience has been good, some bad. Does any one have any suggestions on how a small company can try to choose a decent external company that can help with SEO strategies? There are a lot of options, a LOT of rubbish and a lot of very expensive large agencies that are well out side of our budget (or for a "small" fee simply produce a standardised report on "how to improve your SEO" that can basically be read on the net). We've tried local, smaller companies in order to limit our options .... but that didn't go well either. Any suggestions welcomed. Next is where / how to weight our expenditure and / or our SEO time. Should it be 50% gaining external links (be it by what ever means such as social, checking out where competitiors have links and chasing those possibilities etc) and then 50% internal page SEO, blog content creation, internal linking etc? Thanks again.
Link Building | | jasef0 -
Where can I get a list of broken links to my client's website?
I have a client who owns a website that attracted a large number of links to internal pages of their sites. Without realising the value of those links, they removed every page of their website other than the home pages that now reads, "new website coming soon". How can I get a list of every website still linking to the (now broken) internal pages of their site?
Link Building | | richdan0 -
Any successes getting SEO/link vendors clean up Penguin-related problems they helped create?
Hi all, I'm wondering if anyone's been able to get link vendors help clean up Penguin-related problems that they helped create? I have a client who was sold years and years of AWFUL link building work from a major and prominent SEO vendor, that we are now battling to de-toxify. There are no legal grounds for us as the ToS was watertight and the client is ultimately responsible (if naive), but has anyone been successful in getting vendors to cooperate with cleanups on ethical grounds? What's the best way to play that with a major vendor, I'm assuming they wouldn't want to be outed. Cheers all, Matt
Link Building | | MattBarker2 -
Can copyright links to your site have a negative impact on your SEO?
many of the websites we designed have a copyright link in the footer. Like: webdesign by company name then this is made a hyperlink to our company website. Some of these websites have a high PR and other metrics but rarely are about webdesign. What is a clever thing to do? Tom
Link Building | | Onlinq0 -
How do I Get a Link Off Blogger.com?
I have some coughunnatural linkscough on a blogger.com blog which isn't mine (it was done by an SEO company). I just can't remember which company did it. The blog is inactive and is a one-page blog. Any suggestion to get this link down or reach the author / owner of the blog? Thank you!
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Does anyone use Adgooroo to manage Back links?
One of the top guys here is a friend of Matt Cutts and makes sure your links meet quality tests, etc. Also helps you find quality sites to get links from. I'm sure a lot of you manage links for your clients and and your own site. Any users out there or know of someone who uses it and gives you feed back/ Thanks
Link Building | | joemas991