To follow or nofollow paid internal links?
-
I am having an internal debate on the need to use nofollow tags on sponsored internal links that link to internal pages. One thought is based on this Matt Cutts video (Should internal links use rel="nofollow"?) in which he says that there is never a need to use a nofollow tag on an internal link. The other school of thought is that paid links with follow tags are a violation of Google policy and it does not matter if they link internally or externally. Matt was just not thinking of this scenario in his short video. Would love to hear if anyone has had any manual action from Google based on their internal links.
-
Interesting question. I don't think Google has every penalized anyone for passing Pagerank to themselves. Technically all paid links should be nofollowed according to Google's policy. Practically speaking, in your case, it's more of a grey area although I seriously can't anticipate too many negative consequences.
-
I won't bother writing too much as Takeshi has pretty much covered it (IMO).
-
Yeah, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. That's like someone paying money to Facebook to have their page show up prominently in the sidebar. It's an advertisement or featured placement.
The Google policy is in reference to buying links from sites to manipulate search rankings, not to internal links on your own page. Nofollow should only be used for sites you don't trust, direct competitors, and paid links.
-
The site features tens of thousands of profiles. Profile owners can purchase sponsored links that will feature their profiles in strategic sections of the sites. These links can be featured on internal search results, related profile pages and on the top of the directory listings. The only reason their links are displayed is because they bought into the program.
-
I'm not exactly sure what you mean either, but how you link within your own site is your own business, and you won't get penalized for it. Unless the internal link is 301 redirecting to an external site, you can link however you want.
-
Hi,
I am not sure I understand the question...are you saying that you have links from one part of your site to another that have been paid for with money? That seems like a really strange way to do things.
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
-
HELP: Why do I have a 61% score for "% of total links, external + follow"?
Firstly, I understand what this percentage is. It's the ratio of external links that are "follow" -> compared to the links that are "no-follow". Four questions: This is definitely not accurate! I have loads of no-follow links Does anyone have ideas or techniques to add more healthy no-follow links? Am I completely misunderstanding this? Will this high score negatively affect my ranking? I could definitely use some help. Thanks so much in advance. I don't think my website address should help, but if you need it for context, it's estatediamondjewely.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCitron0 -
Are These Links Junk?
I hired an SEO to create incoming links to me website insisting that only white hat techniques be used. The SEO was highly recommended by a family friend. In 3 months about 14 links to my site were obtained. The URLs for the domains where the links originate are below. I paid $8,000 for the services of the SEO provider to create the links over 4 months. When I looked at the links more carefully I noticed that the sites did not seem to have owners. That there was no phone number, physical address and scant information about ownership. I also noticed that most pages had outgoing links of a promotional nature. Also, that content created for me had grammatical and occasional spelling errors. The links did not look bad in terms of MOZ domain authority and MOZ page authority, but when I went subscribed to AHREFS a few days ago and evaluated the links, I noticed that the URL rating (somewhat equivalent to MOZ page authority) was really low. Furthermore, noticed that one of the domains solicits paid links from gambling sites. The SEO who sourced the links on my behalf says he will explain why I "have nothing to worry about". Dividing his monthly fee by the number of links and I paid $571 per link. Is it possible the the below domains could have pages that I would want links from? Would these links be potentially worth more than a few hundred dollars? O are these sites more like a cheap PBN or maybe "the hoth". If the links are in fact good I would be delighted. But if they are of poor quality could I legitimately ask for a refund? Also, are these domains so bad that it is imperative for me to get the links removed? <colgroup><col width="198"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
| https://www.equities.com |
| http://www.realestaterama.com |
| https://moneyinc.com |
| https://homebusinessmag.com |
| http://digitalconnectmag.com |
| https://suburbanfinance.com/ |
| http://www.homebunch.com |
| http://inman.com |
| https://www.propertytalk.com/ |
| http://activerain.com |
| https://www.conservativedailynews.com/ |
| http://moneyforlunch.com/ |
| http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/ |
| https://www.tgdaily.com/ |
| |0 -
What link would be better?
Hi Guys, Just wondering what would be better in this instance: finding an old post (with good authority) and getting a link from that old article or creating a brand new article and adding the link to that. Finding an old post (with good authority) and getting a link from that old article Creating a brand new article and adding the link to that. Both naturally link out to the page you want a link too. To me, number 1 as the page already has authority but then again number 2 since Google might place some weight to recency. Any thoughts? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts140 -
Rel=canonical and internal links
Hi Mozzers, I was musing about rel=canonical this morning and it occurred to me that I didnt have a good answer to the following question: How does applying a rel=canonical on page A referencing page B as the canonical version affect the treatment of the links on page A? I am thinking of whether those links would get counted twice, or in the case of ver-near-duplicates which may have an extra sentence which includes an extra link, whther that extra link would count towards the internal link graph or not. I suspect that google would basically ignore all the content on page A and only look to page B taking into account only page Bs links. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk0 -
Internal nofollows?
We have a profile page on our site for members who join. The profile page has child pages that are simply more specific drill-downs of what you get on the main profile page. For example: /roger displays all of roger's posts, questions, and favorites and then there are /roger/posts, /roger/questions, /roger/favorites. Since the child pages contain subsets of the content on the main profile page, we canonical them back to the main profile page. Here's my question: The main profile page has navigation links to take you to the child pages. On /roger, there are links to: /roger/posts, /roger/questions, and /roger/favorites. Currently, we nofollow these links. Is this the right way to do it? It seems to me that it's a mistake, since the bots will still crawl those pages but will not transfer PR. What should we do instead: 1. Make the links js links so the child pages won't be crawled at all? 2. Make the links follow so that PR will flow (see Matt Cutts' advice here)? Apprehension about doing this: won't it dilute crawl budget (as opposed to #1)? 3. Something else? In case the question wasn't confusing enough... here's another piece: We also have a child page of the profile that is simply a list of members (/roger/friends). Since this page does not have any real content, we are currently noindex/nofollow -ing it and the link to this page is also nofollow. I'm thinking that there's a better solution for this as well. Would love your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Is it better "nofollow" or "follow" links to external social pages?
Hello, I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+). if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/ Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do? Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that. Any suggestions are very welcome. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau9 -
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 -
I currently have a client that has multiple domains for multiple brands that share the same IP Address. Will link juice be passed along to the different sites when they link to one another or will it simply be considered internal linking?
I have 7 brands that are owned by the same company, each with their own domain. The brands work together to form products that are then sold to the consumer although there is not a e-commerce aspect to any of the sites. I am looking to create a modified link wheel between the sites, but didn't know if my efforts would pay off due to the same IP Address for all the sites. Any insight on this would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HughesDigital0