Secretly back-linking from whitelabel product
-
Lets say a company (provider.com) offers a whitelabel solution which enables each client to have all of the content on their own domain (product.client.com), with no branding by the content provider.
Now lets say that client.com is a site with a lot of authority, and to promote the launch of product.client.com, they put a lot of links from their main site to the subdomain. This can be very valuable link juice, and provider.com would like to be able to take advantage. The problem is, that client.com wouldn't like it if provider.com put in links on their whitelabel site.
Suppose the following:
All pages on product.client.com start to have a rel="canonical" link to themselves, with a get variable (e.g. product.client.com/page.htm -> product.client.com/page.html?show_extra_link=true)
When the page is visited with the extra get parameter "show_extra_link" a link appears in the footer that points to provider.com
My question is, would this have the same effect for provider.com as placing a link on the non-canonical version of the pages on the whitelabel site would?
-
I'm with Alan - in theory, the canonical would pass the link-juice to the version with the link, but you're not only misleading the client - you're one step away from cloaking the link. You could actually get your own clients penalized for this, and that seems very short-sighted.
Add the NOINDEX on top of this, and I'd be willing to bet that the value of these links would be very low. Even if the client approved followed white-label pages with footer links, for example, we're seeing those types of links get devalued - they're just too easy to get. Now, you add these links all at once, NOINDEX the page, and canonical to a weird variant, and you've painted a very suspicious picture for Google. It might work for a while, but you're taking a significant risk for potentially a very small gain.
-
i would say the canonical.
if the pages are not indexed, but follow, then they would have no value themselfs unless they had in-coming links. if they do have in-coming links then yes they will pass link juice, but only from the canonical i would think, based one what i said above about a canonical being much like a 301
-
Hi Alan,
All of the pages on the subdomain have a robots meta with noindex, follow on them. The pages are only used for data collection (forms), and the clients do not want their pages showing up in google, which is why extracting link juice shouldn't be a problem. As such, the canonical url need not be indexed.
From what I understand, if a page has duplicate content and specifies a rel=canonical, url, the inbound link juice effectively gets syphoned into the original content page. What I'm wondering is, which page does google use for the purpose of propagating outbound link juice?
-
With prev next the content of every page is given to page 1, in that case the link would be part of the content. But with a canonical I am not sure.
If you go by comments by Matt Cutts and Bings Duane Forrester canonicals are the same as a 301 execpt they dod not pyhsiclly move the viewer to the canonical page. so in the case of a canonical the content would not be merged, only the content on the canonical page would be indexed, the links from other verrsions would be redirected. so the link on the show_extra_link version of the page would not be indexed.
As for the morality of this, i would not do it, you are not being honet with the clint and you would be caught out sooner or later when the url was seen in the index(if it was indexed)
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 a business requestion nofollow links from businesses it has commercial relationships with?
I am working for a motor homes company that works with a network of dealers. Having just analysed the site I notice that dealers are sending links to the site - lots of them. They are all follow links and are freely given. ADDED: There are upwards of a million new affiliate backlinks and then a load of pretty normal freely given backlinks with dealers who have commission arrangements, etc., with the company on motorhome sales. Now this doesn't feel right to me because even if it isn't purposefully manipulative, it may appear so because of clear commercial relationships between my client company and the dealer businesses. So I will recommend nofollow althought the site will lose a huge number of backlinks as a result. What are your thoughts on this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
If I am getting links on competitor websites, is it safe to assume those competitors are doing this to hurt our SEO?
We have received a few notification from Google Webmaster Tools and Moz that our competitors have "mentioned" our page on their website. This is incredibly odd as you wouldn't think they'd want to do this. Further, when I go to the page that we are supposedly mentioned on, the link to our site is not on the page. What is going on? Thank you in advance for your insights!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brits0 -
Benefits of having outbound links
Are there any strengths (benefits) in having outbound links within the site regarding SEO? If linking to reputable sites, would that help increase our SEO strength or does that only work if they links back to us?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebRiverGroup1 -
How can I recover from an 'unnatrual' link penalty?
Hi I believe our site may have been penalised due to over optimised anchor text links. Our site is http://rollerbannerscheap.co.uk It seems we have been penalised for the key word 'Roller Banner' as the over optimised anchor text contains key word 'Roller Banner' or 'Roller Banners'. We dropped completely off page 1 for 'Roller Banner', how would I recover from this error?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Advice on using the disavow tool to remove hacked website links
Hey Everyone, Back in December, our website suffered an attack which created links to other hacked webistes which anchor text such as "This is an excellent time to discuss symptoms, fa" "Open to members of the nursing/paramedical profes" "The organs in the female reproductive system incl" The links were only visible when looking at the Cache of the page. We got these links removed and removed all traces of the attack such as pages which were created in their own directory on our server 3 months later I'm finding websites linking to us with similar anchor text to the ones above, however they're linking to the pages that were created on our server when we were attacked and they've been removed. So one of my questions is does this effect our site? We've seen some of our best performing keywords drop over the last few months and I have a feeling it's due to these spammy links. Here's a website that links to us <colgroup><col width="751"></colgroup>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | blagger
| http://www.fashion-game.com/extreme/blog/page-9 | If you do view source or look at the cached version then you'll find a link right at the bottom left corner. We have 268 of these links from 200 domains. Contacting these sites to have these links removed would be a very long process as most of them probably have no idea that those links even exist and I don't have the time to explain to each one how to remove the hacked files etc. I've been looking at using the Google Disavow tool to solve this problem but I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not. We haven't had any warnings from Google about our site being spam or having too many spam links, so do we need to use the tool? Any advice would be very much appreciated. Let me know if you require more details about our problem. <colgroup><col width="355"></colgroup>
| | | |0 -
Suggestion for Link Directory Script?
I own a subscription to PHP Link Directory but was wondering if anyone could suggest an alternative link directory script/software/service to PHPLD. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | fergusonconsulting0 -
How do I place the product link on my blog?
I have a shop and also a blog where I explain better the products on the site, such as: how to use, tips, recipes and more. How do I place the product link on my blog? Should I put a link with nofollow? Should not I put link? To put the link anchor text or just put the page URL? Don’t I need to worry about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | soulmktpro0 -
Retail Site and Internal Linking Best Practices
I am in the process of recreating my company's website and, in addition to the normal retail pages, we are adding a "learn" section with user manuals, reviews, manufacturer info, etc. etc. It's going to be a lot of content and there will be linking to these "learn" pages from both products and other "learn" pages. I read on a SEOmoz blog post that too much internal linking with optimized anchor text can trigger down-rankings from Google as a penalty. Well, we're talking about having 6-8 links to "learn" pages from product pages and interlinking many times within the "learn" pages like Wikipedia does. And I figured they would all have optimized text because I think that is usually best for the end user (I personally like to know that I am clicking on "A Review of the Samsung XRK1234" rather than just "A Review of Televisions"). What is best practice for this? Is there a suggested limit to the number of links or how many of them should have optimized text for a retail site with thousands of products? Any help is greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Marketing.SCG0