Rel="no follow" for All Links on a Site that Charges for Advertising
-
If I run a site that charges other companies for listing their products, running banner advertisements, white paper downloads, etc. does it make sense to "no follow" all of their links on my site?
For example: they receive a profile page, product pages and are allowed to post press releases. Should all of their links on these pages be "no follow"?
It seems like a gray area to me because the explicit advertisements will definitely be "no followed" and they are not buying links, but buying exposure.
However, I still don't know the common practice for links from other parts of their "package".
Thanks
-
Hello all,
Thanks for the input. I'm on the marketing side with a site that presents our products. I'm tryign to clean up inbound links.
I pulled the Inbound links report from Moz.com and have concluded that I want to focus on the sites that are NOT listed as "no_follow." Troouble I'm having is the report headers:
<colgroup><col width="90"><col width="115"><col width="143"><col width="95"><col width="37"></colgroup>
| Link Equity | No Link Equity | Only rel=nofollow | Only follow | 301 |
| Yes | No | No | Yes | No |Does a 'Yes' value in the 'Only rel=nofollow' column mean that the link is marked as nofollow? As in "Affirmative, this link is marekd as nofollow, yes."
Then there is the 'Only follow' and other headers. Know where I can find a Moz article explaining these?
Thanks in advance for any and all help.
Regards,
Joe
-
Right?! When you hit 200 Moz points you get a do follow - rock it Anthony!
-
I did not know that about SEOmoz. I guess I need to work on getting more points!
-
In that I case I would guess that they are PR sculpting as Google would not be able to discern if they are passing links through a paid service.
Also, if the site is relevant to a specific niche and not just a link farm I would further believe that Google would not penalize the site.
Its kind of like SEOMoz - after a certain amount of points you get a do follow on one of your links. I don't think Google would be able to discern if SEOmoz was asking for people to pay or not.
-
Thanks Mark, what I'm trying to get people's opinion on is whether it would be considered people "paying for links" if I give them followed links on my site that are not explicitly paid for (i.e. not in their advertisements).
Most companies I have done advertising with in the past have allowed follow links in profiles, press releases, etc. , but I've also encountered those that no follow everything and told me they were doing it to protect themselves from getting penalized by Google.
I wonder if they were scared of being penalized, or just wanted to sculpt PR and keep it all on their site?
-
No follow keeps the link juice on your site. Do follow passes it to their site. It all depends. Do you want to pass page rank authority to their site? Some find that appealing and will get ad space just for that reason alone. Others won't care as they will just be looking for a good solid site to get the word out.
So if you site has great traffic and is providing value for someone in their niche market I say go with no follow as your site will do better in the rankings by keeping the page authority within your site.
-
Just don't approve porn, illegal, and spam filled website urls. If a company's website is deemed acceptable to be placed on your website, I see nothing wrong with giving them dofollow links.
-
Oleg- Thanks for the answer. I should be more clear with the question. All user submitted links will be set at "no follow". I was interested in what to do about company profile pages, product pages and press releases which we will enter and/or approve.
-
Follow links you have to approve. If people can sign up and get followed links without any editorial review, you will be spammed sooner or later.
G recommends you nofollow all user submitted links (to be on the safe side).
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569
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
-
As a beginner in SEO, how do I do 302 redirects/ rel="canonicals"
One of the things Inseem to leave undone is failure to do 302 redirects or rel="canonicals" on my site www.johannesburg.today. Please help .
Technical SEO | | Gain40 -
Leveraging "Powered by" and link spam
Hi all, For reference: The SaaS guide to leveraging the "Powered By" tactic. My product is an embeddable widget that customers place on their websites (see example referenced in link above). A lot of my customers have great domain authority (big brands, .gov's etc). I would like to use a "Powered By" link on my widgets to create high quality backlinks. My question is: if I have identical link text (on potentially hundreds) of widgets, will this look like link spam to Google? If so, would setting the link text randomly on each widget to one of a few different phrases (to create some variation) avoid this? Hope this makes sense, thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | NoorHammad0 -
Transferring link juice on a page with over 150 links
I'm building a resource section that will probably, hopefully, attract a lot of external links but the problem here is that on the main index page there will be a big number of links (around 150 internal links - 120 links pointing to resource sub-pages and 30 being the site's navigational links), so it will dilute the passed link juice and possibly waste some of it. Those 120 sub-pages will contain about 50-100 external links and 30 internal navigational links. In order to better visualise the matter think of this resource as a collection of hundreds of blogs categorised by domain on the index page (those 120 sub-pages). Those 120 sub-pages will contain 50-100 external links The question here is how to build the primary page (the one with 150 links) so it will pass the most link juice to the site or do you think this is OK and I shouldn't be worried about it (I know there used to be a roughly 100 links per page limit)? Any ideas? Many thanks
Technical SEO | | flo20 -
Would removing or making non relevant links no follow boost a site?
Hi, I have just been checking out the backlinks for a prospective new client. It appears they have a number of links that are totally irrelevant to their nature of business and I was wondering if they would improve in the rankings etc if I removed them or made them no follow instead? Or would I simply just be throwing away crucial link juice? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Benjamin3790 -
Can anyone help me understand why google is "Not Selecting" a large number of my webpages to include when crawling my site.
When looking through my google webmaster tools, I clicked into the advanced settings under index status and was surprised to see that google has marked around 90% of my pages on my site as "Not Selected" when crawling. Please take a look and offer any suggestions. www.luxuryhomehunt.com
Technical SEO | | Jdubin0 -
Can 404 results from external links hurt site ranking?
Hello, I'm helping a university transition to a brand new website. In some cases the URLs will change between the old site and new site. They will put 301 redirects in place to make sure that people who have old URLs will get redirected properly to the new URLs. However they also have a bunch of old pages that they aren't using anymore. They don't really care if people still try to get to them (because they don't think many will), but they do care about the overall search engine rankings. I know that if a site has internal 404 links, that could hurt rankings. However can external links that return a 404 hurt rankings? Ryan
Technical SEO | | GreenHatWeb0 -
Should I change these "Overly dynamic URLs" ?
Hello, My client have pages that look like this: www.domain.com/blog/index.aspx?blogmonth=1&blogday=10&blogyear=2012&blogid=256 Question 1: SEOMoz say they are overly dynamic. Is it really in this case as the numbers indicate the year, month and day and do not change? Question 2: Should we change the URLs to proper SEO friendly URLs such as www.domain.com/keywords1-keyword2? The pages are already ranking well and we worry that changing the URL may damage the ranking? Do we risk the page to go down in ranking by creating SEO friendly URLs? (and using a 301 to redirect from the old URL)
Technical SEO | | DavidSpivac0 -
On page audit throws a rel="canonical" curve ball :-(
Good Morning from -3 Degrees C, still no paths gritted wetherby UK 😞 Following an on page audit one recommendation instructs me to ad:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://www.barrettsteel.com/" /> on the home page of barrett steel. I'm confused, i thought i only had to add this to duplications
the home page which to my knowledge dont exist. So my question is please: "Why shoul i ad this snippet of code on the home page of http://www.barrettsteel.com http://www.barrettsteel.com/" /> Any insights welcome 🙂0