Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
One Way Links vs Two Way Links
-
Hi,
Was speaking to a client today and got asked how damaging two way links are. i.e. domaina.com links to domainb.com and domainb.com links back to domaina.com. I need a nice simple layman's explanation of if/how damaging they are compared to one way links. And please don't answer with you lose link juice as I have a job explaining link juice.... I am explaining things to a non techie!
Thank you!!
-
think about it, you pass PR to me and i'll pass PR to you. At the same time we'll tell Google we are in cahoots together.:(
The easiest way to explain it is that Google is that linking to other sites on your site might make Google think that you are selling links and could get you penalized, so as an SEO you have a rule to never link out to other sites unless they are trusted domains like Facebook, Twitter or G+ pages. And in those cases you are linking to your social media profile pages for the user and not for helping other sites rank better which is against Google's TOS.
There is information directly on Google's Webmaster Guidelines that you can provide to them. Sometimes people prefer to hear it directly from the horses mouth.
-
Link exchanges used to do a lot. These days not so much. You can still get a benefit from them, but you need to be careful. Don't use the same anchor text, try not to get sitewide footer links, and only do so with highly valuable partners.
I mean if you can get a DA 90 site to link back to your DA 13 site then yea a link exchange would probably benefit you a bit.
But overall 1 way links are the best way to go.
-
I guess the simplest way to explain that is that they cancel each other out so have no benefit.
Additionally, if used in excess with keyword anchor text they may have a negative impact (through skewing the anchor text ratios).
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
-
How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?
We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.0 -
M.ExampleSite vs mobile.ExampleSite vs ExampleSite.com
Hi, I have a call with a potential client tomorrow where all I know is that they are wigged-out about canonicalization, indexing and architecture for their three sites: m.ExampleSite.com mobile.ExampleSite.com ExampleSite.com The sites are pretty large... 350k for the mobiles and 5 million for the main site. They're a retailer with endless products. They're main site is not mobile-responsive, which is evidently why they have the m and mobile sites. Why two, I don't know. This is how they currently hand this: What would you suggest they do about this? The most comprehensive fix would be making the main site mobile responsive and 301 the old mobile sub domains to the main site. That's probably too much work for them. So, what more would you suggest and why? Your thoughts? Best... Mike P.S., Beneath my hand-drawn portrait avatar above it says "Staff" at this moment, which I am not. Some kind of bug I guess.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Does google credit links from iFrames or created by Javascript, if so, is one more powerful than the other?
Consider this example, because I want to be clear about what I mean. You have two websites. Lets all them www.a.com and www.b.com. On www.a.com/some/page, there is an iframe something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A Former User
<iframe src="www.b.com/some/special/path"></iframe>
Then content of this iframe is a bunch of pictures, text and numbers, as well as a group of links, linking each picture to www.b.com for example the links might be:
www.b.com/content/1
www.b.com/content/2
www.b.com/content/3 Questions: When google crawls **www.a.com/some/page, **does it pass link juice to www.b.com/content/*? Does google instead consider these to be internal links within b.com itself. because links to www.b.com/content/ ** are actually from b.com itself, since the domain of the iframe is actually: www.b.com/some/special/path 3) Is there any amount of link juice passed from www.a.com/some/page to* www.b.com/some/special/path **because this is the src= element of an iframe that a.com is hosting? Consider an alternative setup. Where instead of using an iframe the contents of the above described iFrame is actually added the the page dynamically using javascript, and a call to an API endpoint at b.com. Resulting in these links being added directly to the body of a.com without being wrapped in an iframe element. Questions:
4) Do these links that were created after page load still get crawled and credited by google? (i have heard in the past that google was going to start crawling javascript, i just don't know if this is known for a fact yet).
5) Do links created on the client side hold the same weight as a link that was served directly via the backend html generation? If both the links within the iframe and the links within the javascript embed method pass link juice. Is one preferred over the other? is one known to be more effective than the other? Thanks!0 -
One company, two address. How do I handle footer NAP?
I have a client with two address that fall under the same brand. One address is in CA and the other is in NY. I have a single domain and will be creating separate landing pages for each location but wanted to know how I should handle the NAP in the footer of the other pages. Should I list both NAPs, one NAP or neither NAPs in the footer? Thanks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalWorkboots0 -
Cross linking between categories
Is it useful for SEO to cross link between TOP level categories, let's say I have a Home page and then 2 sub categories, one about green widgets one about red widgets
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Should i create a link from the green widget to the red widget or should I leave those are separate silos ? I know that within a silo i need to cross link ( from green widget 1 to green widget 2 etc... ) but how about about from the main category to the other main category ?0 -
10,000+ links from one site per URL--is this hurting us?
We manage content for a partner site, and since much of their content is similar to ours, we canonicalized their content to ours. As a result, some URLs have anything from 1,000,000 inbound links / URL to 10,000+ links / URL --all from the same domain. We've noticed a 10% decline in traffic since this showed up in our webmasters account & were wondering if we should nofollow these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Outbound Links to Authority sites
Will outbound links to a related topic on an authority site help, hurt or be irrelevanent for SEO purposes. And if beneficially, should it be Nofollow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VictorVC0 -
Best way to block a search engine from crawling a link?
If we have one page on our site that is is only linked to by one other page, what is the best way to block crawler access to that page? I know we could set the link to "nofollow" and that would prevent the crawler from passing any authority, and we can set the page to "noindex" to prevent it from appearing in search results, but what is the best way to prevent the crawler from accessing that one link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0