Getting links from social media used to be all the range – but is it still safe to do post-Penguin and post-Panda? Will social media links cause a penalty from Google?

(Got your own questions for the show? Ask ‘em here!)

A question from Douglas:

Hi Michelle! This is Douglas McDonald. I’m leaving you this message because I just printed out the Social Media Daily that I had used years ago, 2009, and wanted to ask you if following those instructions would still work to get links to my website in light of the Panda and Penguin updates? Does this booklet of instructions still work surrounding your linking suggestions? Let me know. Thanks!

Hey Douglas! Thanks for asking.

Social Media Daily, for those of you who haven’t been around here since 2007, was a PDF document that I put out about using social media for link building. Specifically for SEO purposes. Back then, it was kind of a novel idea and now it’s sort of industry practice.

I was one of the first folks to talk about using social media for SEO purposes and this was the magnum opus at that time of that sort of activity. And what I did was I listed various Web 2.0 and social media type of sites out there that you could go, join for free and then put a backlink on maybe on your profile or wherever they allowed you to do that.

Click Here to Download Social Media Daily For Free

Is that still a relevant or important link building practice today? In many ways, yes. But in some ways, no. So let me explain to you:

If a site out there allows you to put your link on it, like Twitter, wouldn’t you go and get an account and put your link on it, right? And in the case of many social media sites, it also makes sense to be active on them like it is with Twitter. One of the things that we focused on a lot back then was the keyword, the anchor text and the keyword density. And we no longer want to do that with the Panda and Penguin updates that we’ve seen in the last year and a half in SEO.

It is no longer a good idea to use the same anchor text again and again and again. And it really isn’t even enough to just mix it up a little bit. If you did blue widgets, red widgets, black widgets and silver widgets, you still have way too many widgets out there in your anchor text. So what you would need to do is completely mix it up so that you aren’t using even the same root words in your anchor text.

Now, one of the ways that social media has always been such a successful place to link build on is that many of them don’t even allow you to use an anchor text. So, for example, if I’m linking to my website from Twitter, it’s just going to say, ‘http://michellemacphearson.com,’.  It’s not going to have an anchor text. Those kinds of links great to get!

For those sites that do allow you to have an anchor text, you’re going to have mix it up. You’re going to have to use a lot of generic words like “my blog,” “my website.” That kind of thing. So that you don’t get into “trouble” with Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms.

So, to go back to the original question from Douglas: Yes! Everything in Social Media Daily that is still an active, viable working site today, go! Get links from them. Awesome! But you don’t want to focus on that keyword match anchor text or even a partial match anymore or you will see yourself on the bad side of a Google update.

I hope that that answers your question, Douglas, and anymore questions about social media for SEO purposes head on over to michellemacphearson.com and let me know. I’ll answer it in the future episode of the podcast.

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