If our link profile is too "blog link" heavy, will that be all that bad?
-
We own a site that lends itself extremely well to getting boat loads of links, only down side is that those on the boat are all bloggers.
We are selling a product that retails for $6.89 per unit. They are for women. Our target market is any woman/girl who is between 14 and 50. Even better, our cost per unit is only about $0.40. So what we've been doing is sending them out by the hundreds to legit fashion blogs all the way down to blogspot mommy bloggers and the reviews have poured in, literally all of them positive.
Moral of the story, we have a good product, and no shortage of bloggers that would be willing to write us up a legit, human written (by a red-blooded American none-the-less) on almost exclusively legit blogs. We're not trying to manipulate what they say, how they link to us, what anchor text they use or anything. We're just sending them product, asking that they do a review and give us a link and that's it.
Our worry is that given the nature of the site and the product offering, it's going to be easy to get these legit blog links, but more difficult to get links that "aren't on blogs".
Is this going to hurt us, or will Big Google be kind and realize this isn't shady manipulation. It's legit part of our ongoing effort to get the word out.
Further evidence that our campaign isn't to manipulate (although we all know we're in it for the links) is that so far 75% of our sales have been driven by these reviews. A few of the bigger sites that have done reviews have each directly resulted in 10+ sales from that single review.
So what are all ya'll's thoughts? I suspect we'll be OK, but wanted some others to provide their views.
-
Good stuff--sounds like you're on the right track then, all around.
-
As I said, we're only approaching, legit blogs, mommy or otherwise. So that isn't a worry. I was just worried that the bulk of our links are going to end up being blog reviews. And I'm also not worried about the passing of strength in theory, because in the end it's really more of an "ad campaign" than anything else.
I'd say around 1/3 of the reviews done so far just happen to be blogspot blogs, but that's just because they were quicker to respond. When the dust settles, 70% will be from unique domains, while about 30% will in fact be blogspot blogs. But that's the nature of the beast. Mommies love free blogs.
-
While it doesn't matter whether the linking sites are blogs, there are a couple of things you need to be aware of:
- if tons of them are at the same root domain (e.g. *.blogspot.com), you're not getting as much link power as if they're from different root domains
- some mommy bloggers can be really, really spammy....if you're getting lots of links from sites where the blogger is clearly getting paid to write "fluff" articles to link to car insurance, viagra, online poker, mortgage refy, replica watches, etc., you may end up with a suspicious-looking link profile and that could result in a manual penalty
-
So it turns out, we aren't in fact "requesting" the link. At the bottom of the email we put a "relevant" links section that includes a link to our home page, our "product application" page which shows them how to apply the product, as well as links to the product page of the items we sent them. We make no mention of "requesting" the link formally, so sounds like we're all good. And thus far 100% of those that have actually done the reviews have provided links and I've been surprised at the anchor text some of them have used. It has worked out very well so far for us, and the industry is very competitive.
Thanks for the 2nd thoughts. It's what I thought myself but it's always nice to get confirmation from others.
-
Oh you'll be fine. Google isn't necessarily going to differentiate a blog page versus just a web page. To the Google bots they see an HTML page and that's it that's all. If the sites themselves are relevant, the anchor text isn't all the same keyword, and the links aren't appearing 1,000 at a time you will be just fine.
Basically if your links come naturally then you're good. And this is a pretty natural way of gaining them. Some will say that sending out free product in hopes of a link is potentially against webmaster guidelines but I disagree with that. The fact of the matter is you are gaining sales from these reviews and that's all that really matters. So good job! Sounds like you're kickin butt, keep it up!
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
-
New Featured Links in Organic Search Results?
Hi guys, I just performed a search and came across something that looks like "featured links" under a regular organic search result (see screenshot). This is the first time I'm seeing this. It looks like a combination of callout and sitelink ad extensions for Google ads. Basically, linked callouts. I went to the landing page to check out the source code and it seems like they are calling it "featured link" in their code. I tried to find more info online but wasn't able to find anything. (I might not be using the correct search terms.) Does anyone know how to take advantage of this? Thanks a lot for your feedback. dJ9dmTr
Algorithm Updates | | HinterP0 -
What happens when a de-indexed subdomain is redirected to another de-indexed subdomain? What happens to the link juice?
Hi all, We are planning to de-index and redirect a sub domain A to sub domain B. Consequently we now need to d-index sub domain B also. What happens now to the link juice or page rank they gained from hundreds and thousands of backlinks? Will there be any ranking impact on main domain? Backlinks of these sub domains are not much relevant to main domain content. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Sub-domain with spammy content and links: Any impact on main website rankings?
Hi all, One of our sub-domains is forums. Our users will be discussing about our product and many related things. But some of the users in forum are adding a lot of spammy content everyday. I just wonder whether this scenario is ruining our ranking efforts of main website? A sub domain with spammy content really kills the ranking of main website? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
What does it exactly means when Google brings the "brand name" to the beggining of the page title in search results when it was actually given at the end?
We see many times...page titles starts with "brand name: page for etc" where actually "brand name" has been given at the end and keywords at beginning. Why does Google make this change? I noticed this happens when similar title tags are used by multiple websites for high difficulty keywords. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Google live blog schema
Live blog markup was rolled out to a selected group of publishers last year 2015. I'm trying to find out whether it has been released to other publishers yet (we are a news site). Not seeing any updates about it anywhere and wondering how I can find out if/when it will be available. This is the latest I can see which is not much help https://developers.google.com/search/pilot/open/live-blogs. Any insider info would be very much appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | hjsand2 -
Yoast SEO plugin and Weak Links
The plugin has what I thought was a great feature. My main site is often scrapped and I thought 'well at least we're getting a Link out of it' - due to the RSS feature of Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin (you can add a link to the bottom of your RSS feeds). Now Google is talking about Links from weak/crap sites and how they may impact your rankings. So - with this in mind.. Do we want links from scrappers? Are we now better off discontinuing the usage of this feature? I imagine there may be varying opinions on this so I'll open it as a discussion... thanks
Algorithm Updates | | TheHockeyWriters0 -
Backlink profile
Hi there Thanks for everyone here for their posts. As a newbie (with dozens of SEO providers asking me to pay them!), I was wondering if there's a preferred / better backlink profile to target in light of Panda/Penguin. I get a lot of companies offering 1000's of profile creations, which seems worthless to me! Surely certain types of links (local vs international), blogs, articles etc, have more value just through the fact that they offer something to the user who sees it (and hopefully that something is sticky, high quality content!) I understand that there is no magic formula, but at least want to know whats not worth doing and working backwards from there. Any opinions from users who have ranked well recently? I've got a mailbox full of sales pitches, so would be good to see this from an expert's eyes! Thanks in advance Regards
Algorithm Updates | | avgjoe0070 -
Any way to tell if a link has been devalued?
I have some listings in lawyer directories some of which have very hig PR , links, traffic, etc. For example, www.nolo.com, I know that Google has more or less recently devalued a lot of directory links. I would assume that a monster site like nolo would not be one of those, but does anyone know any way to tell? Paul
Algorithm Updates | | diogenes0