Doubt with no follow links: disavow or no action?
-
We have a google penalty (artificial links)
we have checked our link profile with link detox, and we found that a group of links that has no follow tag have been classified as toxic (stats websites mostly). But should we remove those links or what? They are no follow, it shoud be enough.
Should we include this links on the spreadsheet anyway? Should we include and add "no action taken"?
How would you proceed in that case?
Note: I know link detox is not great, but it helped us to collect data. But we have now to make decisions about the results, and I'm new on this and I have doubts. I would appreciate your help
Thank you!!!
-
It really depend on what those 'no follow' links are. Generally they cannot hurt you, but if they are done in a manipulative way eg mass blog comments, and furthermore if they are on bad sites - then they can hurt you - see Matt Cutts video with more info on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSEqypgIJME
-
Don't worry about nofollow links.
The only time to be concerned is if there is a possibility they could be changed to dofollow in the future or that they exists as dofollow links elsewhere on the site.
There is no problem listing them in your disavow file, sometimes its safer to do this for a poor quality domain. Removing them is not necessary, it may speed the recovery process up by removing them if they were dofollow but as they are nofollow I would not bother.
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
-
If I use links intag instead of "ahref" tag can Google read links inside div tag?
Hi All, Need a suggestion on it. For buttons, I am using links in tag instead of "ahref". Do you know that can Google read links inside "div" tag? Does it pass rank juice? It will be great if you can provide any reference if possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pujan.bikroy0 -
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 -
Would you pursue this paid directory link?
Hi all, I KNOW the hard and true answer to this, but I'm looking for deeper insights regarding Links like those contained on this page. I understand the by-the-book answer to this would be only pursue a paid link if it is "nofollowed" OR if it has the potential to bring in new business and traffic. My question is ....does a link like this actually pass SEO value? I see businesses killing it from an SEO standpoint with link profiles full of paid directory links like this. I also thought this conversation was more interested now that Google appears to devaluing links like this instead of issue penalties. Thoughts??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Dummy links in posts
Hi, Dummy links in posts. We use 100's of sample/example lnks as below http://<domain name></domain name> http://localhost http://192.168.1.1 http:/some site name as example which is not available/sample.html many more is there any tag we can use to show its a sample and not a link and while we scan pages to find broken links they are skipped and not reported as 404 etc? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Http, https and link juice
I'm working on a site that is built on DNN. For some reason the client has set all pages to convert to HTTPS (although this is not perfect as some don't when landing on them). All pages indexed in Google are straight HTTP, but when you click on the Google result a temp 302 header response to the corresponding HTTPS page for many. I want it changed to a 301 but unfortunately is an issue for DNN. Is there another way around this in IIS that won't break DNN as it seems to be a bit flaky? I want to have the homepage link juice pass through for all links made to non HTTPS homepage. Removing HTTPS does not seem to be an option for them.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Do I have any harmful links? If so, what should I do?
URL in question: www.nasserilegal.com/criminal.html I'm using OSE and see some questionable backlinks. At first glance, if you look at the page authority and domain authority, they look great. Once you go to the actual pages, they look spammy. If the links are hurting the rankings for the site, should I try to remove the links manually or just ignore and continue to build good quality links or even build a new site? I noticed for the last couple of weeks, the rankings started to slip. Thanks in Advance, Lucas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micasalucasa0 -
How to ping the links
When i do link building for my website, how can i let the search engines know about that. is there any way of pinging?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raybiswa0