Are gallery sites ok post Penguin?
-
We're getting ready to re-launch a redesigned site and I was hoping to use the opportunity to get some quality links. Are some of the higher-quality web design gallery sites still ok to submit to? Did Penguin have any effect on these?
Just looking for opportunities for a little boost from our re-launch.
-
Would the same hold true for comments on blogs? If I'm leaving comments on relevant blogs, would it be ok to leave a link to my website in there, just as long as I'm not using exact-match keywords everywhere?
-
What Google is trying to do with Penguin is to take away (or penalize) any benefit that a website would get from self building links with anchor text.
In the past, if I wanted to rank for "green widgets" I could build a bunch of links containing the anchor text "green widgets", such as "Check out this website about green widgets!" This type of thing would really work well. But, Google has now caught on that this is a blatant attempt to manipulate the search results. They don't want you to rank #1 for green widgets just because you've got good SEO skills. Rather, they want the site that best represents green widgets to rank #1 for that term.
Sites that are getting affected by Penguin are generally ones that have overdone it with their anchor text. Now, no one knows exactly how much is too much (although you'll read lots of theories.) But what we do know is that a natural backlink profile has the majority of their links being their url or their brand name.
The problem is that the brand name is sometimes a tricky thing. If your website is www.greenwidgets.com you could say that your brand name is "green widgets", but to Google, building a bunch of links using the anchor text of "green widgets" may still be anchor text manipulation. For an example, see this post on how WPMU got hit by Penguin for having a bunch of footer links pointing back to them using the anchor text "Wordpress mu".
So, if you're building links (as opposed to earning them totally naturally), be careful not to go overboard on a keyword. Ideally, build links using your url as an anchor. The odd one with a keyword is ok, but until we have more data on what exactly is acceptable I would be very careful in using keywords as your anchor.
-
Can you please explain what it means to "be careful about your anchor text." Regarding anchor text, what is the difference between good and bad anchor text?
Best,
Christopher -
Be careful about your anchor text and I really think you should be ok. If you submitted to a pile of sites using keyword rich anchor text then you are likely to be penalized. But if the majority of your links use your url or brand you should be ok.
Be careful with your brand though if it is something that could be interpreted as a keyword. I've seen a couple of sites get hit by Penguin when they were targeting their brand as their brand was a competitive keyword.
-
Check out the Alexa ranks for the top sites you are considering submitting to and see what kind of an effect Penguin had on their rankings & traffic.
In general, if people are using the website (not just bots/spammers), then it is fine to submit to. Bonus points if it is relevant to your website.
Note: This is not meant to be a complete link building strategy. If the only links you are building come from "web design review" sites, you're gonna have a bad time ranking.
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
-
Site not indexed after 1 month
Hi people, I have been working on this new website for a month now and it has still not been indexed, here is a link: http://bit.ly/HNgzKG Can any of you spot anything wrong with it? I have tried submitting and also submitted an xml sitemap but still no joy.
Technical SEO | | Eavesy0 -
Site being indexed by Google before it has launched
We are currently coming towards the end of a site migration, and are at the final stage of testing redirects etc. However, to our horror we've just discovered Google has started indexing the new site. Any ideas on how this could have happened? I have most recently asked for robots.txt to exclude anything with a certain parameter in URL. Is there a chance this, wrongly implemented, could have caused this?
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Business Site Hit Hard from The Penguin Update
Over the last week or so I have been swimming through all the forum posts regarding the latest google penguin update and I am still unclear as to why my site was hit so hard. I have lost 90% of my traffic and my target keywords have disappeared. Maybe I am missing something hear but if you could have a look at my site in question here : http://www.websitetemplatedesign.com/ Is there something that just stands out that I have missed as to why this site would have been hit so hard? Any input would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | jmccommas1 -
What happens if my site was down for 10 hours?
Hello, We have a fairly large site. Due to an attack it was taken down for about 10 hours. We have finally been able to resolve the security issues, restore the code and put everything back online. Now, we are a little bit worried about what GoogleBot will think of us. We have been working hard during the past months to get a better SEO. Should we be worried?
Technical SEO | | jgenesto0 -
Redirecting a old aged site to a new exact match site?
Hi All, I have a question. I have 2 sites with me in the same sector and want some help. site 1 is a old site started back in 2003 and has some amount of links to it and has a pr 3 with some good links to it but doesn't rank much for any keywords for the timing. site 2 is a aged domain but newly developed with unique content and has a good amount of exact match with a .com version. so will there be any benefit by redirecting site 1 to site 2 to get the seo benefits and a start for link bulding? or is it best to develop and work on each site? the sector is health insurance. Thanks
Technical SEO | | macky71 -
How does Ping services help your site
Hi i am trying to understand how services such as pingler.com help your site. I think i understand about the google ping service which tells google that you have updated a page but how does pingler work. Pingler claims that it sends traffic to your site but i do not understand this. Any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848861 -
Traffic has dropped from my site.
Hello, I never had amazing traffic, but during the last week my site seems to have almost dropped of search engines. Nothing drastic has changed during this time that I can see would have caused this. The site is http://www.comparebestodds.com Does any one have any ideas that can help? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jwdesign0 -
Adding no follow links on my site
I am getting a warning about having too many links on my page www.accessoriesonline.co.uk (152) but I don't want to remove any links from the site. Its an ecommerce site with categories across the top, featured products and then a further category navigation in the footer. Would it be beneficial if I added a rel="nofollow" to the links in the footer as these are duplicates of the one's in the header or would this harm the links in the header and the destination URL's which I definitely want to be crawled? Also, does anyone know if SEOMOZ considers links with a rel=nofollow as an actually link when they calculate their overview? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | gavinhoman0