Site has fallen since Penguin, clueless as to why

[onlinesource]

I know that Penguin has effected multiple businesses and their ability to be seen online, and a company that I work closely with is no exception. They have laid off 5 employees, were forced to move, etc. It is a major mess.

First off, this company sells fake widgets which are totally novelty widgets. I want to get that out of the way because I know somebody is going to have to say "no wonder Google dropped them, they sell fake widgets". That isn't true. Plenty of other widget sites rank for the "fake widgets" keyword. I know it can be considered "niche site" but niche sites still rank.

From a moral standpoint, if this still bothers you there are plenty of sites that promote such products for illegal use. This site only suggests their products be used for novelty or replacement purposes.

Now, that I hopefully got that out of the way and won't have to defend the site, let's move on.

Their site has ranked well for 6+ years and just dropped after Penguin 2. One night they are on #1 for the top keyword ("fake widgets") and within seconds they can't be found anywhere for it. Google still lists the site (it isn't banned) but all of their keyword power is gone.

They are clueless, so is the SEO company that they hired. I have people tell me that there are too many backlinks on the same server, some images are missing alt tags (most of that has been fixed since) but please check out:

<snip>

This competitor ranks on the first page of Google (#2 right now) for "fake widgets". On their homepage, they have over 10 backlinks to their domain (which I hear Google finds as abuse), they also have a billion keywords in meta tags (I always been told 5 per page), they have 2 h1 tags for some reason and none of their images have alt tags.

So, what is the difference here? The first site follows as many rules as they can about content but this site gives a big finger to Google and Google loves them. There has to be something more here than simple content fixes with header tag and alt tag adjustments.

I would appreciate any assistance possible. I'm guessing that Google doesn't care that much about abusing your own site for backlinks, alt tags... all of that is not the real problem.

<snip> I had hired a SEO company for 6 years and ranked well. They mostly did link building and the links were added with white hat methods. I don't know, maybe a competitor has created a site to give us bad links? I have a list of all my backlinks via Webmaster Tools but have no idea what links are hurting or helping the site.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 9:48 pm (utc) on Sep 17, 2013]
[edit reason] Exemplified, removed specifics [/edit]

[linkbuildr]

Well you hired an SEO company who did link building. There is your problem. 99.9% of the "SEO" companies out there have no idea what they're doing is against Google's TOS.

[JD_Toims]

They mostly did link building and the links were added with white hat methods.

Can you describe the methods, please?

99.9% of the "SEO" companies out there have no idea what they're doing is against Google's TOS.

Don't know it's against the TOS or just plain don't care as long as they make a $ from what they're doing -- Sorry to hear about the situation.

[Panthro]

Every single time I've looked at someone's site with an unexplainable Panda or Penguin traffic loss, I've been able to find the problem. It's usually not that complicated, most people just don't really watch the SERPs close enough or have access to enough sites to be able to tell what's going on.

Keep in mind there's also little updates and changes quietly slipped in with the big ones that get all the coverage.

[bodashka]

Every single time I've looked at someone's site with an unexplainable Panda or Penguin traffic loss, I've been able to find the problem. It's usually not that complicated, most people just don't really watch the SERPs close enough or have access to enough sites to be able to tell what's going on.

I can find problems with every site, including this one. But if it causes Panda, Penguin or whatever and if any fix would return is another story. They are a lot of "experts" that claim fixes trolling on webmaster forums, but the fact that barely any site has returned from panda (unless Google changed the algo) shows it isn't easy.

[Whitey]

I don't know, maybe a competitor has created a site to give us bad links? I have a list of all my backlinks via Webmaster Tools but have no idea what links are hurting or helping the site.

Studying the link profile is a good start and deciding where you are going to either pull off referring links, or disavow them.

Why can't you tell which ones are likely to be offending. Surely there must be some more than others that stand out in the profile. Multiple exact match anchor texts , over optimization , money keywords, links from similar or networked sources. You should see the clues in your analytics as to which keywords were hardest hit.

If you can't work it out, you can always put your site up for review to get some quick inputs from folks who'd want to help you: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Planet13]

Hi there, OnlineSource and welcome to WebMaster World!

Could you please tell us the exact date that the traffic from google stopped and your rankings dropped?

Also, can you describe what the methods the seo company used to build links? (Yes, even the white hat methods.)

Thanks in advance.

[Panthro]

can find problems with every site, including this one. But if it causes Panda, Penguin or whatever and if any fix would return is another story. They are a lot of "experts" that claim fixes trolling on webmaster forums, but the fact that barely any site has returned from panda (unless Google changed the algo) shows it isn't easy.

I agree and that's part of the problem with finding a fix. Lots of "know it alls" and "experts" in this muddy business and if you're a lost webmaster already it's hard to know where to turn for real help. It's like trying to find a lost ring in the ocean waves.

Like I said, most people blame everything initially on Panda or Penguin because they don't know any better, and it's no wonder there are so few reported recoveries. There are plenty of other things going on out there besides the "known" Panda/Penguin factors. Other sites are doomed no matter almost what because of the fundamental changes that have been solidifying in the past couple years. Some business models are just not going to work like they used to and unknowing webmasters will continue to throw money at sinking ships until there's absolutely no hope and never know what happened.

The fact that it's not easy is the crux of it all IMO. That's where Google has everyone. Many, many people who have made money in the organic SERPs like to do things the easy way and will not or can not invest the time, money, and effort it requires to get things back on track.

[onlinesource]

I can't figure out how to reply to an existing reply here. Sorry.

It feels weird when I get into discussions about SEO companies, because it seems like every SEO companies doesn't trust another SEO companies methods and no matter who you go with, somebody will tell that it is mistake.

That being said, the SEO company that we have hired - to be completely honest - has never sent us any reports as to what they have done (a list of lists of sites they posted to, a list of backlinks they created, etc) over the years. I've always asked for reports and they were promised, but they remain very secretive about exactly what they do. Maybe they were secretly submitting blackhat SEO (possibly?) but I really believe that most companies won't give away the secrets to their trade.

You see, we've hired other SEO companies in the past to work on other sites which targeted the same desired keywords. These new SEO companies sent all sorts of weekly reports about YouTube videos they uploaded, articles they submitted to article feeds, but we never ranking! Like I said, this site ranked #1 to #3 for "fake widgets" over a 6 year period using their methods, so obviously if something is working as a business... you don't flip out over a lack of weekly updates and drop your SEO company. :)

I also understand that ranking online is really a total crap shoot. You really are at the mercy of any changes done by the search engine, but our site continues to rank #1 to #2 for "fake widgets" with Bing and Yahoo (luckily) so this latest drop has to be some issue that Google sees as a problem but not others.

As far as when the drop happened... it was right around the middle of this June. Looking at Analytic reports, I can see that it was slowly starting to loose traffic weeks prior but it just dropped off like a cliff, if an instant. One night our site went down because our host said their server failed (didn't crash, just somehow failed due to a mechanical issue). When it was fixed and the site went back up, I realized that our traffic was nonexistent. Before I had like 300 people online and now, it was down to 2. I checked Google for "fake widgets" all the way down to page 300 and NOTHING. Of course, when I type my domain name into Google, it shows up and I can even type site:mydomain.com and get links back. We don't seem to be have banned but all of our top keyword juice was just destroyed. We do manage to rank for less desirable keywords, but some that are in the same ballpark such as "sites that offer fake widgets". It isn't close the amount of traffic that "fake widgets" provides though.

There are a few things that I have noticed since crashing, that I am in the process of TRYING to fix... issues that my be the answer to my problem or maybe not.

You see about a year ago, we realized that we ranked very poorly in the UK and didn't have any UK traffic. SO what I did was create a Wordpress blog with my same domain but instead of mydomain.com, it was mydomain.co.uk. The blog was really just articles that pointed to mydomain.com. I did this because if people wanted to buy, they'd have to leave the co.uk site and buy on the .com site, where the cart was. We had been posted about an article every week on the co.uk site and really not giving as much attention to the .com site.

One interesting that I have noticed is that right around the time of the crash... as the .com traffic started to dwindle, the .co.uk traffic started to rise. hmmm Do you think that Google is stating to see my site as a UK site because of all the UK traffic? Would it be wise to turn .co.uk into it's own shopping cart and keep all the UK traffic in the UK? I see other competitors have their .com sites rank on UK search engines but maybe because my UK site is on another server, Google sees the traffic as a backlink?

That is one issue and the SEO company believes it may be the issue. I'm actually looking into getting a cart setup on the .co.uk server as I write this.

Another issue, regarding the .com site is that we have updated the shopping cart several times over the years and it has gone from a cart which uses generated urls (ie: product-id=4939) to SEO-friendly urls (ie: custom-widgets.html). I had created a 301 redirect list years back which stopped working about a year and a half ago with the latest cart update. I didn't even noticed it wasn't working til the drop when I started to realize how many crawl errors we had. In Google Webmaster Tools, I see about 100+ not found urls. Now if I try to visit a link such as mydomain.com/product-id=4939, it forwards me to the homepage but mydomain.com/product-id=4939 is still in the address bar. So it's sort of like a redirect but not really. Would trying to get the 301 redirect list back up and running make a BIG difference?

My issue with all of this is that there is either a bunch of tiny issues causing the problem or one big issue. What confuses me is that Yahoo and Bing do not seem to mind the missing urls or traffic coming from the co.uk site. The only difference, now that I think about it, is that Yahoo and Bing do have something like Webmaster Tools but the co.uk site was never submitted to it. Google has had it submitted and it's set to target UK traffic.

I'm starting to think that the UK site is the real issue. Maybe I'm figuring this out as I write this? Unless somebody has a second opinion? :)

[jimbeetle]

You mentioned Penguin in the thread title with no follow-up as to why. So, why do you suspect Penguin?

Planet13 asked for the exact date the site's traffic dropped. Answering that question will start the process of determining what the heck is going on.

[aakk9999]

One night our site went down because our host said their server failed (didn't crash, just somehow failed due to a mechanical issue). When it was fixed and the site went back up, I realized that our traffic was nonexistent.

How long was the site unavailable? From what I am reading, you had a problem with a server which went down, you got the server back up and your rankings disappeared?

As jimbeetle said, it would be useful to have the exact date when your traffic has disappeared as well as the date(s) the server was down prior to traffic failing.

It would be very coincidental (although not impossible) that you got hit by the update right the day the server failed. I somehow think you need to check you do not have technical issues first.

With regards to co.uk domain, the articles that you are putting on there - are they duplicated of articles on the .com domain or perhaps re-hashed articles from .com domain or are they newly written and unique? The links to .com domain from the .co.uk domain, are they nofollow? What kind of anchor do these links have?

Note that if you have .com domain that is geo-targeted to UK and .co.uk domain, these two domains will compete with each other. There is a remote possibility that Google just decided to filter one out.

Now if I try to visit a link such as mydomain.com/product-id=4939, it forwards me to the homepage but mydomain.com/product-id=4939 is still in the address bar.

This would happen if you are returining HTTP 404 (Not Found) and sending home page HTML alongside the response. Have you checked what HTTP response you get for these old URLs?

[onlinesource]

@jimbeetle. I say Penguine 2 because right after the drop I had read an article that said something like "Google released the installment of Penguin 2 today". It just so happened to be on the same day we dropped. Actually, Matt Cutt's blog was flooded by outraged people who saw a drop... right around the time we did. I just believe our drop is related to these changes by Google.

@aakk9999

As far as the timing of the drop in Google vs. the day the server going down, I felt it was odd at the time but it just may be inconsequential.

[i44.tinypic.com...]

The date the server crashed was July 11th. I know I still have the text I sent to my partner, the night my site went down. Reading them now, my hosting company claimed that the "the rack was bad". We were not "hit" or "attacked" and I remember thinking that was good news. You see, we had been getting "hit" for about a year prior from somebody trying to crash the server. Often it just takes us having to reboot the server, but this was a rack issue (at the time).

As far as Anlytics go when I run an "overview" from July 9th to July 12th, I see on the 9th we had 879 visitors, the 10th 716 , the 11th 409, and the 12th 372. It just kept going down and down from that point on as we continued to loose keyword power. Now I can't pinpoint a time with Analytics so I don't know if the drop happened right when it crashed... but I remember I telling my partner, "looks like the site is back up" and his response was "nobody is on the site" and later "I just checked Google and we are nowhere for "fake widgets"". I know it is odd that the site would go down and we could crash, but sites deal with possible outages all the time.

As far as impressions go, on 7/9 we had 150 impressions for "fake widgets". On 7/10 90, 7/11, 30 7/12 30, 7/13 12, 7/14 16 (had gone up?), 7/15 12... I could go on and on. It looks like on 8/1 we had 12 impressions for "fake widgets" and then... 5 which resulted in 0 clicks. In fact, the 8/1 was the last day we got any clicks for the keyword.

I hope this isn't all rambling and actually can help make sense of my issue.

As far as co.uk goes, I mean yes it is unique content. It is a shopping cart like amazon.ca or amazon.com that sells a lot of same products. Although I have a lot of unique articles on co.uk and such, there is some content that may match. As far as links, there is nothing on the co.uk site now pointing to the .com site (there was in the past, which is why I feel that the .co.uk site might be the issue). As far as matching content, it is my understanding that when sites are hosted on separate DOMAINS they are therefore not considered duplicate content.

As far as redirects... it is a bit of mess. I think my shopping cart requires special coding to make this work and I am having a big of a headache trying to figure this out. Basically in the htacess file, if I create a 301 redirect line, it sends people to the new url but it adds ?sef_rewrite=1 to the end of the url. Very weird. I'm trying to get the developer to make sense of it. In the meantime, I have 189 not found errors. Like I said, these are mainly odd generated urls that are now SEO friendly urls but the cart can not make sense of a simple 301 line.

[JD_Toims]

Based on personal experience [I had a site not get auto renewed and make it to the redemption period before I noticed (28+ days) but it came back within a week of renewing it.] I would say the "downtime" was not the issue, because even if the site didn't show in the results for a week or two due to downtime it should have been back not too long after it was back up.

As far as Anlytics go when I run an "overview" from July 9th to July 12th, I see on the 9th we had 879 visitors, the 10th 716 , the 11th 409, and the 12th 372.

This is also not an "Oh, our server went down" drop pattern -- If a site's server goes down and it gets dropped then re-indexed the visitor pattern should go the other way. Meaning it should go from 0 and continue up, not slowly drop.

That being said, the SEO company that we have hired - to be completely honest - has never sent us any reports as to what they have done (a list of lists of sites they posted to, a list of backlinks they created, etc) over the years. I've always asked for reports and they were promised, but they remain very secretive about exactly what they do. Maybe they were secretly submitting blackhat SEO (possibly?) but I really believe that most companies won't give away the secrets to their trade.

-- Best guess after skimming through the long messages in this thread: the preceding bit you in the A** with Penguin 2.0 and any type of duplication [to be non-duplicate 85% or so unique is the last % I remember hearing] on the .co.uk domain probably didn't help, because duplicate content is duplicate content and I'm not sure who said it wasn't considered a duplicate on a separate domain, but they're incorrect.

[jimbeetle]

@jimbeetle. I say Penguine 2 because right after the drop I had read an article that said something like "Google released the installment of Penguin 2 today". It just so happened to be on the same day we dropped. Actually, Matt Cutt's blog was flooded by outraged people who saw a drop... right around the time we did. I just believe our drop is related to these changes by Google.

Okay, but just attributing something to what might be coincidence is not the way to analyze a cause.

That said, considering you've been buying SEO services for the site, it's likely -- though not positive -- that it is Penguin-related, as one of the easiest SEO "services" is getting a bunch of spammy backlinks for a site. So, the first step should be to check your backlink profile for any "unnatural" links your SEO companies built for you.

[onlinesource]

-- Best guess after skimming through the long messages in this thread: the preceding bit you in the A** with Penguin 2.0 and any type of duplication [to be non-duplicate 85% or so unique is the last % I remember hearing] on the .co.uk domain probably didn't help, because duplicate content is duplicate content and I'm not sure who said it wasn't considered a duplicate on a separate domain, but they're incorrect.

I would like to get a straight answer to this. I plan on upgrading my shopping cart which will use this new system that allows me to control multiple storefronts under one admin. So this way, customers will see my .com and co.uk site but I have one admin to view orders, etc. The way the cart works is, you create categories and products and say, "O.K., co.uk can sell THIS product but not THAT product". Sometimes you have two carts selling the same product which to me means the same description, same price, etc. I don't see how this is not duplicate content but the cart developer assumes me it isn't.

I have noticed that both Amazon's UK site and Amazon's Canada site are hosted in Seattle, Washington... Most than likely they host all their domains on the same server and not in each country. Still, for instance the product "Grand Theft Auto V Limited Edition Guide" is on both the .com and .ca site and both use the same product description and the "frequently bought together" part matches too. The URL "/grand-Theft-Limited-Edition-Strategy/dp/0744014956" also matches for both domains. The product reviews are different, which could make it unique.

Again, I hear conflicting things on this. The cart says, "it's fine, don't worry". Others tell me to freak out! :)

[onlinesource]

That said, considering you've been buying SEO services for the site, it's likely -- though not positive -- that it is Penguin-related, as one of the easiest SEO "services" is getting a bunch of spammy backlinks for a site. So, the first step should be to check your backlink profile for any "unnatural" links your SEO companies built for you.

Thanks man. Again to recap, I've had this domain for almost 6 years now. Fact is, we did not rank overnight.. it took time. In the beginning, when the process was frustrating I remember my partner saying something to me like, "hey, I found this guy online... 100 backlinks for $20" I think he signed up for it. At the time, we were both clueless. Again, we began to rank... so neither of us had any clue that those links could have been damaging someday.

Somebody wrote me here and was kind enough to point out AwStats in CPANEL and I got a list of referring links. We have a ton of .ru links that I believe Google sees as spammy links. Not sure why the manual action feature in Webmaster Tools doesn't pull this up (it could be why my SEO guy has ignored them). If links are not reported as "manual actions", should I just assume they may look bad but aren't bad? Or would I be wise to remove all links that appear to be on russian servers or even adult sites? How can I tell what backlinks hurt or help me? What is strange is, I'm checking some of these now and don't see our links.

*** Now I have to explain to my girlfriend that my browsing history is all work related. haha ***

[jimbeetle]

If links are not reported as "manual actions", should I just assume they may look bad but aren't bad?

"Manual actions" can be related to unnatural links, but Penguin is algorithmic, so no notice will show in Webmaster tools.

How can I tell what backlinks hurt or help me?

Any spammy links built by your SEO companies should be easy to spot. You can eyeball them or use a tool such as the Boykin boy's handy-dandy backlink checker tool for Penguin and disavow analysis [backlinks.webmasterworld.com]. It's not the be all and end all, but it's a pretty good place to start.

Of course, the above is based on the assumption you determine it is a Penguin problem.

[mboydnv]

RE: onlinesourece

I have been suffering like you. After reading your post I checked my awstats and found lots of crappy .ru referrers. I go to check the pages and our link is nowhere, yet I discover an url in our wordpress db to a russian website. This is stressful. We've lost lots of traffic lately. Thank you for pointing this out.

[onlinesource]

Any spammy links built by your SEO companies should be easy to spot. You can eyeball them or use a tool such as the Boykin boy's handy-dandy backlink checker tool for Penguin and disavow analysis [backlinks.webmasterworld.com]. It's not the be all and end all, but it's a pretty good place to start.

Of course, the above is based on the assumption you determine it is a Penguin problem.

Thanks. I just checked this out and ran a report. Not sure how to make sense of it. I see where it sees the contact the developer and have them work with you in submitting disavow links to Google. Has anybody else taken them up on this? Wasn't sure who you contacted? I went to their and it had a form to fill out with a minimum budget of $5K. Hope that isn't what they charge to report disavow links.

[onlinesource]

I have been suffering like you. After reading your post I checked my awstats and found lots of crappy .ru referrers. I go to check the pages and our link is nowhere, yet I discover an url in our wordpress db to a russian website. This is stressful. We've lost lots of traffic lately. Thank you for pointing this out.

The more I research my problem, the more I realize that I'm not alone. I have list of .ru links but I really don't know if they are hurting or helping, so I'm sort of stuck at a crossroads. Some of these appear to be spammy links though. For instance, I have a Russian site about cement with links to "fake widgets". :)

[mboydnv]

I'm not taking any chances. Seems that country is notorious for hacking wordpress sites. So I put a referrer block for starters in the htaccess. I ran the bad links check and disavowed a few who's domains link out to payday loans etc. Most of the 200 + domains that i have (had) links on are bad domains now or the links are gone etc..I have a lot of work to do...this sucks

[jimbeetle]

I just checked this out and ran a report. Not sure how to make sense of it.

Did you watch the tutorials?

[Planet13]

You can submit a disavow file yourself to google. No need to drop five large to do it.

Before you start developing any new shopping cart (or splitting it off into two or what not), you really need to get things figured out.

- There are several free tools out there to help you find your backlinks.

- There are several free resources out there on what a BAD backlink is (in google's eyes).

- As pointed out above, you could have a Penguin demotion / affliction without a notification in your webmaster tools of a manual penalty.

The best thing I can recommend is look closely at your google analytics for google ORGANIC traffic and see if you saw significant drops (25% or more) in traffic from google on:

April 24, 2012

May 9th, 2013

May 22nd, 2013

(Note: May 9th is not an OFFICIAL Penguin update, but it seems that many people who were hit by Penguin 2 on May 22nd, 2013 were also hit by the May 9th update).

~~~

Also, you need to get as much previous work from your SEO company documented. If they built links - maybe they did, maybe they didn't - you should get as much info as you can about what, where, and when they did it.

In my opinion, until you get this straightened out, you should avoid putting any more serious resources into your site. You need to figure out what is wrong FIRST before you can fix it.

Just my opinion.

[Planet13]

"Most of the 200 + domains that i have (had) links on are bad domains now or the links are gone etc..I have a lot of work to do...this sucks"

In the interests of saving you time and money, do you know what a bad link "looks" like?

there are several discussions on webmasterworld about good or bad links, or certain types of links.

I would first try and educate myself about what types of links are verboten BEFORE spending significant amounts of time, energy, or dinero on trying to disavow them.

Hope this helps.

[onlinesource]

Did you watch the tutorials?

I did. It sort of leaves me more confused. :) They basically say, "well this feature will show is the site is reported for this... if it is, it could be bad. Then again, maybe not". Ohhhhh k.

I know this tool isn't the be all to end all, but I'm way to nervous to submit links to Google and disavow them based upon the reporting.

The other thing that makes no sense is, the report shows links that are 302 Redirected Backlinks, Possible Host Error Backlinks, etc. So basically it's scanning through a list of sites that link to me and telling me if the site is down, etc. What about packages that are up and live on the web with links to my site? I'm confused how a link on a dead url does any good or bad? Maybe I missed that part of the video.

I reached out to the Internet Marketing Ninjas for a bit more help.

Part of me looks at these sites and wonders what bad it would do to disavow them. Almost all of them have "pay day loan" links associated with them, which I thought was my answer to them being no good, but again the video says "Wait, they could be good". Now, I'm just more confused. :)

[JD_Toims]

...the report shows links that are 302 Redirected Backlinks

That doesn't sound promising, especially if you didn't put the 302s in place.

[onlinesource]

That doesn't sound promising, especially if you did not put the 302s in place.

No, it doesn't. When I run my report, some of the links seem to be potentially bad but some are like flickr or justanswer. Legit sites. Some of the sites in the list are down (This Account Has Been Suspended) or the page the link was on has moved.

[jimbeetle]

I'm way to nervous to submit links to Google and disavow them based upon the reporting.

Good, you should be nervous, this really isn't something for someone not familiar with the ins and outs of search and Google even warns that the disavow tool might be dangerous in the hands of the wrong people.

But, while you're pursuing the possibility of a Penguin hit don't discount anything else. Dive head first into your analytics and tease every last bit of info out of it that you can. Then, when you're done, you'll be able to make a more educated guess as to what actually affected the site.

[mboydnv]

hmmm.. My thinking is very old school. You must be able to see your link on the page of the domain that is linking to your site. If you can't find the page, it's gone. (not sure why google still counts it though in WMT).

Also, if their domain links out to payday loans, that can't be good unless that is your niche.

Our company has 287 domains that link to us. according to the report 9 are live. those 9 are also in the same niche. It was the bitterest pill to swallow.

We are just gonna go get new domains that are in our niche and get links. The others we will disavow more than likely beginning early winter.

[Planet13]

"You must be able to see your link on the page of the domain that is linking to your site. If you can't find the page, it's gone. (not sure why google still counts it though in WMT)."

No, it could be cloaked. It might be hidden from people using a browser, but visible to googlebot.

they could also be in "random" text widgets. For instance, certain blogs might post random blog comments. It may be the time that googlebot swung by a page, they were displaying a blog comment with a link to your site. when you went by to take a look, they weren't displaying that same comment.

"We are just gonna go get new domains that are in our niche and get links."

Are these good sites or bad sites?

If you get links from bad sites, then you are just setting yourself up for a penalty / Penguin demotion.