In light of the recent search engine algorithm changes I’ve decided against using social link communities for my main sites and I suggest you be careful using it as well.
From an SEO standpoint you may be inadvertently causing harm to your site that won’t be evident until it’s too late.
Let me be clear on something. I think these communities are technically a great tool which accomplishes exactly what they advertise – viral auto-syndication of content over social media.
But a few points I’ve noted from my experience using these types of services caused me concern and I’d like to share my thoughts with you today.
My 2 main problems are… Quality and Velocity, or lack thereof.
Use of these tools generate large quantities of low quality backlinks. It’s true. The PR on 99.9% of those pages is 0. Further, the links are grouped together with unrelated content on social profiles that are essentially “spam” accounts (accounts that contain mostly auto-posted content).
Even if you were getting the auto-syndication love on the coveted Facebook and Twitter accounts (you’re probably not, AND we don’t care about the less popular ones as much anyway) those accounts would be blasted with the content of everyone else that person is auto-syndicating. That person’s “friends” are getting blasted all day long with auto-syndicated content, do you really want your quality content (you ARE making unique, high-quality content, right?) thrown around like a cheap ragdoll?
Remember, search engines don’t like automated link building because they consider it clutter…and they definitely don’t like automated link spamming to content farms (we’ll get into Panda in a second).
But that’s just a part of the problem. The other area that concerns me is the spike and resulting drop in link velocity looks suspect. Think about a piece of viral content such as the leak of the new Beastie Boys album. Yes, it instantly got tons of traffic from social media (a good thing), but that trend continued the next day, and the day after that, etc.
This trend is not the case when using these tools. You get a one-time push of a large number of links, then nothing. Doesn’t it make sense that search engine algorithms are clever enough to see through this “trick” and make a note accordingly (penalty, red flag, no credit for the links, etc)? Hint: They are!
If one were using this strategy for SEO, I’d say it’s part of a “bigger picture” and there are better ways. If one were using it to increase traffic I’d suggest checking analytics data and evaluating the quantity/quality of traffic and how well it converts. I’d rather have 10 “buyers” visiting my site everyday rather than 100 “browsers”.
So What does a Panda have to do with all of this?
The Panda/Farmer update was an algorithm change that Google put out earlier this year which affected about 12% of all US searches and heavily penalized content farms, splogs, article directories and other sources of duplicate/low quality content.
My immediate concern is that Panda 2 was recently released and it’s currently making it’s way around the web. The problem is, we won’t know the extent of the changes for at least 45-60 days because we’ll need to wait for the rollout to finish AND the search engines to reindex/recategorize the entire web. Then we’ll be able to assess the damage, but by then it could be too late.
I take my SEO seriously and I’m sticking to the tried and true methods I’ve been using for years. I’ve actually released an info course called SEO Domination, which you can see here, that explains the process I personally use (and is updated for the latest Panda update).
If you recently started practicing automated link building, I’d urge you to proceed with caution, especially on your money site, until Panda is complete and everything’s reindexed and analyzed by the SEO community. Then, research the results and proceed with caution. The site you save could be your own.
