How to Check if a Sites Backlink Profile is Penguin Friendly?
-
Post penguin I am of course very wary about which sites I proactively solicit links from.
Here is the scenario. Let's say for example I found a blog relevant to my business sector, had good domain authority/moz rank and noticed that they accepted guest posts. Sounds great?
Well on the surface it sounds like it would be worth reaching out to the blog owner - but what if that blog had been involved in some really shady link building practices in the past and the reality is that I could end up damaging my own site by association.
Can anyone share any useful resources such as articles or tools that will help to understand how to qualify if a sites backlink profile is shady and should be avoided as a link prospect?
-
Hi Luia, Ryan's answered your question in terms of detecting penalties / shady link building.
I would just add that if you are going to guest post, it should be to reach the audience and less about the value of the link. Ultimately, if you can get readers to your site and interested in (and sharing) your content it's going to be much more rewarding on an ongoing basis than that single link.
-
Post penguin I am of course very wary about which sites I proactively solicit links from.
For the most part sites penalized for manipulative links have had specific pages penalized, not the entire site. If you are writing a new article on the site, then it should have a new URL which would not have had any manipulative links pointing towards it, so that page would not be penalized.
If you want to examine the site anyway, an easy way to check is to perform a Google search for a term you expect them to rank well for. If you are trying to earn a link from SEOmoz you can search google.com for "seo tools" and you will notice the site ranking in position 3 (Rand? What's up with that? If you are the best seo tool provider shouldn't you rank as #1?)
You can also check the site's backlink profile in OSE. If you examine the top 50 links and most offer anchor text, especially if it is the same anchor text repeated, that is a warning sign.
Now that I addressed your question directly, I would also share none of the above really matters. Ideally you should be posting your content on your own site. If you decide to post on another site, then you are doing so to reach their audience. SEOmoz, for example, has a dedicated community. A large percentage of the community visit the site because they have the URL memorized, or bookmarked, etc. You are trying to connect with that community and even if your article had no direct search traffic, look at the numbers of followers Moz has earned (check the upper right corner). When an article is published it goes out to over 100k RSS feeds, 130k+ twitter followers, etc. That is who you should be trying to reach with a guest blog. If you are going to depend on search traffic, then the article might as well be on your own site.
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
-
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,
Link Building | | seoanalytics0 -
I got 1 backlink with 19k backlinks is that bad ? I am afraid
Hi i get 1 good backlink from he have Domain Authority 34 /100 and Page Authority 44 /100 in the footer and the site is vb and with this backlink i get on ahrefs Backlinks19.5K its that normal or good or bad for google ? http://imgur.com/7MNbwBW 7MNbwBW
Link Building | | imgamer0 -
Is healthygallbladder.com a spammy site?
Hello Moz Community! We're getting many back links with random anchor text (completely irrelevant) from a website called healthygallbladder.com and various subdomains under that domain. Has anyone else come across this website? I can't seem to load the pages at all. It always comes up with a bandwidth exceeded message.
Link Building | | SylviaH0 -
Backlink Disavow strategy
Hi, I would like to know what are the things to check when Disavow backlinks? Should we disavow all the low PR and DA backlinks ex: disavow all the backlinks under 4PR? Thanks alot !
Link Building | | bigrat950 -
Linking to sites that link to porn or casinos, my site getting penalized?
I have some link exchanges with some sites to get web traffic but when i ran the bad neighborhood link checker, i found that one site links to some casinos and another site has one link to a porn site. Is this getting me penalized? should i remove the links to these sites? Thanks, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
Penguin and Backlinks
I have been looking closely at my backlinks. I readily admin that I have not worked on backlinks in years since for e-commerce there is little white hat opportunity but here is what I find in doing a detailed analysis. I mostly have back links that are pointing to our nicely ranked site (well it use to be pre-penguin) being hyjacked by crappy sites that just put us on the their site in order to try and rank. I have no way to prevent this. They are like a cancer. Point me to the Doctor. Is Goggle penalizing us for these guys listing us in long pages list to create pages that obviously exist for one reason...... To display Adword Ads....isn't that a twist that simply sucks for use but has Google making money either way. If they want to penalize us for them stealing our link then we should get a say in accepting the link. Advice on dealing with this? Do I have to hire someone to create enough good links to overcome this trash that I have no control over ? Perhaps my competitors are doing this. I simply can't tell. Any advice is appriciated.
Link Building | | freestone0 -
Why is it that so few of my inlinks appear in site explorer?
For instance, Manta, yellow pages, even google and yahoo directories - why do they not appear in site explorer, and is there a better way to determine who is linking to my site?
Link Building | | ScottM0