Links from music/celebrity based fansites - sitewide images with no alt text

[PixelKicks]

We're currently in the middle of a link audit on our website OneDirection.net and a large part of our incoming links come from fansites such as the following:

• ladygaganow.net
• nickjonline.com
• justinbieberhood.com
• joejonashq.com
• harrystylesfan.org
• brunodaily.org
• onedirectiondaily.com
• onedirectionfans.net

Now, our previous way of thinking was that these are very relevant websites in the same niche as us, and therefore should be passing some value? However all of the links on these sites come from sitewide images with no alt-text. Some of the sites are passing 1000+ links to us.

We've been wary to disavow or request removal of these links as we've usually gone with the thinking that Google applies "common-sense" based logic in its algorithms, and therefore these backlinks should be ok - in our opinion.

However we think we are suffering from some kind of algorithmic penalty with our current rankings, and are now thinking these could be the cause.

What are people's opinions on these links? Should we stay clear of sitewide links altogether? Should we contact the site owners and try to get them to mix up the alt-text? Or should we get rid of them altogether?

Thanks,

Chris.

[fazza47]

I don't think sitewide links are a good idea any more.  Im sure they have been legitimately placed but in the eyes of a computer could look like paid links  which as we all know is a bad thing.

My advice would be contact each website in turn and ask for an editorial link rather than a sidebar/sitewide link.  This way you keep a genuine link.

If they refuse then I would ask for it to be removed as in my opinion these links are more than likely the cause of your penalty despite them being relevant as if they link to your fan site they are probably linking to lots of fan sites so could also look like a link ring of some sort.

[Jonathan1979]

I agree with Mark.  Sitewide links are an extremely quick way to get a penalty these days.

Another option is to ask those links to be no-followed if they do give traffic (and try to get an editorial link on the front page, or some other page), but at the end of the day if they refuse, your only option will be to dissavow.

[PixelKicks]

Thanks for your quick responses guys.

Since the original penguin update back in April 2012, we've cleaned up our link profile immensely, improved the load speed of our site by over 150% and totally reworked & simplified our UI. Throughout all this we've provided unique, daily content.

As such it's been annoyance that we've only seen our rankings drop, but frankly we've never touched our core of fansite links. I'll be quite surprised if these are indeed the source of our problems - but at the same time delighted to have finally found the culprit.

Still, ignoring whatever decisions Google has made in its algorithms, are these fansites (and ourselves) actually doing anything wrong with their sitewide links? What is it that Google doesn't like about them? Usually the individuals who run the sites provide a lot of up-to-date content that other fans like to see, and quite often users will be interested in similar artists/bands, hence the links to "friends" or "affiliate" sites in the sidebar.

Is this a niche way of doing things that probably should have an exception from Google's calculations?

Or are they just bad, bad, bad?

[fazza47]

The problem with sitewide links and sidebar links is that they have been abused by the spamming world so stick out as if a paid link despite in a lot of cases actually being genuine.

You have got to remember that at the end of the day it is a computer analysing these links and they are not quite there yet.  Although they are legitimate there are hundreds of thousands that are not and this im guessing is what Google is basing it on.

[PixelKicks]

Quick update on this - we've disavowed 22 entire domain links from these fansites and will monitor rankings to see if anything improves.

As mysterious as the disavow tool is, we're expecting to have to wait anything from 3 weeks to 3 months before anything happens. Will report back here with our findings.

Cheers.

[PixelKicks]

Update...

Our rankings suddenly improved on Saturday October 5th, and we've seen an uplift in google traffic by a factor of 20/30% so far, but manually checking some of our rankings puts us on page 1 for a lot of medium/long tail keywords. We've not seen rankings this strong for ages.

It's still a little too early to tell fully so I'll update again in another week or so, but from an initial couple of days of data & analysis we're seeing better rankings right across the Google network

As well as simply disavowing the links, we also contacted 10 of the sites asking them to remove our links directly. Two of them responded saying they had done this on Wednesday, but this seems a little too soon to see an effect from so we're putting more belief that the the disavow links have been reflected.

This is the first time I've felt like we're finally seeing daylight, and it was the last source of links we've thought were damaging us!

[PixelKicks]

Further to my previous update, it now seems that Penguin 2.1 positively affected our site. So there's still the chance that the disavowed links have not been taken into account yet.

Either way, rankings have remained strong, but we still think there is further to go. We're continuing to contact sites directly, asking them to remove or nofollow our links.