Question Regarding Inbound Links
-
Hi,
I have someone who asked me for some advice on his website and I want to make sure I don't give him the wrong advice.
Basically he runs a mortgage company and is linked to from a popular estate agent. Now he has over 11,000 links coming from this agent because his link appears on each listing. Someone said that the link should be made nofollow which i understand, but it has been like this for over a year and he is ranking highly for a search term that he cannot afford to lose. Should he just leave it as is or should he change it from dofollow to nofollow.
Looking at open site explorer it says he only has 25 inbound links but lists the thousands, but If i remember rightly it only counts links from the same domain once.
Hopefully someone can help me with this as I want to make sure what I tell his is correct.
Thanks
Paul
-
You're very welcome Paul! It's a very important question and had we not seen Penguin, my answer may have been different. It just shows how much that update changed the SEO landscape.
-
Thanks so much for the advice, that is really helpful and makes a lot of sense.
Thanks
-
Personally, I would nofollow.
It's just being proactive - there's a pretty good chance with that amount of links (all the same anchor text as well, I presume? Could be a problem even if branded) that he may get flagged by Google for a penguin penalty. If it was this and only this that trigged the penalty, then it might be a quick and easy fix - but you cannot be sure.
What you can be sure of is that if you make these nofollow, you're much more unlikely to get pinged by the Penguin. So, in a choice of nofollowing now and maybe taking a slight rankings hit, or riding it out and maybe getting pinged in the future and getting a big rankings hit for an indeterminable amount of time, I'd go with the option that I could control.
There could be a compromise - if he can get the links on each listing removed, but can be listed a single time on the homepage as a partner, or on a partners page, if done in a natural way then this could still pass on the majority (if not all) of the link strength, while being a lot more safer in Google's eyes.
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
-
Inbound Links Updated Frequency
Hi, How frequently is the inbound link report updated? I have added a number of inbound links this week, but they are not showing in Moz Thanks
Link Building | | nadiachapmanphoto1 -
Buy domain, redirect, get all the good links (+link juice) and disavow the spammy ones?
There is a domain for sale that has a quite nice profile and a lot of good backlinks, but also quite a few spammy ones. This domain has a Spam Score of 14% acc. to Moz Link explorer, ours has only 2%. My questions: 1. The domain and the good backlinks are related to or close to our content/keywords. But we are worried whether the "spammy" ones will hurt us. Does anyone has experience with this? 2. Would it help if we disavow the spammy backlinks afterwards? And if so, how do we do that? Add new domain to search console, disavow the bad links and then redirect the entire domain to our domain or redirect the domain first and then disavow from our property? Many thanks for your help!
Link Building | | pissuptours0 -
Effects of a bad link linking to a image
i am getting a lot of links from wallpapers sites.. One person has created 1000's of similar sites that are linking back to my images. My guess is images do not pass link value positive or negative. But I am not sure what the potential effects would be. Does anyone know who linking to images might effect SEO especially when there coming from horribly low quality auto generated sites.
Link Building | | KentH0 -
Spammy Links in MOZ but when I go to the external link I can't find a link to us
I was going to try to contact webmasters to see if they would remove some of our spammy links. I see alot of them in MOZ but when you go to the site our anchor text is not there. Is this good? How often does MOZ refresh external links. Please see: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.totalvac.com None of the links for the anchor text <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="vacuum cleaner parts vacuum parts vacuum bags vacuum cleaner bags" data-id="46391436859">vacuum cleaner parts vacuum part...</a> in MOZ exist? We got hit extremely hard by Penguin in May
Link Building | | totalvac0 -
Advetorial links
How do you scientifically value advertorial links. I have a site who is willing to buy advertorial in large online sites which will contain links. (I would prefer they invested in content on their own site). The DA on these sites is universally extremely strong. the PA of the examples I've seen is pretty low. The site has strong DA matching it's main competition and is performing pretty well in terms of ranking. Question: how do you value this kind of link in terms of the amount of £ the publications want to charge. Anybody have a formula or a logical process which would provide solid advice rather than don't infringe Google's T&C's which I've already mentioned to them. Any thoughts appreciated.
Link Building | | Shivvyt0 -
Question about forwarding domains and link juice
We currently have a domain that has a small amount of inbound links: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.1800wecoach.com/a!links We decided to switch over to a different domain name, which currently has 0 inbound links. What we were wondering is which would be better: link to the new domain from the old domain in a prominent location on all pages. or forward the old domain to the new domain? does forwarding a domain pass linkjuice?
Link Building | | adriandg0 -
Value of Inbound Links to Pages With a lot of Outbound Links
Suppose you have a resource page of the Top 50 Awesome Sites in your niche. Since there are about 50 outbound links, then I would think there will be less Page Rank being passed to internal pages from internal links on the resource page. Since you are getting less PR passed to internal pages, are there other ways the inbound links can be beneficial, such as increasing the diversity of links of your domain? Sites like SEO Optimise seem to create a lot of Top 30 Resources lists and I have read that they think it is a strong tactic.
Link Building | | SparkplugDigital0 -
Very simple Link question: Ziggy Marley homepage
Newbie here: My client is Zion rootswear. They need links, bad. They have friends in high rank places, this is good. Ziggy Marley has a link to them on his homepage: Gear: Zion Rootswear this takes the user to the website when clicked QUESTION Should I have the ziggy team change it to www.zionrootswear.com? Ill assume this is obvious, yes they should....more juice...right? I need an expert opinion. Thanks Mozzers.
Link Building | | Giggy0