Feedback on link building idea
-
We came up with this idea at work for a client but before I initiate it I was wanting to get feedback on if this would be considered whitehat and alright to use.
It is for an ecommerce site. On the order confirmation and thank you page (not email cause they are on some old system that does not send out emails) we are wanting to put a thank you for your order message and continue with a statement about how they can save money on future purchases with a link that takes them to a page with info on how to do so.
That new page will have info about linking to the site from a blog or website. And will say if you link back to us and send us an email with that link as proof we will give you a promo code for your next purchase.
Is this alright?
-
I like where your heads at and this can be a great way to build links. However, I would only allow relavent and authoritative sites to link to me. I would also be sure to have all these external linking anchors in variations to avoid over optimizing penalties.
Instead of just having them add a link and they get a promo code. Make the promo code something you email after manually reviewing the site.
-
Overstock had done this on a large scale and many of their backlinks were .edu. IMO a site all of a sudden getting a ton of .edu links for many different keyword terms but all linking in [Exact] is a good reason to sound the alarm.
-
I would recommend you read this article where Overstock.com was penalized for offering discount coupons/discount to students/universities for links.
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
-
C-Block and link juice
We manage a couple of different domains on different hosting providers. I want to consolidate to one provider, but one site has some good links juice to another site (actually just one link). Should I worry about having both sites on the same C-block - and probably the same IP address?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ThomasErb0 -
Site build in the 80% of canonical URLs - What is the impact on visibility?
Hey Everyone, I represent international wall decorations store where customer can freely choose a pattern to be printed on a given material among a few milions of patterns. Due to extreme large number of potential URL combinations we struggle with too many URL adressess for a months now (search console notifications). So we finally decided to reduce amount of products with canonical tag. Basing on users behavior, our business needs and monthly search volume data we selected 8 most representative out of 40 product categories and made them canonical toward the rest. For example: If we chose 'Canvas prints' as our main product category, then every 'Framed canvas' product URL points rel=canonical tag toward its equivalent URL within 'Canvas prints' category. We applied the same logic to other categories (so "Vinyl wall mural - Wild horses running" URL points rel=canonical tag to "Wall mural - Wild horses running" URL, etc). In terms of Googlebot interpretation, there are really tiny differences between those Product URLs, so merging them with rel=canonical seems like a valid use. But we need to keep those canonicalised URLs for users needs, so we can`t remove them from a store as well as noindex does not seem like an good option. However we`re concerned about our SEO visibility - if we make those changes, our site will consist of ~80% canonical URLs (47,5/60 millions). Regarding your experience, do you have advices how should we handle that issue? Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | _JediMindBender
JMB0 -
Competitor outranking you with link spam. What would be your next steps?
FYI: I've already searched the forums for previous posts on this topic and although some are helpful, they don't tend to have many responses, so I'm posting this again in the hope of more interaction from the community 😉
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | adamlcasey
So can I please ask the community to tell me what course of action you would take, if this was happening to you? We have been ranking in position 1 for a major keyword in our space for the past 18 months. Today I logged into my Moz account and to keyword rankings to find that we have dropped to 2nd. So I placed the competitors website; who's now in 1st position, into OSE and looked under the "Just Discovered" tab. There are 258 newly discovered links, 95% of which use keywords in the anchor text!
So I reviewed the rankings for all of these other keywords being targeted and sure enough they are now dominating the top 1-3 spots for most of them. (some of which we are also attempting to rank for and have subsequently been pushed down the rankings) Their links are made up of: Forum and blog comments - always using anchor text in the links Article's posted on web 2.0 sites (Squidoo, Pen.io, Tumblr, etc) Profile page links Low quality Press Release sites Classified ad sites Bookmarking sites Article Marketing sites Our competitors sell safety solutions into the B2B market yet the topics of some of the sites where these links appear include: t-shirts sports news online marketing anti aging law christian guitars computers juke boxes Of the articles that I quickly scanned, it was clear they had been spun as they didn't read well/make sense in places. So my conclusion is that they have decided to work with a person (can't bring myself to call them an seo company) who have provided them with a typical automated link building campaign using out dated, poor seo practices that are now classified as link spam. No doubt distributed using an automated link publishing application loaded with the keyword rich anchor text links and published across any site that will take them. As far as I was aware, all of the types of links we're supposed to have be penalised by Google's Penguin & Panda updates and yet it seems they are working for them! So what steps would you take next?0 -
Domain authority - Low quality links
I have a question I hope people can help me on. it is my intention for my next project to focus on domain authority, and a small number of high quality links. I have a couple of scenarios I would appreciate some advice on: 1. Can lower quality links lower domain authority? 2. Would you avoid links from low quality sites no matter what \ what domain authority levels should you avoid links from. 3. Should I be looking at link profiles of the sites I get links from. Does it matter if a site I get a link from has 1000's of spammy links (i.e. something to look out for when doing guest blogging). 4. Should I avoid directories no matter what, or is high pr \ domain authority directories ok to use, if I end up on a page of other relevant directory submissions related to my niche. Essentially, my aim is to have high quality links, but equally, there are some decent sites on the fringes that I will need to consider (based on a competitors link profile I researches).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jonathan19790 -
Sitewide logo footer link - what's the risk?
Hi, an incredibly popular website, with several thousand pages, has offered me a site-wide footer logo link. The site this popular website would backlink to has 50 high quality backlinks (and low volumes of traffic - it's a new site). I am tempted to say no, because of the risk of penalty, but then I started wondering whether a logo link posed the same penalty risk as a text link.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Does your website get downgraded if you link to a lower quality site?
My site has a pr of 4. My friends site has a pr of 2 but I think that he is doing some black hat seo techniques. I wanted to know whether the search engines would ding me for linking to (i.e., validating) a lower quality site.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jamesjd70 -
Creating multiple domains with key phrases and linking back and forth to them
There are several of my competitors who have built multiple sites with keywords in their domain names such as localaustinplumber.com, houstonplumbers.com, Dallasplumbers.com, localdallasplumbingservices.com...you get the picture. (These are just made up examples to illustrate what they are doing) They put unique content on each page and use alias whois using a different credit card to set up each domain to hide the fact from Google that they are the same entity and then link back and forth to each of the domains with appropriate keywords in the anchor text. They are outranking me on a lot of key search phrases due to the fact that they have the keywords in the domain name. They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own. Is this a good idea? is it black hat? are they going to get slapped if someone reports them as a link farm? It's frustrating for me staying white hat and getting legitimate links and then these competitors come in and out rank me after only a few months with this scheme. Is this a common practice to rank highly for certain key phrases? Thanks in advance for your opinions! Ron10
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ron100 -
Would linking out to a gambling/casino site, harm my site and the other sites it links out to?
I have been emailed asking if I sell links on one of my sites. The person wants to link out to slotsofvegas[dot]com or similar. Should I be concerned about linking out to this and does it reduce the link value to any of the other sites that the site links out to? Thanks, Mark
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Markus1110