Link cloaking in 2015\. Is it a bad idea now?
-
Hi everyone,
I run a travel-related website and work with various affiliate partners. We have thousands of pages of well-written and helpful content, and many of these pages link off to one of our affiliates for booking purposes.
Years ago I followed the prevailing wisdom and cloaked those links (bouncing them into a folder that was blocked in the robots.txt file, then redirecting them off to the affiliate). Basically, doing as Yoast has written: https://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/
However, that seems kind of spammy and manipulative these days. Doesn't Google talk about not trying to manipulate links and redirect users? Could I just "nofollow" these links instead and drop the whole redirect charade? Could cloaking actually work against you?
Thoughts? Thanks.
-
Yes and anything to do with WordPress link cloaking and redirects the must have plug-in is 'Pretty Link Pro'. It provides super easy link management and handy analytics on every outbound link you create. I've been using it for years and it's great.
-
Yeah, so I always thought that Google hating on affiliate links was a myth. Then I had an affiliate site started losing rankings. They went back up when I nofollowed the links. That was years ago, but it's still my preferred solution.
I suspect Google is already smart enough to understand what's happening, but they avoid doing anything about it because it's not impacting rankings and some people use it for legitimate reasons. Maybe some site owners don't trust the site they're sending traffic to, and don't want them to know which content is working best. Maybe others have a poor method of tracking that involves redirect.
I'm familiar with Yoast's solution, but I don't think it's helpful. It might make it look like you have more internal links, but I sincerely doubt Google is going to reward you for that. I recommend nofollow in any case, and direct links unless you have some other reason to avoid them.
-
Interesting question. Yes, just adding the no follow attribute would be a much better solution, but it's not always optimal to have your full affiliate links exposed to everyone.
I would still run with the redirect linking process that you're using, provided that the mechanics of it are sound, and they work. But I would just make sure that all of the links are actually nofollow links. Linking out to sites in a bad neighbourhood is what will hurt your site's rankings. Provided that your affiliate sites aren't super spammy, and all of your outbound links are nofollow, you shouldn't have a problem.
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
-
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 -
Slideshare - Links within
Hi Guys I am going to be putting some powerpoint presentations up over time. I have a couple of questions regarding slideshare. If I add links to the slideshare are these crawl able by Google etc...? If I places the powepoint presentation on our website and slideshare would this be counter productive i.e duplicate content? Love to here your suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Disavow links established in 2009??
Sorry for the length, but I believe this is an interesting situation, so hopefully you'll enjoy thinking this one over a little. Thanks for taking the time! Historical Information We’ve owned and operated printglobe.com since 2002. In late 2009, we acquired absorbentprinting.com and operated both sites until Mar, 2015, when absorbentprinting.com was redirected to printglobe.com. The reason we chose to redirect absorbentprinting.com to printglobe.com is that they were same industry, same pricing, and had a lot of product overlap, although they did have unique product and category descriptions. We saw a long and steady decline in organic traffic to absorbentprinting.com in the last couple of years leading up to the decision to redirect. By the way, while I understand the basics of SEO, neither I nor anyone else at our company could be considered an SEO practitioner. Recent Information An SEO firm we used to be engaged with us reached back out to us and noted: “I started looking through your backlink and it looks like there has been a sharp increase of referring domains.” They included a graph that does show a dramatic increase, starting around November, 2015. It’s quite dramatic and appears anything but natural. The contact from the SEO firm went on to say: “After doing a cursory review, it looks like a handful of these new links are the type we would recommend disavowing or removing.” We do little in the way of “link building” and we’re in a relatively boring industry, so we don’t naturally garner a lot of links. Our first thought was that we were the victim of a negative SEO attack. However, upon spot checking a lot of the recent domains linking to us, I discovered that a large % of the links that had first shown up in AHREFS since November are links that were left as comments on forums, mostly in 2009/2010. Since absorbentprinting.com was redirected to printglobe.com in Mar, 2015, I have no idea why they are just now beginning to show up as links to printglobe.com. By the numbers, according to a recent download from AHREFS: Total # of backlinks to printglobe.com through mid-Feb, 2016: 8,679 of backlinks “first seen” November, 2015 or later: 5,433 Note that there were hundreds of links “first seen” in the months from Mar, 2015 to Oct, 2015, but the # “first seen” from November, 2015 to now has been 1,500 or greater each full month. Total # of linking domains through mid-Feb, 2016: 1,182 of linking domains first seen November, 2015 or later: 850 Also note that the links contain good anchor text distribution Finally, there was a backlink analysis done on absorbentprinting.com in April, 2013 by the same firm who pointed out the sharp increase in links. At that time, it was determined that the backlink profile of absorbentprinting.com was normal, and did not require any actions to disavow links or otherwise clean up the backlinks. My Questions: If you’ve gotten through all that, how important does it seem to disavow links now? How urgent? I’ve heard that disavowing links should be a rare undertaking. If this is so, what would you think of the idea of us disavowing everything or almost everything “first seen” Nov, 2015 and later? Is there a way to disavow at the linking domain level, rather than link-by-link to reduce the number of entries, or does it have to be done for each individual link? If we disavow around 5.5k links since Nov, 2015, what is the potential for doing more harm than good? If we’re seeing declining organic traffic in the past year on printglobe.com pretty much for the first time in the site’s history, can we attribute that to the links? Anything else you’d advise a guy who’s never disavowed a link before on this situation? Thanks for any insights! Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PrintGlobeSEO0 -
Link Audit - Sponsor/Partners Images Links
Hi everyone, 1. I'm conducting a link audit and read that if you are a sponsor or partner of a company, links should be nofollowed. I always no follow them if they are money keywords, but branded I leave alone. is that a good strategy? Or do i nofollow my brand name as well? 2. What if I'm a sponsor and have my company logo on their website that links to my website? How would i know if that link should be nofollowed? a. Does it depend on the "alt" of the image? b. Does it depend on the landing page of the link of the image? c. Do i just no follow image links from sponsor pages and partner pages as a whole? Please keep in mind that I'm sponsoring websites that are relevant to my niche. PLEASE HELP!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Unnatural Links Removal - are GWMT links enough?
Hi, When working on unnatural links penalty, is removing and disavowing links shown on the GWMT enough or should the list be broaden to include OSE and Majestic etc.? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Am I buying links according to Google?
I have the opportunity to sponsor a variety of sections in a variety of .edu sites. Really appealing since they will both provide high quality traffic as well as to help our rankings... (maybe 🙂 )... Anyway this opportunity involves a monetary exchange, no different than advertising in Adwords and/or buying a display ad with the NYT. The links will be both text and banner... With follow links. My questions to you guys are: Is this practice penalize? And will display ads pass link juice also? Thanks for the help...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dhidalgo10 -
Best links to gain?
Hi, Just a quick one to see what peoples thoughts are regarding links. I have just gained a free link on a .gov website in the UK. In one of their offers pages, will this provide any link value or domain trust to me and what can the benefits be SEO wise from having a link on a government domain? The link is just the website url with a a few lines of text detailing our address etc... so its not got any anchor text regarding targetting one of our brands. It is equallly, less or more important to target anchor text links to specific brands or to get good high quality links from trusted sites such as the .gov one I have linking to my root domain? The website is a local council website in the UK. And was listed by a member of their staff, who only list in the offer page if your offering discount to council members etc..., so its not a spammed page or anything like that. What are peoples views on anchor text links vs domain url links? Cheers Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0