Hello there, SEOers! Search Engine Academy teaches some in-depth modules about link building strategies; mainly those that are “white hat” and won’t get you in trouble with either a manual penalty or Google Penguin, on the regular occasions it rolls out across the internet land.
That being said, here are a couple of link building schemes that Google has something to say about.
Widgets With Links
First, from the great folks at Search Engine Land: Several months ago, Google recommended you use the “nofollow” for links in widgets, because as usual, spammers, bless their evil, fatty little hearts, were abusing widgets with – what else – link spam! This was supposed to be a way to differentiate you from the bad guys.
Well now Google Webmaster Guidelines has altered their links scheme page significantly. Not only do they still talk about how it’s a major no-no to buy links or sell them to pass Page Rank, but look about halfway down the page now and you’ll see a bullet point with this: “Keyword-rich, hidden or low-quality links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites…”
It’s always a good idea to read this page in its’ entirety, in case you were confused on what is still Penguin-friendly vs. those types of links that will get your pages dropped so far down they’ll never see the light of day again!
My personal opinion of spammers is that they all should be covered in 5-alarm hot sauce topped off with honey, then locked into a room with starving fire ants. But that’s just me. I’m not too mean or anything.
Next up, there’s some news regarding temporary link schemes. From a great SEO blog post written by Dejan SEO, there’s this commentary from a Google Plus community:
Apparently temporary link schemes, defined as links that are randomly placed out on the internet, but removed soon enough to be counted by the algorithm, but not get penalized, are still showing up in cached results on Google SERPs. And that, my SEO heroes, can still get your pages, should they be part of this type of link spam, in trouble. You still need to disavow those links. Google knows about these links as well, according to John Mueller of Google. If you get a manual spam penalty, be sure you continue to root all bad links, including those that may be cached.
So there you have it. I am always so humbled to be an SEOer, because I learn so much new stuff each week. What else have you learned in this new year thus far?
As always, keep it between the ditches and come back again!
All the best to you,
Definitely gotta go easy on the the widgets, they were fun while they lasted though. UK bank just penalised with their use http://www.garethjames.net/uk-bank-halifax-receives-google-penalty/
Yep, they were good, but as usual, spammers over did it. Thanks for posting the link; interesting article!
Hello Sir,
I’ve received few back links so far through the widgets, but as i saw Matt Cutts video of putting rel=”nofollow” tag with the anchor text, i get a bit confused, there are so many web developers as well who put a link back to their website. And they say , not to remove it.
Anchor Text in the widgets i provide is not hidden, as it can be clearly seen in the bottom. Is it still an issue in terms of SEO?. Please clear my doubt so that i can work on it. Thanks. 🙂
With the first Penguin rollouts, many web design firms got nailed because in the footer of every single page of every single website they ever designed, they had anchor text with a keyword phrase linking back to their sites. Resolution included changing all the anchor text to their business name for branding purposes. As far as widgets go, yes, Google decided that most of them are spam, and the recommendation is to remove the widgets to stay in Google’s good graces. It sucks, I know, because for the sites out there legitimately using widgets, they’ve gotten slammed. Spammers unfortunately ruin things for everyone. I’d remove the widgets to make sure I don’t get caught in Google’s crosshairs.