Partnerships web pages and optimization- dangers and solutions?
-
My boss is in the process of building lot of new partnerships. The goal is to increase the number of mutual referrals. These are businesses that are not in the same industry, but have the same clients, so there is no competition.
He wants a separate Partners category, landing page and a subpage for each partner. On each partner page, he wants a link pointing back to the partner company, along with some information about that particular business.
In exchange, our partners would do the same- have a page dedicated to us with information and a link to our website.
By the way, this is not an affiliate program, just referral exchange program.I am worried about appearing like a link farm. Should I be?
From what I see, most partners of other companies are all listed on one page.My boss says others do this without any problems, but he is not an SEO person.
What are the dangers of doing it the way my boss wants?
What is the safest way to list business partners on our website while trying to accomplish what I have been asked (or as closely as possible)?No follow links, maybe? What about the metas and titles? NoIndex/NoFollow pages? (my boss wants these pages to be indexed).Your input is greatly appreciated.
-
It's listed right here in the Google Webmaster Guidelines:
"Building partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking."
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
The guidelines also mentioned "excessive link exchanges" -- so what's deemed excessive? This is definitely a gray area.
I would nofollow the links just to be safe.
-
Hi,
Although I appreciate your thoughts, I feel that I am playing with fire if I had to add these links, since this program will expand to include more related industries.
I am responsible for the website's results and making sure it is safe, so it is my job to let my boss know about these things-good and bad. Being responsible for the website, it is not enough to just earn the paycheck and keep my mouth shut- this is not that kind of role.
Being opinionated and holding my boss from making a mistake is one of my duties, and so far, I have accomplished this. In the end, he has the final say, of course, and luckily my boss is intelligent and listens to my opinions, whether he likes them or not.
I am just trying to find the happy medium between making him happy and following the rules to the best of my abilities.I know all about the natural link-building and unique content, and I have built a lot of unique content for many years.
Thank you again
-
- How many of these is "a lot"? If it's 10 or so, I wouldn't be worried at all.
- Does your boss pay your paycheck? If yes, I'd do what he says if you aren't sure because it is his business, money, etc.
- The safest way to list business partners on your site is naturally. This means that if it makes sense to give each of them their own page, then do it. If it means to put them all on the same page do that.
- Don't worry about no follow links in this case, especially if you are in related industries. Linking to sites in the same industry is a good thing. I would go as far as to say link to more than just these companies so that it doesn't look like you only link to people who link to you if you are worried about looking like a link farm or circle.
- On each of their pages I would make a strong effort to create unique content. Not just copy and paste from their websites. This way you are adding value to the web.
-
Yes it would be a bad idea.
If you must, just nofollow the links. The dangers are getting ALL the sites penalized and that just isn't cool to have it happen.
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
-
Building Page Rank
I have a situation where there is a product category page with multiple products listed linking to individual product pages. The pages been around some time with no change. The strange thing is although page rank is reasonable on the category page it doesn't seem to be passing any rank to the individual product pages. Any ideas to swing the roundabouts on this? Thanks
Link Building | | seoman100 -
100% whitehat , Site not perorming even not at 100th page
many of my blogpost are not ranking with same title , no where in google , both sites have same problem topcreativedesigns.com lovelyquotes.org my other sites are performing well but these do have serious problem i have made no back link/ spam comments etc please advise me what should i do.
Link Building | | Ghazanfar780 -
PR web anchor text
We are submitting a press release today for a contest we are doing and it is actually news worth compared to a lot of things on PR web. Our question is PRweb.com still worth using? If we use them should we put an anchor text in it? We have one link to our home page and one to the contest page and we were going to have one link to a different page. But will linking to the third page with an anchor text be to much?
Link Building | | DoRM0 -
Are hosting Web badges still worth it?
Hi, I would like to ask you about a really specific case: hosting company web badges. I'm working for a web hosting company, and in order to increase the number of incoming links we were considering providing web badges to our customers, so they could link back to us. Some customers would be glad to show they host their website with us placing one web badge in their website, but after the last penguin update I'm not sure if it's still a good idea. As the company is hosting several thousand websites it could be a really good opportunity to get some back links, but I would like to hear your suggestions. Shall we use "nofollow" on the links? (But that way we would be missing all the link juice that we could get) Would it be better to just show the web badge on the home page of each domain and keep the dofollow attribute? Are there some terms that we should use or avoid in the links? Maybe "Hosted at <company name="">" would be a good anchor text, or shall we just use the company name? </company> So, I would love to hear your advice about doing or not doing it. Or any advice about how to do it properly in order to get the desired result. Thanks! 🙂 Xavier.
Link Building | | xtrill0 -
Any value in link building to local pages on my site?
If I'm trying to rank for the term 'wedding band' with my url: http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-bands will linking to local pages such as: http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts/hire-wedding-bands/wedding-bands-london help the main page to rank? I added the 'local' pages to try and pick up any traffic from long tail search queries but my main focus is on getting the main page to rank as the traffic from long tail queries is so small. So is it worth me spending time building links to these local pages in order to try and help the main page rank?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Fresh set of eyes on this page please. Why isn't it ranking?
Morning all, I'd really appreciate it if you could take a quick look at this page and see if I'm missing something here. The targeted keyword (wedding favours) is pretty competitive and the rank had been slowly improving until recently and we've now slipped to 25th on Google UK. I've added a "Pay with a tweet" button for our eBook which has been pretty well received (around 100 downloads) so far so the social side is better than our competition. I've also written a few guest blogs with links back to the page from a variety of sources. Here is the page analysis on OSE. If you could take a quick look and let me know if I'm missing anything here, it would be most appreciated! Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | Confetti_Wedding0 -
Building backlinks on sub-pages instead of main page(rood-domain)
Hey Mozzers! I am facing a problem and I need advice. I have recently opened my new website, which purpose is to offer quality articles, optimized for SEO. The problem is that I cannot find the right keyword to use for the main(root) domain (http://xxxxxx.org) as it is consisting of many niches. Is it a good idea to build backlinks on pages (http://xxxxxx.org/the-keyword-for-ranking) instead of building them on my root-domain? So basically, my root-domain will have less backlinks than my pages inside? Please give me some advice and way to act with. Thank you
Link Building | | Ralchev0 -
Linkbuilding on deep Blog pages
So I think I've got a good strategy going but wanted to get others feedback on it... I've been link building on a lot of blogs via reviews and giveaways. Frequently, these blogs give my posts limited exposure on the Home Page because the posts quickly get buried by new posts and eventually pushed off the home page to the "older posts" pages. Sometimes, reviews never even touche the home page because they live one level down on a "reviews" page which typically has 0 inbound links and low page authority. In these cases, I will use OSE to find the blog post with the strongest back link profile and request a link on that page instead. Typically, these posts are 2-3 years old so the bloggers are usually happy to give an old page some action. I'm a bit concerned though..Since these pages are frequently old, their content has not changed for years. Essentially, the pages have gone stale. Am I getting any benefit from these links? They typically have the 2nd best Page Authority on the Domain, but I'm wondering if the lack of fresh content kills all the value.
Link Building | | znotes0