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?
-
It is indeed. One the one hand, err on the side of caution - on the other, links are required, but with that many affiliate links, I would have though Google was ignoring them.
-Andy
-
Thanks for your feedback Andy - In this instance the site has a history of penalties, so perhaps more vulnerable. It's hard to know for sure, of course.
-
As a matter of course, I would tend to nofollow affiliate links, but I can't say I have ever seen a site penalised for having inbound affiliate links.
Unless there was a manual penalty or some other reason, I still wouldn't rush to nofollow them if all is working well.
-Andy
-
Hi Matt - thanks for feedback - my main concern is upwards of a million affiliate backlinks that have come in recently - they are live, unfortunately.
-
The site is performing fine and many of the backlinks are freely given - just a few - however they have started some major affiliate marketing work and I see the backlinks coming in are nofollow and there are lots of them.
To give you an example - the latest company linking has sent through over 1,100,000 follow links to a few pages on the website (mainly a calculator for financing the motorhome).
These are all follow links and I'm thinking 302 or nofollow would be far safer, yet they're all live right now. I believe the client did ask for nofollow tags but they weren't implemented correctly.
One problem is the site is so reliant on these follow backlinks from affiliates for its rankings - if I just march in there and implement nofollows it will hit organic rankings.
-
Hi Luke,
Google is smarter than ever when it comes to links, so if something is freely given and isn't advertising, I wouldn't necessarily be no-following all of these.
Have a read through Google's guidelines on what they suggest for no-following here.
How is the site actually performing? Are they ranking badly in Google? Is visibility low? Are there any manual penalties? Have the site recently undergone any big changes?
Lots of other questions to look at before rushing at links.
-Andy
-
Luke,
I feel like you are jumping the gun, here. Is your site ranking poorly that might suggest a penalty?
You said there are a huge amount of links. How many? What is the context/ location of the links? Do the linking sites have high spam scores?
I wouldn't rush but consider those questions before proceeding.
Matt
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 - Redirect, Leave Alone, etc
Hi, I recently download the inbound links report for my client to look for some opportunities. When they switched to our platform a couple years ago, the format of some of their webpages change, so a number of these inbound links are going to an error page and should be redirected. However, some of these are spammy. In that case, someone recommended to me to disavow them but still redirect anyway. In other cases, some were "last seen" a year or two ago, so when I try to go to the URL the link is coming from, I also get an error page. Should I bother to redirect in these cases? Should I disavow in both cases? Or leave them alone? Thanks for any input!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac261 -
SEO Links in Footer?
Hi, One of my clients uses a pretty powerful SEO tool, won't mention the name. They now have a "link equity" tool, which they are using on a lot of their client's sites, which include tons of fortune 500 companies. It involves add footer links to your site that change based on the content of the page they are on. The machine learning tries to figure out the most related pages and links to them with the heading tag of that page as the anchor text. Initially this sounds very spammy to me. But then, it seems a lot like "related products" tools that many companies use. The goal for this tool is to build up internal linking, especially for deeper pages on their site. They have over 10,000 currently. What are everyone's thoughts on this strategy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vetofunk2 -
JavaScript encoded links on an AngularJS framework...bad idea for Google?
Hi Guys, I have a site where we're currently deploying code in AngularJS. As part of this, on the page we sometimes have links to 3rd party websites. We do not want to have followed links on the site to the 3rd party sites as we may be perceived as a link farm since we have more than 1 million pages and a lot of these have external 3rd party links. My question is, if we've got javascript to fire off the link to the 3rd party, is that enough to prevent Google from seeing that link? We do not have a NOFOLLOW on that currently. The link anchor text simply says "Visit website" and the link is fired using JavaScript. Here's a snapshot of the code we're using: Visit website Does anyone have any experience with anything like this on their own site or customer site that we can learn from just to ensure that we avoid any chances of being flagged for being a link farm? Thank you 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AU-SEO0 -
Obscene anchor text linking to non-existent pages on my site
My website seems to be rapidly accumulating links from what seem to be reputable websites and which are going to non-existent pages on my website. The anchor text of many of these links is obscene. Here is the URL of one of the pages that is linking to me. I contacted the originating site a couple of weeks ago and they are looking into it but I've not heard back. I'm guessing the originating sites have been hacked. Should I be concerned? Why are they linking to pages on my site that don't exist? http://www.radicalartistsagency.com/htmlarea/language/0content_abo_utus.html Looking at the page source of this page reveals the hidden links.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MartinDS0 -
Do legitimately earned links from unrelated sites help or hurt?
We have a few charity events coming up that have offered to link back to our homepage. While we do genuinely like the charities we are going to sponsor, I'm not sure how those links will look seo-wise. For example, one is for the local high school basketball team and another is for a Pediatric Care Mud Run. To a human, these links make perfect sense, but to a robot, I'm not sure if it differentiates these links from spam/some negative link. Granted, I understand that a small percentage of links probably won't do anything either way, but I'd like to ignore that for the purposes of my question. All things being equal, do links such as these help or hurt? Thanks for your time and insight, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Clear out Spammy Links
I was looking at my Open Site Explorer, and I noticed that now we have link anchor text in terrible words (porn videos, free streaming porn movies, big black c*ck) I believe this is an ex employee who we caught doing black hat seo and now they are retaliating. Has anyone had this happen to them? I need to know how to remove these links and make it stop. We have had a slight decline in our ranking as well, and wasn't sure if it could be the result of all this spamming. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AmandaJ0 -
Link-Building - Directories
Hello, The SEO world is a bit confuse in the last months with the Google Antartic updates. Its normal since Google is trying to kill SEO to have more Adwords publicity results. My most recent doubt is about directories. I heard Matt Cutts from Google in a recent Google Hangout saying that registering a website in directorys was ok, but not the ideal method to become relevant in the internet world. However it seems that this procedure is not against the Google policies. Now, here in the forums, I already saw someone writing about adding your site to directories and how dangerous that situacion is. So, whats your opinion about adding your site to free and pay directories as first link-building strategy? If directories are out of the question, why SEOmoz as a huge list of paid directorys? Is SEOmoz outdate?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PedroM1 -
Is widget linkbaiting a bad idea now that webmasters are getting warnings of unnatural links?
I was reading this article about how many websites are being deindexed because of an unnatural linking profile and it got me thinking about some widgets that I have created. In the example given, a site was totally deindexed and the author believes the reason was because of multiple footer links from themes that they created. I have one site that has a very popular widget that I offer to others to embed into their site. The embed code contains a line that says, "Tool provided by Site Name". Now, it just so happens that my site name contains my main keyword. So, if I have hundreds of websites using this tool and linking back to me using the same anchor text, could Google see this as unnatural and possibly deindex me? I have a few thoughts on what I should do but would love to hear your thoughts: 1. I could use a php script to provide one of several different anchor text options when giving my embed code. 2. I could change the embed code so that the anchor text is simply my domain name, ie www.mywebsitename.com rather than "my website name". Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarieHaynes1