Links from my Own Blog to my Own Website and Link Scheme

[Midleton]

Hi There,

I use my own blog to give advices and offer information related to my business service. Of course in terms of SEO my blog is useful not only to expand my brand presence but also to acquire long-tail traffic. I use to insert a maximum of one link with a relative matching anchor text in every article of my blog pointing to my own webpage.

Said that, the questions are as follows:

Am I involuntarily participating in a Link Scheme with my blog? And If so, how many links can I send to my own webpage ? Shall I limit the number of links to a minimum?

Thanks a lot for your advices.

[TomRayner]

Hi there

This really is a grey area.

By the letter of Google's law, they would see this as a link scheme. How likely is it they would find it and how likely is it that they would punish it?  It's very difficult to say.  Chances are they wouldn't be too pleased if they did find it.  The fact that you are using matching anchor text makes me think they wouldn't be too happy.

However, on the flip side, your producing content with real value to visitors, your including relevant links to give citations in your work, so the links are quite legitimate in that sense.  The thing is though is that you control them, and that's a big no-no in Google's book.

It's not up to me to judge whether it's something you should or should not be doing - I'd rather explain the risks.  With this method, your opening yourself up to being penalised for running a link scheme.  It's very hard to determine a limit on this or a threshold, but knowing it's possible, for me, is enough.

You could reduce your risk by lowering the amount of times you link to your site and also if you linked to your site with non-commercial anchor text, such as just your brand name or even a raw URL.  That would leave less of a "trail", as it were.

You can remove the risk entirely of course by either removing the links - or instead, making the links on your blog "nofollow" to your website.  Now this might be useful - your blog can continue to bring in people via long-tail keywords and the link can send them to your business site, yet the link you have will not pass SEO benefit to your business site and thus would not be seen as a link scheme.  You would get all of the benefits as before other than the direct SEO benefit (which, granted, might be a significant benefit).

But look, you could equally carry on with this method if you're happy to run the risk/reward tightrope.  Just be aware of the risk.  You at least know which links you would need to remove or change should you get penalised in the future.  It's totally your call on this but, gun-to-my-head-acting-as-an-SEO-agency example: I'd advise you to stop creating these dofollow links and change your old ones to either nofollow, or remove them.

Hope this helps.

[CommT]

As Mr Roberts says, making the links nofollow should stop you being penalised AND give you the benefit of the traffic.

[doggiedivalicious]

How does one know that one is being penalized for linking blog pages on one site to the ecommerce pages on the mother site?

Thanks, DIane
Diane Kramer, Doggie-diva.com