Links from other industries

[guggi2000]

Hi,

we have an EDUCATIONAL site and started to create a project where we collaborate with PHOTOGRAPHY bloggers. Basically, we use the photos of these photography bloggers and create new educational content based on these images.

Many bloggers like the idea, participate in the project and link to us from their relevant posts. The purpose is to enhance services for their users and for our users. So far, win-win...

Now Google may pick up those links and think that we are link building. The problem is that while some of the bloggers are great photographers they are not the best marketers/webmasters. That means that we are getting links from photography sites, although we are in education, and some of these blogger domains have a DA of less than 20 or a PR of 1 or 2.

We get about 5-10 links per week, some from DA-30 some from DA-10.

Do you think this could be a problem?

Thanks!

[aristotle]

Can't really give a "probably yes" or "probably no" answer based on the information you've provided. So here are a few questions:

1. Do the backlinks from the blogs point to the same page on your site, or to different pages?

2. Do the backlinks from the blogs all have the same or very similar anchor text?

3. Are the backlinks from the blogs dofollow links, nofollow links, or some mixture?

As a general rule, the more variety among a site's backlinks, the more likely they are to help rankings, and the less likely to cause a penalty. This would be variety in anchor text, dofollow or nofollow, coming from different types of sites, and pointing to different pages on your site.

One trick you might consider is to slowly adjust some of the content of your site to better match the content of the pages that have the backlinks. I don't mean major revisions, but just adding a sentence or two here or there.

[guggi2000]

Thanks for the quick reply.
Here more info:

1. We have over 1000 domains pointing to us for more than 9 years. But in the NEW photography project all links are to the same URL (around 50 links), except that every blogger uses different query parameters (to load his photos automatically).

2. all different anchor text

3. I guess most are follow links, I never asked for a no-follow.

Regarding adjusting content: The linked pages have a lot of keywords about photography, but I cannot adjust the overall content at this stage. We are still in the education business.

[aristotle]

If you already have backlinks from more than 1000 domains, and they have a lot of variation in anchor text and other properties, then these new backlinks shouldn't cause any problems.

Also, since you said that these new backlinks all point to the same page on your site, I think you should consider including some content on that page that relates to photography, perhaps a brief description of the project.

Another thing you might consider is how tightly you should interlink this page with the older pages on your site, or in other words, how you incorporate it into the overall site structure.

[martinibuster]

...and some of these blogger domains have a DA of...

Whoa...let's slow down for a moment and discuss metrics. Domain Authority is not a ranking metric in use by any search engine. As far as I recall, there are no search engine scientific papers, research papers or patents that mention anything like "domain authority" so that's a metric that's no where near anything in use by the search engines. Part of the DA score is based on MozTrust, which uses a methodology (seed set based TrustRank) that was disproved about six or seven years ago and superseded with better algorithms. MozTrust, an element of DA, follows a similar methodology as TrustRank, a method that has been shown by researchers to be biased and untrustworthy for identifying spam sites.

I just did a quick Google search on what search engine patent expert Bill Slawski has said about this and here is his opinion: [seobythesea.com]

Domain authority and Page Authority... are not ranking signals developed by any of the search engines. They were created by Moz as a convenient tool for people to use to try to gauge how easy or difficult it might be to rank a page, but they are not ranking signals that can be used by search engines. It doesn’t matter whether or not there is discussion on blogs about author rank, domain authority, or page authority. Those blogs don’t determine how Google will rank pages.

If you must use a tool, then check out Majestic's Topical Trust Flow. That tool offers a snapshot of what niches a site's backlinks are coming from. There's a numerical score offered as well which corresponds to how "trustworthy" those backlinks are. I'm not sure how accurate those are, but there have been scientific research studies that proved that by dividing a seed set into topical buckets then calculating trust metrics in that manner resulted in a result that was as high as about 43% better than regular TrustRank calculations. Regardless, one of the most important metrics of all is Relevance and Majestic's Topical Trust Flow delivers that in an easy to see graphical representation.

All of the search engines have been working to improve the relevance part of the link signal. From the feedback I have received from web workers who hammer links by the ton, the relevance factor (and non-spamminess factor) is increasingly important, which may be different according to how competitive a phrase is. So if Relevance is important then any tool that shows you that will be useful in making a more informed decision. It's been my experience that relevance is important.

Here's an article on SearchEngineWatch about Topical Trust Flow [searchenginewatch.com] that goes into detail.

Getting back to your question, I believe irrelevant links are of limited usefulness. Relevance has been an important goal for all the search engines and improving the link signal to reflect relevance has been a priority for a long, long time. So it follows that a focus on relevance is of importance for link cultivation & acquisition purposes. It is my experience that relevance is important.

[edited by: martinibuster at 3:25 pm (utc) on Feb 3, 2015]

[guggi2000]

@martinibuster Thanks for the input about DA. You are 100% right. I tried to simplify by not going into the details. I am still looking at PR, DA, Flows and even Twitter followers to determine good bloggers and usually there is some correlation. But the technique is a different topic.

Back to the main issue about cross-industry links:

@martinibuster You say "irrelevant" but are links from other vertical markets really irrelevant?

I.e. a known photographer with a cool website (PR-5, DA-45, fresh content) is sponsoring an educational topic with animal images for kids and linking to our project page from his inner page.

Won't that help? Or may that hurt if done 100 times with various photographers?

@aristotle Our project page is talking about photography and education. We are considering creating several pages, like animals, nature, buildings, etc...

[martinibuster]

Won't that help?

If it did help would you be asking that question in the first place. ;)

As far back as 2003/2004, one of Google's excecutives and engineers, Marissa Mayer stated at a SES San Jose, in response to my question, that a web design "powered by" credit on a fictional university widget department web page will not pass PageRank (or at best partial depreciated PR) because widgets was irrelevant to web designing. The interesting part was that she stated that as a fact, that PR was being depreciated way back then and that the depreciation was based on relevance. That was over ten years ago. How far do you think Google has come along in the use of Relevance as a factor?

Relevance isn't the only factor. The link signal, the way I understand it is for determining authority and relevance. Authority pertains to spamminess (may be discarded from the link graph for ranking purposes) and authority is useful for passing PageRank (included in the link graph for calculating ranking and relevance). Relevance in my opinion is for ranking purposes.

I responded to Marissa Mayer by asking if the web designer is relevant to the dot edu web page about widgets because the designer created the page. She responded to me that it is not related because one topic (web design) does not have relevance to the other topic (the fictional widget topic of the university department web page).

[edited by: martinibuster at 3:49 pm (utc) on Feb 3, 2015]

[aristotle]

What about my question of how tightly should you integrate this project page into the overall internal link structure of your site. I think this is something that needs to be included in the considerations.

[guggi2000]

@aristotle What we are trying to gain by this project is:
1. More direct traffic
2. Maybe coverage by other educational sites
3. More "link juice" for the entire domain

We do NOT expect any organic traffic on the project page and we are not SE optimizing these inner project pages at all. However, we do link to the project pages from our homepage, because it is a fun project. We do not interlink it at this stage from other pages.

It should be a landing page for direct traffic and bring the "link juice" for the entire domain.

[aristotle]

guggi2000 --
I think it can be useful to draw a vector diagram to represent the general internal linking structure of a site. It helps to understand how different parts fit together, and how the "link juice" flows within the site. If you have a page or section that doesn't seem to fit in very well, it might confuse the search engine ranking algorithms.

Also, you said that you want the link juice that this page receives from outside to flow to the rest of the site. In order for this to happen, you have to internally link from this page to some other pages on the site.

[Planet13]

I think that google will probably sort it out and realize that you have one page (or area) of your site directly related to photography education and will rank that page according to its own merits regarding that subject.

I think you are probably over-thinking it.

However, if you are getting lots of NEW links, and they seem to be outside of your niche, maybe it would be a good idea to keep both eyes out for SPAM links as well?

Obviously, I have no insider knowledge, but maybe if you are getting a lot of deserved links from unusual suspects, possibly spam links will have an increased negative potential?

Purposely worded vaguely because I don't think anyone knows.

[netmeg]

We do NOT expect any organic traffic on the project page

BAM! That would rule it out for me right there.

[aristotle]

In my opinion a good site is built around one central subject or theme, and all of the pages reinforce each other.

If you try to juxtapose two pieces of unrelated or poorly -related content together on the same site, you need to think very carefully about how you fit them together, especially with regard to internal linking. Otherwise Google's algorithm could be confused about the purpose of the site and put less value on both parts of it than it would otherwise have given them separately. Thus in this case, adding the new unrelated content could potentially reduce the organic traffic that the older part of the site already enjoys. This is why you need to be careful.

[guggi2000]

@netmeg BAM in which sense, negative or positive? Why should I expect organic traffic for a photography project if I am in education? All I am asking is if cross-linking will hurt or may give benefit through link juice. There is no hidden agenda here. Yes, we do get DIRECT traffic and the landing page obviously has the regular navigation

@aristotle Sure. The page is linking out with the regular menu. But there are not to many links into the page, as it is not the main subject.

Let me put an example:
Think of an organic beverage producer in the United States who happens to do a project in Mexico to help farmers grow organic plants. The project gets attention and many links from farmers, agriculture or tourism offices in Mexico, maybe even from Spanish sites.
Now, will the beverage producer place internal links all over his site to the Mexico farmer project? Probably not, but the inner project pages will probably link out to the homepage and other important pages.

The question is whether the website of this producer is at risk? I assume that a link from the offical agriculture site of Mexico would not hurt but what about the medium farmer sites?

I hope that clarifies.

@Planet13 Yes, probably over-thinking it. But better safe than sorry :-)

[aristotle]

guggi2000
Have you considered putting noindex, follow tags on these new pages? The noindex could keep them from being considered part of the site's content, but the link juice would still be captured and re-distributed within the site.

[guggi2000]

@aristotle Excellent thought about no-index, I didn't know that link juice is captured on no-index pages. However, I am not concerned about the content on our site or about these pages in particular, because having 10 pages out of several thousands that are a little bit off-topic won't hurt in my opinion.

I am really just concerned about the links being regarded as low quality. I am trying to choose photographers based on their websites' quality instead of the actual photographic skills. It is just sad!

[netmeg]

@netmeg BAM in which sense, negative or positive? Why should I expect organic traffic for a photography project if I am in education?

Negative. Unless there's a clear benefit for the users (not for you, not for the photographers, the USERS), I for one wouldn't touch it.

Are you an .edu?

[guggi2000]

@netmeg Quote from our first question: "The purpose is to enhance services for their users and for our users."

However, we do like more direct traffic, some marketing "buzz", "freshness", "link juice", etc. There is nothing wrong with marketing good content and asking for links.

Our only concern is what we asked in the first place:
Will receiving links from PR0 to PR3 sites from other industries hurt? What are your thoughts about limits, percentage, etc... Shall we skip the low ones? Are we over-thinking it? Is Google good enough to recognize good vs bad?

@aristotle You named diversity. We will ask for some no-follow. Great input!

@netmeg We are not .edu ourselves

[Yellow_Sun]

Just my two cents....

will probably hurt more than help if accepting all links.

skip the low ones if you can.

probably not over-thinking it, especially if this pays your bills.

in general, a majority of the time google recognizes good vs. bad.

Accept the links from the most trusted sites, the most reputable photographers, etc., with a mixture of anchor text. Don't accept, or no-follow, if possible the low quality sites, spamming sites, etc. If your overall site's rankings improve than it's probably helping your site, depending what else you're doing to the site at the time. If overall rankings start dropping then you probably should rethink what you are doing. Not sure what this page looks like, but as a test, you probably could interlink to another inter-page (which ever page makes sense) and see what happens to the inter-page's ranking..... but take this all with a grain of salt.

[RedBar]

in general, a majority of the time google recognizes good vs. bad.

Really? They haven't a frigging clue!

[Robert Charlton]

Just a thought as I read the first post, if I understand correctly, that it may well be that some of the photographers think they're SEOs, and they might end up spamming those project pages, perhaps even thinking they are "helping" when they link multiple times to their own material. This is a problem with UGC sites where participants might also be stakeholders.

I don't believe there's a way, aside from disavow, for you to "moderate" inbound links by choosing whether or not to "accept" them... but I think you need to reach an understanding with all participants. I'll bet you may want to get some links removed.

Perhaps I'm not following your description of the project, but I don't see how the motivations are structured to help your site or users.

[Planet13]

I have no idea what you want...

Do you want users to actually visit these pages and enjoy them?

Or do you not want / not care if visitors come to these pages?

Do you really ONLY want to get some SEO benefit from the links spreading link juice to the REST OF YOUR SITE while avoiding any SEO pitfalls (and really don't care about visitors)?

[guggi2000]

@Planet13 Please look at my previous posts. I care about my services, visitors, direct traffic and "marketing buzz". I do not care about organic traffic to THESE project pages. However, increasing the overall domain strength is something every marketer has to keep in mind. So, yes, I do want the links and I do want link juice and I do want to be covered by educational news sites, buzz, etc. Why not?

The only reason "why not" is that Google may MISINTERPRET a sudden rise in links from OTHER industries and hurt us.

in general, a majority of the time google recognizes good vs. bad.

Really? They haven't a frigging clue!

@RedBar Maybe. But this is exactly the reason why I started this thread.

Think of this crazy example:
A DJ is getting links from private mid-quality kindergarten websites, because he is doing a music workshop for poor children. That is a nice thing in REAL LIFE, but bad for SEO because of CROSS-Industry links? Really?

[goodroi]

If this is legitimate and you are gaining real usage from it then you are probably fine. To me this seems too easy to turn into manipulation which Google does not like. Even if manipulation is not your intended goal you might accidentally trigger a false positive on their spam filters I would try to adjust your tactic to minimize the chance of accidentally triggering a spam filter.

[netmeg]

Google isn't going to know your intent. So if you send off the same signals that spammers use, you're going to look like a spammer.

[guggi2000]

@goodroi @netmeg 100% right. This is why I am asking you guys.

On the good side I can tell that the project landing page has a 10% bounce rate for direct traffic and an average of 7 page views per visitor during 2.5 minutes. If Google would pick that up, we'd be on the safe side.

[guggi2000]

To summarize from all responses:
- Diversify exactly as you would do with links from the same industry
- be extra sensitive with links from small websites, raise your threshold

[Planet13]

Whatever happened to just create compelling content that users are going to like?

[n0tSEO]

Honestly, if the collaboration gives fruit in terms of user satisfaction and quality of service, why not?

I understand wanting to please the search engine, but think of your users first. :)

[guggi2000]

@Planet13 @n0tSEO User satisfaction and compelling content proven in this project.

So why not? As @RedBar and @netmeg said, Google hasn't a clue about my intention and a sudden rise in PR1 or PR2 backlinks may raise a false alarm.

I will have to raise the threshold of who I partner with based on their website marketing skill's instead of their artistic skills. Sad but true.