[brightonmike]

I've been noticing recently that for some reason or another, SEO companies are snipping bits of text off our website and then posting it on "article" websites, linking back to our original page without a nofollow.

This seems like something they'd so if we'd hired them as our SEO - but we haven't. I've been checking them out and they all trace back to a French SEO company.

Is the reason they do this to make their content sites look more "natural" so when they put links to companies that have paid Google reads it as legitimate natural linking (due to the presence of links to other companies)?

Also, could this have a negative effect for us? I don't see why because we're not doing it...

And, could it even have, dare I say, a positive effect?

[greyhat]

brightonmike, on 31 October 2011 - 08:51 AM, said:

I've been noticing recently that for some reason or another, SEO companies are snipping bits of text off our website and then posting it on "article" websites, linking back to our original page without a nofollow.

This seems like something they'd so if we'd hired them as our SEO - but we haven't. I've been checking them out and they all trace back to a French SEO company.

Is the reason they do this to make their content sites look more "natural" so when they put links to companies that have paid Google reads it as legitimate natural linking (due to the presence of links to other companies)?

Also, could this have a negative effect for us? I don't see why because we're not doing it...

And, could it even have, dare I say, a positive effect?

I cant think of any other reasonable explanation other that the one you have just given. I assume the articles contain links to other sites? That sure is strange but i cant see it doing any harm and a link is a link, right?

- G

[Phil Comforthost]

As long as the French SEO company are legit and not banned from Google then it shouldn't do you any harm at all - in fact, congrats on having text worth linking too! I could do with some free SEO

[MikeChipshop]

Get used to it mate.
The more stuff you do the more stuff you'll start seeing popping up in otherwise unknown places.

Wouldn't worry about it though, Google et al are smart enough to know what's what.

[Sogo7]

My only concern would be how they taking the cuttings,manually (cut/paste) with a human in the loop or scraping the first paragraph of each new article as it appears automatically. Without seeing both sites it's hard to say.

This mimicry of 'organic' site evolution whilst an elegant link farm solution could be rumbled quickly by Google if the scraper's are failing to remove or at least slightly alter things such as hidden script annotations, anchor tags in particular along with alt & title descriptions if images are being used.

[rallport]

Google is aware you can't control what sites link to you - Matt Cutts state this lots of times in GW Videos. E.g. if I wanted to link to your site, there's absolutely nothing you can do about muar!

[mOxby Design]

The only concerns I would have are:

1. Are the pages doing the linking on authoritative sites - i.e. is the site quality doing you good?
2. How much text are they copying? Just because you don't want your content duplicated across the web
3. What anchor text are they using to link to you and is it consistent with the subject matter of the page they have linked to?

Otherwise, even a nofollow link has value (just not for page rank, but that's only one consideration so never mind) and a more natural link profile has nofollows in it anyway. So long as the site doing the linking is not likely to harm your reputation I wouldn't worry too much.