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
-
Site Footer Links Used for Keyword Spam
I was on the phone with a proposed web relaunch firm for one of my clients listening to them talk about their deep SEO knowledge. I cannot believe that this wouldn’t be considered black-hat or at least very Spammy in which case a client could be in trouble. On this vendor’s site I notice that they stack the footer site map with about 50 links that are basically keywords they are trying to rank for. But here’s the kicker shown by way of example from one of the themes in the footer: 9 footer links:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RosemaryB
Top PR Firms
Best PR Firms
Leading PR Firms
CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR Firms
Technology PR Firms
PR Firm
Government PR Firms
Public Sector PR Firms Each link goes to a unique URL that is basically a knock-off of the homepage with a few words or at the most one sentences swapped out to include this footer link keyword phrase, sometimes there is a different title attribute but generally they are a close match to each other. The canonical for each page links back to itself. I simply can’t believe Google doesn’t consider this Spammy. Interested in your view.
Rosemary0 -
Black Hat SEO Case Study - Private Link Network - How is this still working?
I have been studying my competitor's link building strategies and one guy (affiliate) in particular really caught my attention. He has been using a strategy that has been working really well for the past six months or so. How well? He owns about 80% of search results for highly competitive keywords, in multiple industries, that add up to about 200,000 searches per month in total. As far as I can tell it's a private link network. Using Ahref and Open Site Explorer, I found out that he owns 1000s of bought domains, all linking to his sites. Recently, all he's been doing is essentially buying high pr domains, redesigning the site and adding new content to rank for his keywords. I reported his link-wheel scheme to Google and posted a message on the webmaster forum - no luck there. So I'm wondering how is he getting away with this? Isn't Google's algorithm sophisticated enough to catch something as obvious as this? Everyone preaches about White Hat SEO, but how can honest marketers/SEOs compete with guys like him? Any thoughts would be very helpful. I can include some of the reports I've gathered if anyone is interested to study this further. thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd0 -
Competitor using "unatural inbound links" not penalized??!
Since Google's latest updates, I think it would be safe to say that building links is harder. But i also read that Google applies their latest guidelines retro-actively. In other words, if you have built your ilnking profile on a lot of unnatural links, with spammy anchor text, you will get noticed and penalized. In the past, I used to use SEO friendly directories and "suggest URL's" to build back links, with keyword/phrase anchor text. But I thought that this technique was frowned upon by Google these days. So, what is safe to do? Why is Google not penalizing the competitor? And bottom line what is considered to be "unnatural link building" ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20101 -
Disavow - Broken links
I have a client who dealt with an SEO that created not great links for their site. http://www.golfamigos.co.uk/ When I drilled down in opensiteexplorer there are quite a few links where the sites do not exist anymore - so I thought I could test out Disavow out on them .. maybe just about 6 - then we are building good quality links to try and tackle this problem with a more positive approach. I just wondered what the consensus was?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lauratagdigital0 -
Links via scraped / cloned content
Just been looking at some backlinks on a site - a good proportion of them are via Scraped wikipedia links or sites with similar directories to those found on DMOZ (just they have different names). To be honest, many of these sites look pretty dodgy to me, but if they're doing illegal stuff there's absolutely no way I'll be able to get links removed. Should I just sit and watch the backlinks increase from these questionable sources, or report the sites to Google, or do something else? Advice please.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
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 it worthwhile to remove a large quantity of lesser quality links if you are able to do so easily?
So I've recently started working at a new company where I lead up their SEO efforts. In regards to link building I've discovered that a little over 75% of the anchor text on the links to the homepage (at least of the 10k SEOmoz provides) are non branded keywords. We don't appear to have any penalties, however, in my opinion we have what is an unnatural link profile for our homepage. As I investigated further I've noticed that a lot of these links (not all) are from irrelevant blogs where the link is found in the footer. (Clearly this was the result of some less than ideal get links quick strategy that was implemented in the past.) At first I was overwhelmed thinking that I'd have to try and contact these sites individually to see if I could get the link removed, however, I soon discovered that the site these links are actually linking to is not our domain, but is instead a domain that redirects to our site. So this brings me to my question: Should I remove the redirect from this other site to rid myself of these links. The white hat side of me strongly thinks this is a good step forward, however, a small part of me wonders what the ramifications would be. These types of redirects seem to account for a fairly high number of links, however what value that actually contribute is difficult to know. Any thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Poindexter0 -
Partners and Customers logo listing and links
We have just created a program where we list the customers that use our software and a link to their websites on a new "Customers" page. We expect to have upwards of 100 logos with links back to their sites. I want to be sure this isn't bordering on gray or black hat link building. I think it is okay since they are actual users of our software. But there is still that slight doubt. Along these same lines, would you recommend adding a nofollow or noindex tag? Thanks for your help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PerriCline0