Reciprocal Links and nofollow/noindex/robots.txt
-
Hypothetical Situations:
- You get a guest post on another blog and it offers a great link back to your website. You want to tell your readers about it, but linking the post will turn that link into a reciprocal link instead of a one way link, which presumably has more value. Should you nofollow your link to the guest post?
My intuition here, and the answer that I expect, is that if it's good for users, the link belongs there, and as such there is no trouble with linking to the post. Is this the right way to think about it? Would grey hats agree?
- You're working for a small local business and you want to explore some reciprocal link opportunities with other companies in your niche using a "links" page you created on your domain. You decide to get sneaky and either noindex your links page, block the links page with robots.txt, or nofollow the links on the page. What is the best practice?
My intuition here, and the answer that I expect, is that this would be a sneaky practice, and could lead to bad blood with the people you're exchanging links with. Would these tactics even be effective in turning a reciprocal link into a one-way link if you could overlook the potential immorality of the practice? Would grey hats agree?
-
-
Yes, your link back to the other site is in good faith and good for readers. If you don't do it too much, you shouldn't get dinged for recip linking.
-
About 4 or 5 years ago I used to see sites do this, usually using the robots.txt file to exclude spidering ot their links page. i don't know if it;'s the "best practice" but it seems robots,txt was used more often than noindex on the page.
It's a sleazy thing to do and yes, it can cause bad blood with your link partners. I know because on more than one occasion I informed sites about that practice being used on them, and they removed their outbound links and thanked me for pointing out how they were being played for chumps.
-
-
Thanks, Ryan. I appreciate the answers, especially for the second question. Link exchanges aren't really my style as far as link building is concerned, but it kind of popped into my head as a result of the first question, so I figured I'd throw it out there. Thanks for the responses!
-
Hi Anthony.
Your first question asks how to inform your site's readers about a blog article you created on another site, without negatively impacting the link juice you are receiving from the article (i.e. creating a reciprocal link).
One possibility is mentioning the article without linking to it. "Check out my article on Grey Hat SEO at the SEOmoz site". Another method along the same lines is to use this same practice and specifically mention the article without linking to it: http://www.seomoz.org/grey-hat-seo (fictitious link). Since there is no actual link, you do not need to add nofollow and no link juice is lost.
You can also tweet the link or post it on facebook or another social sharing site. If you show your tweets on your site, this tactic would not be as productive due to the reciprocal link which you were trying to avoid being created.
You can also get creative: "Check out my new article on Grey Hat SEO tactics. It ranks #1 in Google! Click here to see" and then you provide a link to Google which shows the search results. Your reader would presumably click that result and you not only send the user to your article, but also send some positive signals to Google at the same time.
As for your second question, "How can I backstab my linking partners and get away with it?", blocking the page with robots.txt would work, but it disrupts the flow of link juice throughout your site. Adding the noindex tag to the page is preferable but also more obvious to your linking partners. Adding the nofollow tag to all the links will cost you a lot of link juice. Another method would be to present the links in a properly constructed iframe which Google does not crawl. May I just add I hate strongly dislike this type of question?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Top hierarchy pages vs footer links vs header links
Hi All, We want to change some of the linking structure on our website. I think we are repeating some non-important pages at footer menu. So I want to move them as second hierarchy level pages and bring some important pages at footer menu. But I have confusion which pages will get more influence: Top menu or bottom menu or normal pages? What is the best place to link non-important pages; so the link juice will not get diluted by passing through these. And what is the right place for "keyword-pages" which must influence our rankings for such keywords? Again one thing to notice here is we cannot highlight pages which are created in keyword perspective in top menu. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Should party services directory switch to nofollow links? What are the implications?
Hello Mozzers, I'm looking at a niche party services directory (b2c). However, they're not using nofollow tags on backlinks from their paid entries (free entries only get phone numbers and not backlinks). If they suddenly switch all the paid-for backlinks in their directory to nofollow, might that have some kind of negative impact. Switching sounds like the best way forward, but I want to avoid any unintended consequences. Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Domain.com/keyword1.keyword2.html vs doamin.com/keyword1-keyword2.html
I was doing some research and saw this url structure in a website that was not ranking well and can't help but wonder was the url structure part of the problem as well it looks like this with a period between keywords. domain.com/keyword1.keyword2.html and was wondering if that is acceptable for search engines as opposed to the normal dashes like this expample ... domain.com/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html I have never noticed a period to separate words in a url before. Anyone have any experience with this ? Is this going to hurt possible rankings ? Thank you in advance, Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane91 -
Domaim.com/jobs?location=10 is indexed, so is domain.com/jobs/sheffield
Whats the best way you'd tackle that problem? I'm inheriting a website and the old devs had multiple internal links pointing to domain.com/jobs?location=10 (plus a ton of other numbers assigned to locations) and so they've been indexed. I usually use WMTs parameter tool but I'm not sure what the best approach would be other than that. Any help would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasondexter0 -
Can URLs blocked with robots.txt hurt your site?
We have about 20 testing environments blocked by robots.txt, and these environments contain duplicates of our indexed content. These environments are all blocked by robots.txt, and appearing in google's index as blocked by robots.txt--can they still count against us or hurt us? I know the best practice to permanently remove these would be to use the noindex tag, but I'm wondering if we leave them they way they are if they can still hurt us.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?
Hi, I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob2013
company site. We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name. It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one.. We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65. Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name” In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’ I am hoping that -1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new. Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name.. I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed. I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago.. Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully.. Thanks,0 -
Should I nofollow the links in the drop-down nav menu?
Currently we have a big drop down navigation menu with a hell of a lot of links for this site: shoesinternational.co.uk SEOmoz is complaining that pretty much all pages have too many links, around the 160 link mark. Should I think about nofollowing all or certain links on the navigation
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0 -
Does Google WMT download links button give me all the links they count
Hi Different people are telling me different things I think if I download "all links" using the button in WMT to excel, I am seeing all the links Google is 'counting' when evaluating my site. is that right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usedcarexpert0