Random keyword inbound links good/bad/no difference?

[Brian-H]

I have a client that as part of their service hosts newsletters for their clients. They all link to www.domainname.com/archive... and as you can imagine the clients link with a wide rang of keywords to their newsletter from from "visit our newsletter" to "jamie finds out where peter stayed" etc

They asked me if this could be considered spammy and holding them back from ranking as an authority in their field (they are a e-newsletter company) and my gut feeling is no as they all go to archive.Now we could set up a subdomain archive.domainname.com and send everything there but I don't want to recommend extra unnecessary work to them or even work that may produce a negative result.

Any thoughts?

[JarnoNijzing]

Brian,

my first thought actually goes to rel="nofollow" on the anchor text to the newsletter system. I can image all the different anchor that are non descriptive to the service provided by the website and that is exactly what nofollow is intended for.

I just compared it to a footer link with copyright text by your designer company (Copyright XYZ.com 2013 also gets a nofollow link as suggested by Matt Cutts of Google). So why not use it in this instance?

regards

Jarno

[grasshopper]

Hi Brian,

If I'm understanding you correctly, and your client is a newsletter company, and part of their business is keeping archived copies of the newsletters that they've created live on their site for reference purposes, then don't worry about anchor text pointing to those archived newsletters being random - random anchor text from a wide variety of client domains is good.

People linking with random anchor text is actually exactly what you would expect from a client base that's probably very wide-ranging, linking to newsletters on an equally wide-ranging set of topics.  Those are natural, editorially-given links, and those kinds of links tend to include lots of random word variation in anchor text.

In fact, it would be much more worrisome if their anchor text distribution was clustered heavily around a lot of "money" keyword phrases like "free email newsletter" and "newsletter templates", where there's a lot of competition, fairly high AdWords CPCs, and clustering of anchor text would tend to indicate a concerted effort to game the algo and rank organically for those money keywords.

If you want to see what manipulative link profiles look like, and how they've been penalized with the Penguin updates, there's a bunch of great case studies here: http://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/

But from what it sounds like, your clients have a completely natural backlink profile, with lots of random anchor text from a wide variety of domains, which will help them from an authority perspective.  No setup of a separate sub-domain sounds necessary, and don't worry about asking clients to use rel="nofollow" on links.

Hope that helps!

[AlanMosley]

Why no follow any link, unless it is going to a porn site that you don't want to be associated with. Al links leak link juice there is nothing to gain by no-following them.

[AlanMosley]

Just what I was thinking, a natural link profile what the problem?

[JarnoNijzing]

Alan,

I get what you are saying but since Google Penguin focuses on back link profile and relevancy I strongly do believe that you need to take this into consideration.

If you put your business name on every website you create with a link to your websites you'll have links from maybe cooking websites, financial websites, recreational websites all pointing to an internet markerting websites. Since there is not relevancy between to links from and to the site you're creating non usefull links. I read a post on this subject in the Moz blog section of this site not to long ago about this particular subject.

I just searched for the article but couldn't find it that fast.

For the visitors the links can be usefull but for a seaerchengine there is not substatial value in these links.

Do you get what I mean with that?

regards

Jarno