Every month or so, we get a question from a student about whether we can recommend using the “SEO Smart Links” plugin for WordPress. The answer is always no, because the way it works inevitably creates a terrible user experience. Well, now we’ve got evidence that it can do far worse than that.
After reviewing the evidence, I am convinced that using SEO Smart Links can get you penalized by Google. This does not mean that using this plugin will instantly cause a penalty, but the way we see most people using it is extremely risky.
What is SEO Smart Links? Well, this plugin’s intended purpose is to improve ranking, by automatically linking every occurence of a keyword or phrase within your WordPress site, to a target URL that you’re hoping to get ranked.
There are undoubtedly some “smart” ways to use this plugin. I can think of several – like automatically linking a call to action (“click here to sign up”). However, right-out-of-the-box, it is one heck of a dangerous tool. Out of the box, in the free version, it doesn’t even limit the number of links it creates on a page.
Imagine what it would look like if every occurrence of “SEO” in this post were linked to our home page, or to some doorway page. To make it easy for you, I linked a bunch of SEOs (to href=”#”) already. Now imagine if we also wanted to rank some different pages for keywords that included words like [Wordpress], [plugin], [penalized], [user experience], [keyword], [ranking], [google], etc. etc. Half of the sentences in this post might contain links!
Imagine if we actually thought that would be a good idea.
If we did, we’d install this plugin, keyword-stuff all of our posts to get more links in, and add as many keywords as possible to the plugin’s list…
Which would make our posts harder to read, and much less useful. It would, in short, reduce the quality of our web site. It might even cause us to violate Google’s “quality guidelines” for web sites.
As happened to a friend of a friend, whose rankings went deep into the well of despair shortly after installing and beginning to use SEO Smart Links. Since there hadn’t been any other changes to the site, he took a flyer on a reconsideration request and discovered that yes, indeed, there had been a penalty:
So, what had this site owner done to merit a successful reconsideration request? Simple – he removed the SEO Smart Links plugin and apologized for using it in the first place. Let me run the sequence of events by you again…
- Site owner installs SEO Smart Links Plugin and begins keyword-link-stuffing his pages automatically.
- Google manually penalizes the site for violating their quality guidelines.
- Site owner removes SEO Smart Links Plugin, apologizes, and asks Google to reconsider the penalty.
- Google sees that the plugin is gone, and removes the penalty.
The only part of this story that should surprise you, is that a human at Google responded and removed the penalty as quickly as they did.
Everything else should come as no surprise whatsoever. It doesn’t matter if you agree with what Google did, in applying the penalty. It only matters that you understand why they would apply a penalty.
Of course, it might also be worth taking a look at any sites you’re working on. Consider whether you might be stuffing keyword links in where they don’t make sense for users, and if you are, ponder the likelihood of losing the “Google lottery” by “winning” a manual penalty.
Most penalties do not come with a “warning” in Webmaster Tools. They just happen. When they do, it’s up to you to figure out what you did, clean it up, and ask for forgiveness.
The “Penguin anti-webspam algorithm update” doesn’t come with a warning either, but if it’s *not* looking for the same kind of quality issues that the humans do, I’d be surprised.
Although asking for comments is so annoyingly clichéd at this point, please do let us know if you have used SEO Smart Links or something similar, and if so – have you lost traffic from Google recently?
If you are using this plugin, my advice is to stop using it right now, unless you are dead certain about what you are doing.
Thanks!
Dan
Dan, appreciate your article. I haven’t used this plugin before, but it’s a good reminder to consider the wider impact of a plugin before downloading. So often, I think WordPress admins get trigger-happy with plugins that “seem like a good idea,” have high ratings, or whatnot.
I agree that SEO Smart Links could be used well in some cases, but there are so many tools out there that have been exploited and consequently given a bad name.
They need to make some modifications to it and it will be safe like limitation for links on 1 page.
Yes I agree, you really need to be careful with any automation. What used to be a great way to help you speed up some mundane tasks could now potentially cause you problems.
I installed this a while ago, a couple of years I guess. I removed it after realizing that the links were sometimes not so smart after all. I spotted links in headers and even on one occasion a weird link within a link! I had linked up a short sentence, maybe 4-5 words, and 2 words in the middle were automatically linked with smart links. Made a right mess.
There is another wordpress plugin that displays “related” articles from other blogs below the articles, I suspect that this is also on the hitlist.
@Jon – I think you’re referring to Zemanta. They didn’t work for me, but SEO-wise it seems to me that since you can choose the link based on your own preference and relevance, Google would still see that as editorial.
I’ve used a similar plugin for about 3 yrs now without any problems. Like anything, I think it depends on the situation and how the plugin’s settings were configured. The plugin I use, for instance, allows me to specify how many times on a page the keyword(s) should be linked. In most cases, one instance is just fine, but it’s a setting you have to add yourself; the default setting is every occurrence.
In your example, I’d be willing to be that the user let every instance of the keyword get auto-linked to the destination page. Not too surprised about the result if that was the case.
A lot of plugins can get yours site penalized unfortunately. With more posts like this one, hopefully some site owners can avoid getting in trouble.
@Cory, Over at the High Rankings forum, one of the folks working on the site figured out that they could use the “profanity filter” in the software to automatically link certain phrases, so all the moderators had to do was say “read the FAQ” and it would automatically be linked to the FAQ page. That’s brilliant, and a tool like this can make that kind of stuff easy.
Where people get into trouble, as you say, is when the thing runs wild. Like the example in @Jon’s comment there.
Good article. I’ve seen this on many sites and it is undoubtedly a dangerous tool if not filtered correctly. Another WordPress SEO plugin, SEO Ultimate does the same thing, they call it “Deeplink Juggernaut”. The difference between SEO Smart Links and Deeplink Juggernaut is that DJ has many filtering options and limiting rules that can be set to prevent just this. I’d like to share a portion of this post on SEO Friendly Forums (forum.seoproim.com) – is that ok?
-Thanks
Lucas G.
@Lucas, getting the word out is important, so feel free to quote a little piece. There are several plugins that do more or less the same stuff and they are all a bit dangerous.
SEO Smart Links has paid versions that allow you to limit and filter and all that. A whole lot of people use the free version which doesn’t limit the number of links, but even when the number of links is limited, it’s still very risky to play with if you don’t understand the implications.
This thing also has a feature in paid versions where it only keyword-link-stuffs older posts, which to me just screams of intent to spam, whenever Google gets a look at it.
That and site-wide links are the main culprits.
To be fair, there are any number of redirect, affiliate management, categorisation, syndication, etc plugins for WP that could mess up your rankings if you’re not careful – it’s not really fair to highlight one. If you take that out of the equation then;
Site owner begins keyword-link-stuffing his pages automatically.
Google manually penalizes the site for violating their quality guidelines.
Site owner removes [keyword-stuffing], apologizes, and asks Google to reconsider the penalty.
Google sees that the [keyword-stuffing] is gone, and removes the penalty.
Nothing new with that story.
The plugin works on the same basis as most related posts plugins – it just manages the output differently. In fact, I’d go as far to say as the practice of automatically linking content is absolutely fine and many legitimate sites do it well. The Guardian website automatically links terms to their equivalent of tag pages. Look here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/25/google-drive-dropbox-cloud-computing
Links to these pages;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/internet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/smartphones
Mashable also does the same and I’m sure we could find a load more examples. In fact, it’s actually a fairly common tactic in big site SEO where site architecture plays a large part in the success of the campaign.
I do get the point that perhaps the plugin can be a way you can get yourself penalised, but really, what’s more to blame in that situation – the plugin, or the webmaster who’s messing around with stuff without knowing what he’s doing?
Scott
@Scott, it’s a combination of the plugin, the webmaster, the way the plugin is promoted, and the way people are being told to use it. Watch some of the videos out there about it, read some of the blog posts – there’s a lot of “advice” on using it, that’s just very risky for webmasters to follow.
I highlighted this particular plugin because of a number of things.
Dan, your “proof” is not proof at all. The action taken of removing the plugin may not have had anything to do with why the rankings returned. It could have been a false positive, they could have done something else without noticing/realizing etc etc.
I’ve used SEO smart links on my sites for quite some time and have never had any problems. If you look at almost every wiki type site you’ll see the same type of linking and I’m constantly seeing those sites ranking well.
I agree you should limit the number of links it creates and not allow it to link in the header etc but I would expect more from a well known SEO than this kind of flimsy proof.
Ben, the first use of the word “proof” on this post is in your comment. We have enough evidence to be confident, beyond the one case where I had permission to share the message.
As I said in the post, which you say you agree with, it matters how you use it. It’s also worth noting that the stuff you mention doing requires purchasing a premium version of the plugin. 300,000 users, very few of them have that.
Dan,
I have used the free version on numerous sites, many of which are very high exposure and have regular visits from Google headquarters. What is important here is the arbitrary editorial style of Googlers that is the real problem, and the fact they let super well-known sites get away with more than the average small webmaster.
Even if a site had a million internal links, they are only as valuable as the total links into the site, so yes, if the guy had a high ranking site with hundreds of thuosands of pages, and dozens of links per page, then maybe yes, I could see this getting into trouble….with a Google Editorial Executioner who woke up on the wrong side of the bed that day 😉
Surely that would result in Wikipedia going getting penalised too?
Wikipedia doesn’t link every occurence of every word. Words are linked when they are relevant, normally only the first occurrence on a page is linked, and Wikipedia has a whole editorial process designed to keep it that way. And Wikipedia isn’t going to get a manual spam penalty, because they’re Wikipedia.
Just because you tell Google you made a specific change to your site doesn’t mean that’s why they removed the manual spam penalty. In response to my own assumption about whether specific changes I listed had any impact to getting a manual spam penalty removed, Matt Cutts said the following:
“When you submit a reconsideration request, if the webspam team has taken manual action in the past, we take another look at the site. We do that regardless of what you say in the the text of the reconsideration request. You could slip in “I was kidnapped by aliens, and the aliens said to do a reconsideration request” and we’d still take another look.”
The exact comment where he made this statement is here. Not trying to get a free link to that post, I’m trying to provide context, so feel free to delete it if that’s not appropriate.
Jake, I understand how the reconsideration process works, and I know better than to assume anything. We have enough evidence to be confident, beyond the one case where I had permission to share the message. If you’ve been following me for a while, then you know it takes a lot to convince me of anything. If I thought it was just a maybe hint of a slight possibility, I’d have posted that.
Keyword-link-stuffing is the issue here. Keyword-link-stuffing may be a new point of emphasis for Google, they may have new tools that make it easier for them to see keyword-link-stuffing, and/or they may simply have more humans to look at stuff, since “manual spam action” requires a trained human to take action.
If you look at the examples of “webspam” that have been shared around this Penguin thing, a lot of it is keyword-stuffing and keyword-link-stuffing. Google will always share the most egregious examples, because it serves their public relations interests, but this stuff never stops at some clear bright line, because there is no place to draw a line.
Don’t get me wrong – anything that convinces people to stop automating stupidity is a good thing. Hopefully this post will cause a few people to wise up.
As an anecdote to the Cutts repsonse above, just for fun I did submit, “I was kidnapped by aliens, and the aliens said to do a reconsideration request” as a reconsideration request on a domain that had no penalty. Google replied that there was no penalty on the domain.
LOL, Jake… next time try “I was kidnapped by Matt Cutts…”
I used a similar plugin on a drupal site once long ago. It took a more limited approach. It was a bit buggy though and I haven’t used it again.
Many of my sites have certain pages that are our key ranking targets. These pages are linked to from every page, in the sidebar, with links containing the anchor text we’d like those pages to rank for (albeit phrased naturally and usefully). Basically, its called navigation.
Excuse the silly question, but how is that different to the output of a plugin that pumps out the same anchor text links to the same target URLs? Is it because they’re contained within body copy?
Not trying to be facetious, I promise. Genuinely interested in the distinction.
Dave, I think that’d be the primary distinction, yes. Remember, a manual penalty means that a human being has decided that something is “bad.” I don’t know why a human being would have a problem with navigation that’s designed for human users.
Like i said in the post – imagine that we’d hyperlinked every keyword in every sentence. The post would be jammed full of links, and that kind of thing creates a terrible experience for users. Navigation is essential to a good user experience.
@Dan, I agree – dangerous tool. Adding links to older material, especially in quantity (anywhere – not just older content) is not healthy SEO practices. – Thanks for the great post! Next Tuesday SEO Friendly Forums is hosting a Hangout on Google+, we’d love for you, Leslie, or both to participate. Thanks again. – Lucas
Sounds like fun, Lucas – I sent you an email so we can sort it out there.
There is an easy way around that using what I call makers, see here : http://hospitalera.com/internal-linking/ In summary you tell the tool / plugin exactly what keyword / keyword phrase you want to be linked and most importantly which ones to ignore …
Yep – that method makes it a tool to insert the link you want, when you want to do it, and it just makes the process faster.
Good call Dan and tks very much. Never heard of this plugin but as usual, automated SEO just doesn’t work.
@Dan I am always against with the automation process like this. These process instead of help distract to visitors.
Hi, good article! I also don’t believe on automated SEO procedures. I’m always prefer the White Hat SEO methods…
A key point is also that Dan has always advised against it’s use… Dave Harry and myself have been doing likewise. It doesn’t take a rocket science or a white coat to know that just aint natural… or very user friendly because it is adding more Actions to the page which may dilute the action goals. Many reasons not to do this beyond the 2 toned bird or bear 😉
I have been using this plugin since 2008. I mainly use it to interlink between my content pages (+/-100 pages) on my website http://www.cometocapetown.com I have recently had some issues with rankings dancing around, and pages not appearing for their on page text (the latter which has recently been resolved) Would you advise removing this plugin? I am not using it to stuff keywords, just to interlink relevant content for user experience. Please let me know.
I didn’t look at every page on your site, but it looks like you’re barely using it, James. Which is more or less the right way to use it.
I’d look at organic referrals over time, particularly Google. Are you seeing big drops around any of the Panda updates, or around the most recent “Penguin” update? There’s some little stuff on the site that could be an issue, like missing images (Table Mountain page), but the usual culprit when the changes don’t line up neatly with a Google update is lost backlinks. Google has been dumping blog networks and a lot of other stuff they don’t like from the index, so if you used any of that, it could have an impact as well.
thanks Dan, would have been nice if this plugin could have been the “magic bullet” but I also doubted it. I am mostly using the plugin on these pages: http://www.cometocapetown.com/why-cape-town/ where it basically adds 2 or 3 relevant links to other content within the site. Thanks for the heads up on the missing Table Mountain images, that was part of a broken blog category which i have now removed, thank you.
James, when you remove content, make sure you clean up any pages/posts that were linking to that content.
I think any ‘tool’ used incorrectly can cause issues. Also one size doesn’t fit all and in many cases automatic linking within content can positively assist internal navigation.
It’s all very well saying that everything should be done manually but if you run a large e-commerce site with thousands of products you need to find scalable ways to operate. Changing one link in a plugin is certainly preferable to trawling through hundreds of blog posts.
Also what’s wrong with directing a user to a landing for a product if that product is mentioned in a post? Much beter than leaving them to find their own way.
IF it were the case that auto linking is dead then Wikipedia better watch out!!
Caroline, it’s all a matter of degree. The cases we have are manual penalties – which means they went nuts with it. The problem is, most of the people we see using this thing have gone nuts with it. There is no clear bright line or magic number anyone can give you. There are ways to use this tool (see the comment on using “markers”) that would allow you to insert the links you want manually, and replace the target URL within the tool – changing all of the links at once.
If you think Wikipedia is going to get a manual penalty, well… of course you know they won’t. Right?
As a “Newbie” I hope to get some clarity, as I am not familiar with SEO Smart Links. I have been using the All in One SEO boxes for every page (which I write unique, quality content for myself, along with paramedics as advisors). What are your thoughts of Word Press’s ALL in One SEO and the Google Panda and Penguin updates. Should I continue to use them?
I don’t use All-In-One, Linda, but I don’t believe that it automatically adds links like SEO Smart Links.
Hey Dan,
I use this plugin on all my sites. Fortunately I haven’t entered a ton of words and posts to link to. One of my sites got slammed with Penguin, and also went from PR 3 to PR 2 and dropped 3/4 of its traffic. I’ll go nose around right now and see if I goofed up the settings. Thanks for bringing this up. I’d been told elsewhere that internal links aren’t a problem, so it’s good to see this perspective.
Hi Dan,
This is really interesting to me. I’ve been using this plugin for about a year now and lost about 80% of my traffic in the penguin update. I have the premium version and have limited the number of links to 3 per post. I think maybe coupled with the random posts and links to other articles widgets that I have, this might be a factor in this.
You mentioned that all the cases seemed to have manual intervention from google – if that’s happened to my site, wouldn’t that show up in webmaster tools as a message?
Thanks for any help!
The cases we saw with this plugin appeared to be manual penalties, Dan. Penguin isn’t a penalty, just a change in the algorithm. But no, they do not send you a message with every penalty, and yes, I think that’s a wee bit evil.
Some stuff I would look at changing on your site:
1) Look at how you’re auto-linking. Consider changing from the anchor text format to not linking the keyword and inserting a link after. So instead of blah blah blah blah keyword it’s blah blah blah blah keyword (link).
2) I saw some pages (top of the blog for example) where your links are orange on orange. That could make a stupid machine think “hidden text.” The general pattern in your site is for links not to have the standard blue/underlined look. I’d consider how much of this you could change. We don’t know that any of it is a problem, but the best advice I can give anyone who has been “hit” is to change anything that might be hurting and isn’t actually helping.
3) Lose the affiliate links for Catalyst, and any others that aren’t actually making a profit. Those that are making a profit, turn them into ads, with nofollow on any paid/commissioned links.
4) Zemanta is also scary. I would not recommend you add any “recommended” links from Zemanta that are “promoted.” I know that on WordPress the Z plugin adds a tag (“promoted”) to any posts where you pick up paid placements from them. Is that a followed link they’re stuffing on every post?
5) That Comment Luv thing is also scary. I’m not saying get rid of it, but do monitor what it actually links to. Because the malware weenies love plugins like Comment Luv.
Okay. Your five minutes are up. 🙂 Next!
Instead of looking for shortcuts with SEO, like Smart Links, if people just stayed to and practiced Google’s best practices, using your SEO plugin and exercised a little patience — they would be much better. Patience when it comes to SEO pays off. There are no shortcuts.
Hey Dan
I agree & disagree here with your points..
1) Agree yes the example you gave is spammy and it’s webmaster work to make sure he is pushing particular content in SERP’s. Saying that, I don’t expect Google to rank my low quality page for Keyword “SEO” or any other keyword just based on too many internal links with anchor text.
2) Limitation:
Limiting the number of links is a solution but that again is available in pro version, which I believe author made the right decision for offering something awesome at a price tag.
3) You can always link to your tag pages, category pages and other pages to lower down bounce rate.As we see all the time on mashable..
4) Target long tail Keywords: Since we have limitation for no. of links in free version, we can target long-tail keyword as occurance will be less….
Its just another tool and like any other SEO plugin “All in one SEO” “EasyWpSEO” “Robots meta” “Ping list’, if not used properly and configured properly it can have negative implication. Something, we faced in the past with Global translator plugin.
Harsh – it’s a tool that is extremely dangerous when people don’t understand the implications. The paid version, if used properly (which probably means “not as advertised”) can do a lot of cool things.
BTW – be careful with pinging, the more places you ping, the more copies of your content the spambots will make. And no – that’s not a good thing.
Hi 🙂
Very interesting article, since I had been thinking about using something along these lines. I think I’ll just do manual linking, that way I won’t be doing too much of it 😀
It was also mentioned in the above reply about using a nofollow on commision links… how would I go about doing that?
Richard 🙂
Hi Richard – I have a post in the works on dealing with affiliate links. Usually it’s easier to control at your end (by sending incoming affiliate traffic through a redirect that doesn’t pass link juice) than to try to get all the affiliates out there to put nofollow on their links to you.
What are your thoughts on the Joost WordPress SEO Plugin, or am I going too far off topic here? What SEO plugins do you recommend?
Actually we did two webinars with Joost on WordPress SEO – first one covers his plugin in detail (http://seobraintrust.com/wordpress-seo-with-joost-de-valk-2/) and the second is a Q&A session because we couldn’t answer all the questions in just one session (http://seobraintrust.com/webinar-replay-wordpress-seo-qa-with-joost-de-valk/)
I just deleted it. I saw a dip. Thanks.
Useful tips, thanks. I’m always wary of things like CommentLuv, however I always monitor my commenter’s and only approve comments if the person who left then left a link to a non-spam site.
Automation is great for some cases, but as this post proves – it is a terrible idea where tasks need to be done manually. I know a lot of SEO’s that preach about automation and I always cringe when I read about it, although few of them run any big, authoritative sites.
I haven’t heard of this specific plugin, but I do know of similar plugins with similar names that are actually paid plugins.
@Dan what kind of an SEO uses the examples you gave to rank a website… like seriously who is going to try and rank such single words like SEO, WORDPRESS, GOOGLE, PLUGIN… etc… LOL.
Yes if someone DID happen to be so stupid and try and rank for those keywords it could be a problem with this plugin but that is not in the real world im sorry.
So im going to have to disagree with you on this one Dan, this plugin is good and has it purposes it eliminates a lot of time and makes you more productive if used by someone who actually knows how to SEO.
My 2cents…
Mitch, an example is just that – an example. But if you feel good with keyword stuffing and keyword-link-stuffing right now, carry on.
This tool *can* be used effectively – but not in the way that so many people have been promoting it. It can be used, for example, to do wikipedia-style link insertion – and that’s awesome. That also requires the paid version.
I actually killed this plugin awhile back and replaced it with a related posts plugin. But the vast majority of website out there (the big players) all have some sort of incontent linking and they get along just fine. So if you set the rules for the Smartlinks plugin correctly (no more than 5 links per page for example) you should be able to avoid any penalty.
Very useful tips and I think any ‘tool’ used incorrectly can cause issues. Also one size doesn’t fit all and in many cases automatic linking within content can positively assist internal navigation.
Holy shit. That’s crazy. I was using something similar to this but stopped in mid 2010. I was using it primarily to hyperlink tag names (e.g. all our tags were celebrities/models with archives).
Hi Dan,
do you think a similar kind of issue might arise by using the “Simple Tags” plugin, which allows you to link all tagged posts together by their tag keyword?
Great article – many thanks!
Don’t tags normally link to a tag page? What does this plugin do?
I agree that this plugin could be dangerous, but I also think that a webmaster should check how this plugin works first on their site and make that decision.
I can’t comment on the free one, however, I’ve been using the paid version on a few of sites for 2+ years and no penalization (yet!). I do use it very sparingly and impose a small limit of links on one page (3 I think?), but then isn’t that the point? It’s a useful plugin if used wisely.
I do think though that if there’s no limit of links per page on the free version, then that would even warrant removing it from the WP repo, as that’d screw up a lot of inexperienced users’ sites. If he added a limit, then there’s be a lot less potential danger with this.
Hey Guys
Thank you for sharing this info – Have now pulled the plug as it where 🙂
Cheers
Paul
I am using SEO SmartLinks free version and it has Limits for Max Links, Max Single and Max Single URL that you can configure. I set my sites to 1 each and there is one internal link that appears on one post (I am using 1 article per post) and sometimes, the post doesn’t even have a link. Thus, my conclusion is that SEO SmartLinks can link only to keywords set on Custom Keywords textbox, it cannot do keywords not set from there.
Even if you use other SEO tools, if you stuff keywords, then, they will do you no good.
Hello Dan,
Thank you for clearing this out.
Is this right for all the SEO plugins which do the same work (if I am right, there are many plugins to automatically link posts or pages)?
thanks sharing this informative post 🙂
Well I might be one of the sufferers of this plugin as I am always in search of new SEO helping plugins. Thanks for saving me mate.
I have been using the premium version of the plugin and was penalized. I am going to stop using it after I read your article. Should I submit a reconsideration request or will Google notice that I have stopped using it when the site is reindexed?
BTW, since I use the premium version I don’t have too many links on each page and they do make sense. My rankings did drop a lot and I was wondering if it could not be a result of the fact that Google recently started placing less emphasis on anchor text than it did. I mean, maybe I wasn’t penalized but my good rankings were caused by anchor text which now doesn’t help so I am down to the rankings I would have had if anchor text had never been so important? Hope my question is clear…
Hi Dan:
We disabled SEO Smart Link Premium (sometime in early May). We never got any notice from Google. 1. Should we disable YARP (Yet Another Related Post)?
2. We are also using a global translator plug in, it creates a lot of 503 server errors because it creates the translated page’s url first then goes back and fills it in with the actual translated page. It gives an alternative way of proceeding which produces 302 codes. Please comment on risk of this plug in.
3. We continue to use Joost’s WordPress SEO plugin.
4. How long does it take to get this reversed?
Thanks
Hi Dan, Isnt this just the way that sites like wikipedia link from page to page ? They have exceptional success in the search engine results, with sometimes hundreds of links per page pointing to the same page with the same anchor text.
still what i am looking for is a way to interlink keywords in sites without specifying any URL. specify the keywords and the limit per page and it goes and do the job
i agree as one of my friend’s blog was hit by google as penalty and he lost his organic traffic.it made my mind not to use that.thanks for such information.Good work.Thank you.
Points that you wrote in this article are also mentioned in new google panda policy.i agree smart links causing penalty for new websites.google making this battlefield more tough but qualitative.great information.Thanks for sharing.
I’ve googled a lot about a plugin that puts incoming search terms at the bottom of each page. I recently had a hit in traffic, and I think it may be linked to this. Do you think that this would be considered keyword stuffing since the Panda update?
Not sure what plugin you’re talking about, JJ, so the big question is “what does it do?” If it’s just sticking extra keywords on the page for no damned reason, yeah, that could be seen as keyword stuffing, because it is.
I had a chap working on my site but as soon as he stopped so did the contacts was it something he did ?