Our link building strategy - affiliates and trophies
-
Hey guys,
I just wanted to follow up on Rand's excellent whiteboard Friday: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/preventing-linkbased-penalties-whiteboard-friday
It got me worried I think, but I'm not sure.
We have a site where we are building up links in 2 ways:
-
We have an affiliate set-up. A search widget in an i-frame, and below the i-frame a followed link pointing to the relevant page.
The anchor text varies for each affiliate depending which region the affiliate comes from. -
We have awarded about 500 of our partners with trophies - i.e. - this partner has best reviews or most sales etc. Our partners are absolutely loving it.
The trophy is an image link which they can embed on their website, with alt text only mentioning our brand - that was an oversight ( I think). I wish the alt had been dynamically generated for each partner.
The trophies link to our partner pages.
So we are getting many links to our deeper pages, which is great.
The links I believe are relevant as they are coming from our partners websites and pointing to their relevant partner page on our website.
So burning question is. Would you consider these links dodgy given Rands recent whiteboard friday post, and the recent farmer algorithm change?
Many thanks,
Croozie
-
-
'Post response' deleted my answer. I'll try and remember what I said!
I think Rand's WBF was focusing largely on new websites with link portfolios that consisted almost entirely of 1000s of 'dogdy links'. Provided that your website is aged (and it sounds like it definitely is) and that you have a mix of natural and 'artificial' links then you have nothing to worry about.
While I don't know, I would imagine that Google takes far more kindly to image links than text links; simply because text links have much more weight and therefore more power to manipulate.
Anyway, you have a totally legitimate link building strategy and I would suggest that even if your site was brand new there wouldn't be an issue.
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
-
DA vs PA when building links
When building links to your site from other sites, what is more important or what weights more heavily? Say a site has a DA of 20 and PA of 34 for that page I want a link from. Say another site has the revese, a DA of 34 and a PA of 20. All things being equal, which site's link to me would be better? The one with a higher DA or the one with a higher PA for the on the specific page I would get a link?
Link Building | | studio35design0 -
Totally puzzled by link building/content marketing
Hey Mozzers! 🙂 I'm going to be starting link building for a website soon and I am having some trouble wrapping my head around a couple of things. First of all, in the current world of SEO, where should I be looking to generate links? Is it as simple as reaching out to bloggers and trawling through competitors links? Or is there something more? In relation to this, if I were to generate a good number of links from high authority sites, how would this effect my ranking for keywords (assuming the anchor text for those links is the website URL)? The other thing I'm a little puzzled by is, if I were to write a great article on the websites blog and it gains traction in social media circles, people would (I assume) only share a link to the blog post instead of the actual article itself. How would this effect the ranking of keywords that I have optomised (anchor text etc.) for in the article? I assume this is where guest blogging would come in? Any help would be HUGELY appreciated. I've been trying to logic this one out the last couple of days and just can't do it 😕 Thanks a lot to anyone who replies 🙂
Link Building | | CD_20161 -
Link Building for relaunched & newly designed site
Hey all, Next week we are relaunching our brand spankin' new site. It's a major overhaul of our existing site from both a brand, design, and identity point of view. As part of the relaunch we will be reaching out to journalists in our niche with PR, and also doing a series of guest posts. But I'm wondering about other link building opportunities around newly redesigned websites. I have a list of about 2 dozen design + CSS galleries to submit to. Can you recommend other sources? I'm especially interested in sites that review web design, etc... Thanks. C.
Link Building | | cmoylan1 -
Build Links with Bloggers
Hi! A few days ago, someone asked about how to ask links from bloggers and we got good answers, specially from Egol. But, I do want to add to that question: after conducting research on each blogger and make sure they have good quality content, how would you factor in their page rank, visitors, page view and social media info? if they don't have much traffic, with PR3 (we are PR4), which means we can't count on too much traffic from them, but, will backlink from such places deemed as quality link by Google? I do understand the higher number in PR and traffic is better, but, in our case, they don't come by often. Is it still worthwhile to do the lower sites?
Link Building | | ypl0 -
LINK BUILDING - Does it really matter if the link is not relevant?
Hi guys, I have just done a lot of link buillding and I thought I am just going to link build and I am not going to go after RELVANT links. I have property/real esate website and I have been any kind of link builidng and I have noteced some good increases in rankings.. So my questions is; Does it really matter if the link is relvant to property or real estate if I have got ranking increases? Or will it later harm my site?? Thanks Gareth
Link Building | | GAZ091 -
Reciprocal Linking Strategy
Hello All, I wanted to ask something regarding a link-building tactic that I was thinking about trying. Many sites have what seem to be automated systems for adding a URL to a page in a site, but first require a reciprocal link to be posted from a page on your own. I was thinking about starting up a separate small blog/information site that related to subjects in my industry, and posting links to related resources on other sites as well. Could I use this as a vehicle for acquiring links that point to my main domain, while reciprocating links from the separate domain where the blog/informational site was located? Has anyone tried this before? Do these automated systems only accept a reciprocal link request if a link is verified from the same domain that you request your link to be pointed at? I realize that some webmasters who verify links manually may have an issue with this, however I feel I can overcome that concern more often than not by delivering quality, relevant content on the informational site (as well as promoting that site separately). I think any savy webmaster would prefer it this way as well. I'm certain this has been tried before, but would like to find out what kind of results I might expect. Any experience or advice that may be given here will be much appreciated. Mike
Link Building | | mreisbeck0 -
Link building tools
hello all Please can you suggest the top 5 link building tools that an agency can use? Thank you 🙂
Link Building | | vijayvasu0 -
Create content or more link building?
For those of you who have been doing white hat SEO for many years, I'm curious what % of your time (and/or how many hours/week) you spend on 2 activities: -- creating new, original content for your site -- work on getting links to your existing content I find that working at getting links via article marketing, guest blogging, forum posting, etc, is an open ended time suck that never ends. But maybe a necessary investment for sites that have fewer external links than their competitors (?). Adding unique original content to my site is also time consuming, and I'm not sure about the short-term vs long-term benefit of it. I'm curious if you guys who rank in top 3 positions of the SERPs split your time evenly between link building and content building, or if you spend more time on one than the other? And does the answer change for a site that's been around for a while and already has several hundred external links and several hundred pages of original content? Where should I spend my time on a site that is 8 months old, has about 90 pages of original content (all with good on-page SEO), and several hundred external links (with mostly relevant anchor texts)? My goal is to rank higher for the key terms people search on to find a service like mine. Currently I'm on page 1 in SERPs but not in top 3.
Link Building | | scanlin0