Anyone See This Before? Google Following Links that are Not Hyperlinks
-
Today I was going through my Google Webmaster URL Errors (404s) info. I came across two links in my URL Errors report that are NOT actually hyperlinks on the source page.
Both of these links are from two different forum-type websites. In both cases, the post references a URL on my website (incorrectly, hence the 404 error) in the text of the post but did NOT actually link to my site. I looked at the source code...no href.
Both forum posts simply had a
tag or
tag around the incorrect URL text referencing my site.
I have never seen this before or heard that Google will follow a URL that is not actually a hyperlink. Anyone else?
-
Had a bit of a dig and found this post which seems to confirm the reference being followed such as it is although not clear if any real ranking benefit.
http://dejanseo.com.au/seo-experiment-with-non-link-references/
Certainly is an interesting case and I agree nice to be able to 'fix' these errors and if there is some seo side benefits of any kind, so much the better!
-
Lynn:
A public service type thing letting you know about a bad URL and if someone copy and paste the URL it won't 404 anymore by setting up a 301 is possible.
I check my WMT about every month for 404s and this is the first time that I noticed these kinds of "links".
I just checked my latest backlinks report in WMT and these non-links don't show up in this report.
Perhaps there is some co-occurrence SEO benefit though? Even if there is no SEO benefit it is nice "fixing" these for the potential website visitor to my site and I like seeing people mentioning us.
-
Hi,
I just saw this in one of my gwt reports also, same case, a full url in a forum, http:// and all, but not linked and it is showing up in the 404 errors notices.
Is it likely that this is just a public service type thing from GWT letting you know that there is a bad url floating around?
At the end of the day a full url is pretty much the same as a link, its just not clickable! To be honest I would be a bit surprised if google wasn't noting these type of references. Open to abuse sure, but in many cases completely legitimate references to other pages that just happen to not be hyperlinks. Doubt it contributes much (if anything) to rankings but not that surprising I guess that google can see it for what it is (a reference to a url) and if that url is bad then it shows up in your gwt reports.
-
AndieF:
Sure. Here is a link to one...
http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/lighting/msg112233371417.html
The link that shows up in my Webmaster Tools is in the 2nd post from davidtay - http://www.pegasuslighting.com/4inch-12v-recessed-lighting-housing-rem odel-75w.html.
Here is another one...
http://www.opensourcescript.net/answers/question.php?qid=20130425170248AACa3M1
The link that shows up in my Webmaster Tools is in the 3rd Answer - http://www.pegasuslighting.com/under-cab
Thanks for sharing that video! I can definitely see Matt's point about potential abuse. However, from my Webmaster Tools it definitely looks like they are following these reference links and not completely ignoring them.
-
Really interesting. Would you be able to share with us the URLs of your site and the forums it's at?
Edit: I found this video at in which Matt Cutts suggests that they don't use it as a signal, although it is a few years old now.
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
-
Brushing up on my SEO skills - how do I check my website to see if Javascript is blocking search engines from crawling the links within a javascript-enabled drop down menu?
I set my user agent in my Chrome browser to Googlebot and I disable javascript within my Chrome settings, but then what?
Technical SEO | | MagnitudeSEO0 -
Homepage is deindexed in Google
We recently noticed that our primary page was de-indexed in Google. When looking in google search console there are no manual actions taken. We did add a few new banners to the site but I have no idea why this would have negatively affected that site. I did add a new page called https://enleaf.com/company/testimonials/ that had some duplicate testimonials that were also on the home page but have since removed that. Not sure where to go from here.
Technical SEO | | AChronister0 -
How to remove the specific link from Google Listed Index?
I am working on SEO for an e-commerce client. When I search for brand name in the Google it displays the top link with tabular index of categories. Whereas I want to remove the category called Coffee from the tabular index because it redirecting to the Home page which is not relevant. For your ref. attached is the screenshot. pXjdaCH.png
Technical SEO | | mountain.penguine0 -
Why Google ranks a page with Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW?
Hi guys, I was playing with the new OSE when I found out a weird thing: if you Google "performing arts school london" you will see w w w . mountview . org. uk at the 3rd position. The point is that page has "Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", why Google indexed it? Here you can see the robots.txt allows Google to index the URL but not the content, in article they also say the meta robots tag will properly avoid Google from indexing the URL either. Apparently, in my case that page is the only one has the tag "NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", but it's the home page. so I said to myself: OK, perhaps they have just changed that tag therefore Google needs time to re-crawl that page and de-index following the no index tag. How long do you think it will take to don't see that page indexed? Do you think it will effect the whole website, as I suppose if you have that tag on your home page (the root domain) you will lose a lot of links' juice - it's totally unnatural a backlinks profile without links to a root domain? Cheers, Pierpaolo
Technical SEO | | madcow780 -
Penalised due to links?
Hi, Is there a way to tell if a site has been penalised for it's links? Our site dropped last Friday, and we would like to rule out links, as we plan to move the site to our main site and re-direct the links, unless Google would punish the new url due to this. Our old site does not show any warnings for the link, and neither does our Google WM account, the only thing we have to go by is a big drop in SERP. Many thanks. Quime.
Technical SEO | | Quime0 -
Help with pages Google is labeling "Not Followed"
I am seeing a number of pages that I am doing 301 redirects on coming up under the "Not Followed" category of the advanced index status in google webmasters. Google says this might be because the page is still showing active content or the redirect is not correct. I don't know how to tell if the page is still showing active content, and if someone can please tell me how to determine this it would be greatly appreciated. Also if you can provide a solution for how to adjust my page to make sure that the content is not appearing to be active, that would be amazing. Thanks in advance, here is a few links to pages that are experiencing this: www.luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/sunnyisles.html www.luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/summerield.html
Technical SEO | | Jdubin0 -
Cantags within links affect Google's perception of them?
Hi, All! This might be really obvious, but I have little coding experience, so when in doubt - ask... One of our client site's has navigation that looks (in part) like this: <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="http://www.mysite.com/section1"></a> <a <span="">src="images/arrow6.gif" width="13" height="7" alt="Section 1">Section 1</a><a <span=""></a> WC3 told us the tags invalidate, and while I ignored most of their comments because I didn't think it would impact on what search engines saw, because thesetags are right in the links, it raised a question. Anyone know if this is for sure a problem/not a problem? Thanks in advance! Aviva B
Technical SEO | | debi_zyx0 -
HTTP301 or link ?
We have a page on a website (let's name it ABC) which ranks very well on Google for a specific keyword but this keyword is not the main activity of website ABC. For this reason we created website XYZ for offering the services related to the specific keyword. How shall we redirect the visitors from website ABC to website XYZ so XYZ gets all the weight ? Is it best to do an HTTP301 from the specific page on site ABC or from site ABC, remove nearly all content related to the keyword and create a link to website XYZ ? Your advice is well appreciated.
Technical SEO | | netbuilder0