Paid outbound links - do they have juice?
-
Hi,
A client is asking about a website that has a business model I don't normally work with - it's a site full of very informative articles - no harm there - and they are sponsored by companies who provide the service being discussed. Not really any harm there. But attached to the link is an outbound tracking device. The business model is pay per click. Has anyone had experience with this, specifically if larger search engines have picked up on this and filtered out those types of links to not count very much if at all?
Thanks!
-
Thank you both! So sorry on the delay to respond. Makes sense!
-
You said there's outbound link tracking. Check if those links are nofollowed as Ryan suggested. You can also check if if they are something like www.thatsite.com/redirect.php?id=1 and if the redirect.php has a noindex or www.thatsite.com/robots.txt has a disallow or something like that.
If the links are redirects via a tracking, they are not really being counted towards the linked to site's backlinks anyways, so I don't think there are any issues here.
-
Those links should have the "nofollow" tag applied to them as they are sponsored or paid links. If they do not have the tag applied, it is highly likely Google devalues those links anyway.
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
-
Internal Linking issue
So i am working with a review company and I am having a hard time with something. We have created a category which lists and categorizes every one of our properties. For example a specific property in the category "restaurant" would be as seen below: /restaurant/mcdonalds /restaurant/panda-express And so on and so on. What I am noticing however is that our more obscure properties are not being linked to by any page. If I were to visit the page myurl.com/restaurant I would see 100+ pages of properties, however it seems like only the properties on the first few pages are being counted as having links. So far the only way I have been able to work around this issue is by creating a page and hiding it in our footer called "all restaurants". This page lists and links to every one of our properties. However it isn't exactly user friendly and I would prefer scrapers not to be able to scrape all properties at once! Anyway, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Value of internal links like this
Hello I have a question for internal links build in the pattern below does google value these kinds of pattern of internal links... For example i have 3 pages on website A, B and C, The page A is homepage, B is cateogory page and C is product page and I am on page C, where I build internal links like this Home > Catogory > product page
Technical SEO | | tanveerayakhan0 -
Spam link? Links from linguee
Hi Everyone My site received a notification of unnatural links in Webmaster Tools and the site has had a penalty applied. I can see there are a lot of links from a site : linguee.com .de. nl. ect ..more than 30k of them! I am not sure where did those links come from! The suddenly appeared over the weekend. Does anyone has similar experience before and any suggestion? Thanks Ricky
Technical SEO | | SEO-SMB0 -
Site-wide Links
Hey y'all, I know this question has been asked many times before but I wanted to see what your stance was on this particular case. The organisation I work for is a group of 12 companies - each with its own website. On some of the sites we have a link to the other sites within the group on every single page of that site. Our organic search traffic has dropped a bit but not significantly and we haven't received any manual penalties from Google. It's also worth mentioning that the referral traffic for these sites from the other sites I control is quite good and the bounce rate is extremely low. If you were in my shoes would you remove the links, put a nofollow tag on the links or leave the links as they are? Thanks guys 🙂
Technical SEO | | AAttias0 -
Sitewide Links delete or add nofollow
This question has been asked before, and I’ve read most of the answers. However, things are somewhat different, as we are a web hosting company and have many clients that link to us site wide in the footer, as well we have a website builder application where we control the footer links on our end user's websites. Most use just our “domain name” or “Powered by Domain” Should we remove them? It does provide visitors some value as they can tell where the website is hosting, has been developed or how to sign up for our website builder or web hosting services. Right now, they are all follow, and we are working on cleaning up our link profile so looking for some great advice on how to proceed. Our link profile is very large since we are a web hosting company that has been around for 10 plus years. Thanks in advanced for your recommendations.
Technical SEO | | goodhost0 -
Solutions for too many on-page links?
We have just begun using SEO Moz a few months ago and have been busy cleaning up some of our warnings and errors. One of the errors that has been an issue is ... too many on-page links. I am trying to correct this issue and I am wondering how seo moz counts these links. For instance... we have links to many of our product categories in a drop down from our main menu, those same links are listed in our footer. Does this get counted as two or only one link. If two, should we make one of the link no follow or how would you best suggest correcting this. Our website is www.unikeyhealth.com Since the menu and the footer appear on virtually every page on our site correcting this issue will quickly sort out this problem. Thanks for any advice.
Technical SEO | | unikey0 -
Image Link
If I have an image that is well optimiswed for a keyword that the page it is on is ranking for but i put a no follow in the image link - is this going to lose the value of the image on that page. A strange question i know but this image i have on my homepage is optimised around a keyword, the image is also a link but when i changed the link in the image to no follow i seem to have dropped rankings for that keyword. Probably consicidence but i thought i would throw this question out there and get some views?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Link title with anchor text
Will there be any additional SEO value if we add link title in addition to anchor text.? Can you compare link title with image title? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | gmk15670