New Penguin
-
I just read that a new Penguin might be coming up.
My question is :
Can you rank if you have good content but bad links ?
In other words does the content quality take over the link quality or will google penalize you for the quality of your links even though your content is great and deserves to rank ?
Thank you,
-
Thank you for both of your answers. So from my understanding no need to worry if you have a few bad links, google will ignore those and better work on attracting good links than trying to remove those bad links, correct ?
-
In my experience, links take precedence over content. Mediocre content on a high domain authority site is going to outrank excellent content on a site with no links or poor links.
This is a completely separate issue than Penguin, which is an algorithm that mainly penalizes sites that are actively trying to manipulate rankings with poor links.
-
Hi,
First off it is my understanding that Penguin is operating in real time now - so it is part of the algorithm and as such it will be dealing with spammy links on an ongoing basis. Furthermore, the latest release of Penguin will devalue spammy links and not punish whole sites. So having a bunch of low value spam links is like having no links at all. This is worth reading: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/penguin-update/
Regarding content over links, good content is always required to rank by search engines and your website users. But in a competitive market good content will also need some quality links to be able to do well.
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
-
Gifly.com: url structure for new site with only one kind of page
Hi, we are launching a new site called Gifly.com, it's all about Gifs. At the moment, our robots.txt is blocking everything because we want to have a solid url structure before going public. There is only one kind of page, the permalink which has this form: http://gifly.com/QPmf/ (the four characters 'QPmf' are completely random) What we made different from the multitude of other Gifs site is that we are
Link Building | | mylittlepwny
trying to categorize gifs with hashtags, so we introduced these kind of urls: http://gifly.com/FoYi/
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#fail
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#blonde
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#dumb This was done for several reason, the first is that each gif can have up to 10
hashtags. Another approach to this could have been: http://gifly.com/fail/FoYi/
http://gifly.com/blonde/FoYi/
http://gifly.com/dumb/FoYi/ ...but we will face tons of duplicated contents for search engines because the same gif
would have 10x permalinks this way. The way we use to navigate between hashtags is via buttons/ajax (see the list of hashtags on the left)
We know that google may have a hard time understanding the site's structure, We'd like to know if the current set of urls, as: http://gifly.com/FoYi/
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#fail
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#blonde
http://gifly.com/FoYi/#dumb could be okay if we provide google a solid sitemap. We are thinking about a first sitemap with the list of hashtags,
each hashtag points to a second sitemap containing the list of new gifs uploaded for said hashtag. Thanks! gifly_logo_r_a.gif0 -
Link profile problem? User-generated reviews website suffering after Penguin
Hi all, We run a user-generated reviews website and we link to the websites of businesses with reviews. Many of them also link back to their reviews page (and in fact, we give them a widget to encourage this). I have a couple of questions about this; Most of these links are to legitimate, but fairly small and unknown businesses - which means a lot of our inbound (and outbound) links are low quality. Could this be hurting us? Given that the links are 2-way, could this be viewed as spam? Some businesses (including a couple with high traffic) have included our widget in their website footer - so there are thousands of (low quality) links from a single domain. Problem? The reason I'm asking is that our traffic suffered in the Panda update, and is again suffering with Penguin - despite the fact that we have a lot of unique content in the form of user-reviews. We've never engaged in any black-hat techniques. Any ideas or advice would be much appreciated. SEO novice here!
Link Building | | WOMO0 -
New world order
Hello all I see many talk about it but still I feel that the conversation is full of alogans and cliches are flying around, so here goes. In the not too far distant past I could get sites climbing and getting more traffic just by gettinhg simple links from sites. do that on a monthly basis, and see results. Now it is better for end users and tougher for us SEO guys. we need quality content and strategic postings. I like the new way and the higher quality it brings. As many of you probably expieienced getting clients actively engaged is really hard and most times clients are too busy. We need the involvement to succeed, we need quality content and valid places to post (mostly blogs). My questions are most budgets are not adjusted by clients and as such it creates a problem getting qualuty content. How do you still stay profitable? How did you adjust? Do you feel that much more actuale work on clients' project is needed and as such profits are declining. How di you reacts? what are the adjustment you made Thanks Guy C
Link Building | | ciznerguy0 -
"New" Digg - SEO benefits?
Quick question for the group - I've not used the new Digg. Does it have SEO benefits? I wasn't sure if Google counted these or not. thanks
Link Building | | yandl0 -
Penguin issue or wrong linkbuilding strategy?
Quite a few month ago before Google implemented Penguin algorithm I had a great situation. After 24th of April my ranking and traffic dropped instantly. Here a a screenshot from my GA: http://imageshack.us/a/img15/4717/screenshot20121013at120.png I have reviewed my linkbuilding strategy and on-page optimisation however some keywords which dropped out of page 5 don't want to come back even close to page 1. I would appreciate a professional advise on how my strategy, on-page optimisation can be improved. For those who are interested here is my domain: http://www.desertsafariabudhabi.ae The keyword which is more interesting for me is "desert safari abu dhabi". Thanks in advance, Russel
Link Building | | smokin_ace0 -
Link Building Services Post Penguin
Hi Can anyone suggest a link building service that is of higher quality and still works nowadays? All the private networks were deindexed and it looks like we're left only with blasting software, which i don't really like. I am doing research on link building now and i can't seem to find any service that meets the quality of BMR or other deindexed Homepage Networks. Thanks!
Link Building | | comancsm0 -
Primary link building for new clients, where do you go first?
When starting out with a new client, where do you look first to build links for that client? I have a lot of close friends who have small businesses with not a very huge budget for SEO and I'm trying to wrap my head around how to do a significant amount of quality link building without breaking the bank. Any suggestions? My list so far is: Friends / Family of the client.
Link Building | | adriandg
Free (good quality) directories - Yellow pages, etc.
Content creation / Article publishing
Paid directories (BBB, etc) What i am wondering though is if anyone out there has some suggestions as to how to do some quality link building for a small client with a limited budget (lets say, $500).0 -
Regarding link exchange on new website!
I never used link exchange yet in our link building practices i want to know is after Google Panda updates etc. is link exchange with good SEOMOz rank good niche sites still effective or not ? If yes what shall be the points which i shall remember while doing the start link exchange.
Link Building | | anand20100