A Puzzling Link
-
I'm stumped and I'm hoping some mozzers will be able to help.
I run our company blog (http://scottymacblog.com/). The last couple of days I have noticed that the blog is receiving some traffic from cnn.com. I looked, but cannot find any mention of the blog on cnn. Adding to my frustration is that the content on cnn is constantly changing. Our blog doesn't do any sort of advertising and no one affiliated with the blog posts on cnn. As great as it is to be getting traffic from such a valued source, I have no idea why.
Has something like this happened to (for?) anyone else? Any ideas on how I can research the source of the link?
Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks for everyone's responses! I believe I have solved the mystery.
I went into my analytics and found that traffic had been sent from cnn.com, edition.cnn.com and weather.cnn.com. EGOL had mentioned the widgets that news sites will often use to link to relevant stories. Turns out I found a widget on the weather page that is administered by outside.in - a service that localizes content. I added our blog's feed to outside.in months ago and completely forgot about it. So, I'm assuming, someone who was searching weather or news in the Portland area perhaps would see our most recent post on Portland food carts.
I'm assuming these widgets don't pass any link juice, but I'm so glad to have the traffic and exposure. I suggest anyone who ever writes localized content should sign up for outside.in - your post might just show up on cnn.com.
-
Are you running any Adwords ads? Sometimes when someone clicks on an Ad on another website, in some analytics programs it will look like you are getting visits from that website. So, perhaps one of your Adwords ads is appearing within CNN's Adsense?
-
The other thing I find useful when there is puzzling links to our clients websites is scanning through Google Webmaster Tools. Go into the links section and it will find show you the exact url the link is located on. This does though assume that the link on cnn.com is crawlable, indexable and has been displayed. If the scenario is happening that EGOL mentioned then this recommendation will not help.
-
Sometimes CNN and other news sites have widgets that link out to relevant sites or sites that have linked to one of their stories. Often the text within these widgets is not crawled by search engines - making it very hard to locate.
Also, you might have been mentioned with a link in the comments under a story.
You know that cnn.com is the domain sending the traffic... does your analytics have a way to detect the full URL? If you have daily log files you could run one through a log analysis program such as WebLogExpert looking for all cnn.com referral pages.
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
-
Rel Sponsored on Internal Links
Hi all. Should you use rel sponsored on internal links? Here is the scenario: a company accepts money from one of their partners to place a prominent link on their home page. That link goes to an internal page on the company's website that contains information about that partner's service. If this was an external link that the partner was paying for, then you would obviously use rel="sponsored" but since this is a link that goes from awebsite.com to awebsite.com/some-page/, it seems odd to qualify that link in this way. Does this change if the link contains a "sponsored" label in the text (not in the rel qualifier)? Does this change if this link looks more like an ad (i.e. a banner image) vs. regular text (i.e. a link in a paragraph)? Thanks for any and all guidance or examples you can share!
Technical SEO | | Matthew_Edgar0 -
Malicious Link
Hello all, We're doing an adwords campaign, and Google has said that there is a malicious link on the website we're looking to advertise - so cannot launch the campaign. I've tried to go through Search Console (I am a novice BTW). And it says that "Domain properties are not supported at this time". Which I don't understand. Any advice please?!
Technical SEO | | PartisanMCR0 -
Multilingual Sitewide Links
Multilingual links in the footer section is being counted as backlink and we are getting tons of backlinks from all the 7 lingual websites. Is there a solution where we eliminate these links and still having the option to navigate to other lingual pages? vr24NAv
Technical SEO | | comfortclick0 -
Find broken links in Excel?
Hello, I have a large list of URL's in an excel sheet and I am looking for a way to check them for 404 errors. Please help! Adam
Technical SEO | | digitalops0 -
Too many internal links on one page
Hello All, I have just started using SEO moz. I had one quick question i would like answered. Currently SEOmoz is telling me that there are too many internal links. The recommendation is 100 links per page but the majority of my pages have 125+ links Will this effect the page when its crawled? Look forward to your comments. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | TWPLC_seo0 -
No-follow links on advertising pages
Hi I run a job board that enables employers to post job vacancies and information about their organisations. These are 'paid for' pages (advertising) on our site. These link out to their own websites. My question is, would it be better for these links out to their sites to be no-follow? From my site's perspective, I cannot necessarily dictate the quality of their websites (although the majority are leading firms) as I would in article and feature content, where we do happily link out and refer to other quality sites with information that gives readers further information. I know that many large job boards do this where they run listings of feeds from other sites, but should we also do this at the page level where the link out is effectively paid for. What would be the pros and cons if I do or if I don't use no-follow? I hope this makes sense and look forward to some replies. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CelestialChook0 -
How to measure number of links out from a page
Following on from earlier Q, what do you all use to count links out from a page. I believe there is a bing tool which does this, though rather than a list of sites a simple number would be ideal?
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Amazon s3 links
Hello, Dose anyone has experience with Amazon s3 ? Hosting images, site elements and static files (pdf etc) on Amazon S3 bucket can influence the link structure / juice ? (by having external links to the amazon s3 bucket / account). If you host all the site images and site resources with Amazon S3 will all those "links" count as outgoing external links ? Is it worst then having everything linking internally ? Dose anyone knows if that can hurt you ? Personally I was not able to test it and I am sure I can't test it in the near future. Hope someone has and I can skip some steps with this. Thanks !
Technical SEO | | eyepaq1