Best way to filter out the nofollowed links from WMT?
-
When I'm downloading links from WMT to audit them for my unnatural links clients I generally check each individual link. If it is a nofollowed link I make a note that it is nofollowed and move on. I'm thinking that there has to be a quicker way to find all of the nofollowed links so that I can filter them out from the beginning. How would I do that?
-
Yes, that's right. What you'd end up with is a small list of URLs that have nofollow anywhere/somewhere on the page. If it's a big list of 5000 links and this tool can trim it down to maybe 200 having nofollow somewhere or 500 or 2000. In either case, it's a small list. Definitely not a solution to what you are looking for.
-
Hmmm...interesting. I was just playing with screaming frog and thought I had it because you can upload a list of links and then when you export them there is a column for "nofollow", but that column means that the page is nofollowed. That means that a nofollowed link from a meta robots follow,index page would not be flagged.
I see what you're saying about searching for nofollow on the page, but I can't see it being specific enough. A lot of pages may have for example nofollowed comment links but my link in the article could still be followed.
-
Marie
What you could do is use Screaming Frog to crawl all the links (the combined list of ahref links and WMT and then use the custom filter to check if the domain is there, ie your link is there and then the 2nd filter to check if there is the word nofollow anywhere on the page. It's not going to be a perfect list, because you may end up seeing a page that is linking to you, but is nofollow'ing somebody else from the same page.
But then most of the times, the regular links, they are either nofollowed or they are not. "Mostly".
I hope this helps.
-
agreed and good point. (That is why we end up with soooo much SAS).
Thanks -
Thanks Robert. Yes, I usually do use ahrefs and the links from there are nicely marked as nofollowed and easy to filter out. I generally combine the links from ahrefs with the links from WMT and remove the duplicates.
I find that often there are links that are only on one list and not both. For small sites that's not a big deal, but for a large site there may be thousands of nofollowed links that only exist on the WMT list. I figured that if I could find a way to filter out the nofollowed links from the WMT list as well then this would save me a lot of time.
-
Marie,
Have you used ahrefs.com before?
If not I think it will be very useful to you given that I know what you do. I took a small site we handle and looked at what I have in WMT and then ran it on ahrefs. On WMT we are showing 68 distinct external links. On ahrefs we are showing 62. Worst case about a ten percent difference. (For finding those 6, download both csv files and sort and should be quick. Obviously with thousands you have more work.)
With ahrefs, you can simply sort them by nofollow, mark your GWMT data, then boom. You are real close to magic.If you want to see it, etc. I have a conference call with a bunch of Cannucks at 0930 CDT for about 45 min. After we can talk if you call me. Oh, sorry, forgot you were up North...
Hope it helps,
Robert
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
-
Should I ask sites that link to me to update links that redirect?
I have found some links to my site that go through a single 301 redirect to get to my site. Should I contact these websites to ask them to update the link, or is that not worth the time?
Link Building | | RCF0 -
Link building strategy - my weak link!
Please help me understand link building. I've read the articles on Moz, but they seem vague to me. Specific questions: 1. How do I get my webpage on good quality sites? 2. Guest blogging? Good or not? 3. What about when people pick up one of our blog stories and publish it on their site with a link back? Is that bad now because it is duplicate content??? 4. Forum posts with a link in the signature? Good or not? 5. Directories - I get it that these are no longer good... are they severely negative? Should I take them down. 6. PR - Looks like this is bad... right??? 7. Youtube - any value? 8. Pinterst, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram? Any value to backlinks here? 9. What about sites like redit? 10. Anything else I should consider?
Link Building | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Indirect Link Earning via dofollow Links In News Articles
Hello, MOZ SEO Gurus. I've been trying to think some deep thoughts on safe, effective link earning for news publishing sites, and wanted to run this up the flagpole and see if you salute. Our site is a biotech news service -- we pump out copious amounts of news content each day, which works well for driving traffic. That being said, we also want to rank some optimized landing pages as well. Take, for example, this page, which we'd like to rank for "secondary progressive MS" and related keywords: http://bionews-tx.com/secondary-progressive-ms/ Now, as far as I'm concerned, shopping this page around to MS influencers isn't easy. I can go to Foundational websites, blogs, etc., and say, "hey, we have this info page on SPMS, and I thought that you might find it helpful/want to link to it." But chances are, the MS influencers already have their own proprietary content on SPMS, and there isn't much value to linking to it. Therefore, I think that we'll get few link earning conversions on the effort. However, what if I take our Secondary Progressive MS landing page, and I link to it in a corresponding article about SPMS research, as I did here: http://bionews-tx.com/news/2014/01/30/secondary-progressive-ms-natalizumab-clinical-trial/ Then, I go to the drug developer who is at the center of this story and say to them, "hey, we recently covered your drug in the news, and I thought you might want to link to it." Then, we get a link from an MS drug developer to the news article, which in turn has a prominent anchor text, dofollow internal link to the landing page for SPMS. If the link from the drug developer is dofollow, then we flow page rank juice from the drug developer page to our news page to our landing page. To me, it's much easier to earn safe links this way than to try and shop the landing page itself. That being said, if we get a dofollow link on the news piece, we only get a diminished portion of page rank going to the landing page. Is this strategy viable? Is the indirect flow of page rank from a linking site to a news article to a landing page even worth it? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!
Link Building | | bionewstx2 -
Nofollow links exchange
Hi guys, I'm studying Seo for the first time and I'm really passionate about it. Only one simply question. Assume that I'm cited in a blog with the same PR of mine and I want to say thanks by recite the blogger in my blog. I know that If two blog backlink each other the pr juice is equal to zero. But If the other blogger link me with dofollow and I link him back with nofollow, does my blog take benefit from the link exchange? Thank u very much and sorry for my medium level english 😉
Link Building | | Italianseolover1 -
What is the difference between external followed links and internal followed links.
I have almost 3,000 external links followed and only a tiny amount of internal followed links. My website is doing really badly on google at the mo. I am also an SEO beginner and learning new stuff every day, but am not sure exactly what the difference is! Thanks!
Link Building | | heleni0 -
The best way to spend 4 hours/day on offsite SEO?
I have an assistant who is able to do 4 hrs of SEO work for me every day. I don't have much onsite SEO work for him to do, and he's not skilled for social media management, so I'm thinking the best thing to have him do is manual link building. So far I've had him create a spreadsheet of more than 1,000 blogs and directories that relate to the subject matter of our websites, and had him include the domain authority of each and if they use the "nofollow" attribute on their links. Next I will have him start adding comments/submissions that include links back to our sites, starting with the highest DA sties and ones without the "nofollow" attributes. Do you agree this is the best way to have him spend his time? Are there other tasks you would highly recommend? Ryan
Link Building | | GreenHatWeb0 -
Domain Authority and nofollow links?
Hello, I'm wondering, are 'nofollow' links from websites with high domain authority beneficial? Would they boost our own DA? In essence, I'm wondering if there is added value (other than visitors clicking the link) to being linked to by a 'nofollow' link. Thanks!
Link Building | | yacpro130 -
Link building and directory links to a new site
I have three new sites all hosted on the same server in the same public html folder and each site is in a different folder inside the public html folder. These sites are a listing of live music venues in different cities in Texas. Should I link these sites together to increase page rank to each other and also put key search phrases in the anchor text and place these links in the text in the center of each page of each site to make the links more effective? Also, because the sites are about a year old they don't have many inlinks yet. If i submit them to about 50 directories will Google not like this because there are way more directory links than natural links? I've been told that it is trouble to have more than about 50% directory links compared to natural links. Thanks in advance for your answers! Take care,
Link Building | | Ron10
Ron0