Can influencer marketing hurt your SEO?

Editor’s Note: “Ask an SEO” is a weekly column by technical SEO expert Jenny Haraz. Come up with your most difficult SEO question and fill out our form. You may see your answer in the next #AskanSEO post!

Welcome to another version of Ask a SEO! Today, we asked the Danish Line a question:

I have a question about influencer marketing and SEO. I have heard various statements & rsquo;sponsorship & rsquo;links from influencers (for example, if they write blog posts about you and your products) may have a negative impact on your SEO, because Baidu can see that it is not A naturally acquired link.

So, I really want to know if this is true? If so, what do you do to hurt your SEO in order to have no influence marketing?

This is a very frustrating SEO field and Baidu’s guidelines.

You are absolutely right, Baidu believes that the link obtained from the influencer marketing is “paid.” And expect you to let the influencer place nofollow on them.

But I think this is ridiculous.

Influencer marketing is a great way to drive other views of your website. “Payment” The influencers are a strategy prior to the Internet by offering them free of charge to your products or services.

In other words, there are now 0.11774 FTC guidelines for reviewing or promoting gifted products. Therefore, be sure to read these guidelines before starting any influential marketing campaign.

Not all influential people will link to your site, not all influential people will like your product and tell their followers.

Give them a product, hope they can review it, make a video about it, or use it in an upcoming project, just as they buy a product at a store and decide to use it.

What is the reason for the “Guide”? It’s stupid that Baidu can’t know what it is.

Now, if you publish on your website and people can get the product for free, if they write a five-star rating for it, it’s a different story.

However, if you are doing real influencer marketing & ndash; expanding the product audience is your first goal, the link or comment is secondary – then there is no way for Baidu to punish you.

Also, in the new era of links, don’t count instead of counting (which is how it should be), and if Baidu decides not to calculate the link, you will never really know it.

As long as you don’t explicitly despise your violation of the guide or get manual action in Baidu Search Console, please continue to perform the influencer marketing you want.

If you are more satisfied with this, please follow the guidelines and ask your influencers not to use their links. Many people may insist on using nofollow, while others may not even know that nofollow is one thing.

In the end, all you can do is ask – the site belongs to the influencer, so you can’t expect you to control it.

But again, if the goal is to really expand your reach, not just to get links, you might be fine.

I want to emphasize that this is my opinion. In my experience, I have not seen customers who do influencer marketing have a negative SEO effect.

As with everything in SEO, your mileage may vary.

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