Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Link Building using Badges
-
In light of penguin update, is link building using badges(like "I love SEOMOZ" badge)
still considered a white hat tactic?
I have read old posts on SEOMOZ blog about this topic and wondering if this method is still effective.
Look forward to feedback from MOZers.
-
Thank you John for the tips.
We have a community on our website and could leverage that for such engagement.
-
Yeah absolutely - if you can get people to use them then I don't see anything wrong with them at all. You're not sneaking links into them and people are using them of their own accord, so nothing wrong with having them on the site for people to take and use if they want them.
I think the harder part will be getting people to actually engage with them, unless you're offering a superb platform or service.
Bear in mind any link you get will likely be an image link, so be sure to place your brand name in the alt text, and offer users a html snippet for placing on their site. If you start placing exact match anchor text in the alt text though and they do get heavily picked up, then there will be no variation and you'll likely pick up a penalty, so best to go with your brand name.
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
-
Spam Score & Redirecting Inbound Links
Hi, I recently downloaded a spreadsheet of inbound links to my client sites and am trying to 301 redirect the ones that are formatted incorrectly or just bad links in general (they all link to the site domain, but they used to have differently formatted urls on their old site, or the link URL in general has strange stuff on it). My question is, should I even bother redirecting these links if their spam score is a little high (i.e. 20-40%)? it already links to the existing domain, just with a differently formatted URL. I just want to make sure it goes to a valid URL on the site, but I don't want to redirect to a valid URL if it's going to harm the client's SEO. Also not sure what to do about the links with the --% spam score. I really appreciate any input as I don't have a lot of experience with how to deal with spammy links.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac260 -
Sitewide nav linking from subdomain to main domain
I'm working on a site that was heavily impacted by the September core update. You can see in the attached image the overall downturn in organic in 2019 with a larger hit in September bringing Google Organic traffic down around 50%. There are many concerning incoming links from 50-100 obviously spammy porn-related websites to just plain old unnatural links. There was no effort to purchase any links so it's unclear how these are created. There are also 1,000s of incoming external links (most without no-follow and similar/same anchor text) from yellowpages.com. I'm trying to get this fixed with them and have added it to the disavow in the meantime. I'm focusing on internal links as well with a more specific question: If I have a sitewide header on a blog located at blog.domain.com that has links to various sections on domain.com without no-follow tags, is this a possible source of the traffic drops and algorithm impact? The header with these links is on every page of the blog on the previously mentioned subdomain. **More generally, any advice as to how to turn this around? ** The website is in the travel vertical. 90BJKyc
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShawnW0 -
Is it Okay to Nofollow all External Links
So, we all "nofollow" most of the external links or all external links to hold back the page rank. Is it correct? As per Google, only non-trusty and paid links must be nofollow. Is it all same about external links and nofollow now?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Title Tag : use comma, pipe or colon (:)
Hi, If Title has two and three keywords then which one is better option to separate them either with comma or pipe or colon. Example : Arvixe Review, Coupons (Jun 2015) and Uptime Report (I used (,) as a separator) Arvixe Review is primary keywords and Coupons and Uptime are secondary keywords. Aim is rank on keywords like Arvixe Review, Arvixe Coupons and Arvixe Uptime.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gamesecure
Also, including current month and year with Title tag and it will change every month. Its means every month our title is changed.
Is this effect in SEO? Suggest best possible title for keywords like Arvixe Review, Coupons (Jun 2015) and Uptime Report. Rajiv0 -
Are link directories still effective? is there a risk?
We've contracted a traditional SEO firm, mostly for link building. As part of their plan they want to submit our site to a large list of link directories, and we're not sure if that's a good option. As far as we know, those directories have been ineffective for a long time now, and we're wondering if there is the chance of getting penalized by google. When I asked the agency their opinion about that, they gave me the following answer - Updated and optimized by us - We are partnered with these sites and control quality of these sites. Unique Class C IP address - Links from unique Referring Class C IP plays a very important role in SEO. Powered by high PR backlinks Domain Authority (DA) Score of over 20 These directories are well categorized. So they actually control those directories themselves, which we think is even worse. I'm wondering what does the Moz community think about link directory submission - is there still something to be gained there, is there any risk involved, etc. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | binpress0 -
Should I Do a Social Bookmarking Campaign and a Tier 2 Linking?
I don't see anything bad in manually creating links on different (about 50) social bookmarking services. Is this method labeled as White Hat? I was wondering if it would be fine to create Tier 2 linking (probably blog comments) for indexing of the social bookmarking links? Please share your thoughts on the topic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zorsto0 -
Deny visitors by referrer in .htaccess to clean up spammy links?
I want to lead off by saying that I do not recommend trying this. My gut tells me that this is a bad idea, but I want to start a conversation about why. Since penguin a few weeks ago, one of the most common topics of conversation in almost every SEO/Webmaster forum is "how to remove spammy links". As Ryan Kent pointed out, it is almost impossible to remove all of these links, as these webmasters and previous link builders rarely respond. This is particularly concerning given that he also points out that Google is very adamant that ALL of these links are removed. After a handful of sleepless nights and some research, I found out that you can block traffic from specific referring sites using your.htaccess file. My thinking is that by blocking traffic from the domains with the spammy links, you could prevent Google from crawling from those sites to yours, thus indicating that you do not want to take credit for the link. I think there are two parts to the conversation... Would this work? Google would still see the link on the offending domain, but by blocking that domain are you preventing any strength or penalty associated with that domain from impacting your site? If for whatever reason this would nto work, would a tweak in the algorithm by Google to allow this practice be beneficial to both Google and the SEO community? This would certainly save those of us tasked with cleaning up previous work by shoddy link builders a lot of time and allow us to focus on what Google wants in creating high quality sites. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | highlyrelevant0 -
How do I find out if a competitor is using black hat methods and what can I do about it?
A competitor of mine has appeared out of nowhere with various different websites targetting slightly different keywords but all are in the same industry. They don't have as many links as me, the site structure and code is truly awful (multiple H1's on same page, tables for non-tabular data etc...) yet they outperform mine and many of my other competitors. It's a long story but I know someone who knows the people who run these sites and from what I can gather they are using black hat techniques. But that is all I know and I would like to find out more so I can report them.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kevin11