Odd backlinks from yahoo news
-
Can anyone explain what this backlink does? The original content was syndicated on Yahoo News from Mashable. At first glance it appears to be a straight up follow link from Yahoo to Mashable, but upon closer inspection I saw this in the code.
went public just three months ago
Here's the article on yahoo news: http://news.yahoo.com/facebook-zynga-generates-12-revenue-them-175509319.html
I've rarely seen backlinks from yahoo for any content partner let alone follow links. The us.lrd.yahoo.com in the hyperlink makes me highly suspicious.
-
Thanks Michael! That was quite insightful : )
-
Hey Mike Fan,
What you're looking at there is called a data reference link (that ylt= attribute gives it away). In short, it is indeed a followed link and would pass any authority you'd expect from a plain old link. The big difference is in how it's used.
The _ylt type variables are data packets. They contain specific base64 encoded data. The link could be a login, referential data, tracking data, or even spyware. The main point is someone making that link wants to keep track of who's doing what with it. On large sites, it's actually more common than you'd think for tracking purposes.
In short, this link is probably fine, even if it's a little scary looking in the page source. When a site that famously no=follows uses a followed link, you better believe they're going to track what's going on when they do.
Mike
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 few backlinks got deleted how they affect website?
Dear Experts,
Technical SEO | | jfdagborrbg
This is Julia and I am SEO Executive at J com. I would like to ask that If we are building 150+ quality backlinks per month for any website and 30 backlinks are deleting each month from 150 backlinks so It would be OK (natural) OR it would affect website ranking. I am looking forward to your response0 -
To avoid errors in our Moz crawl, we removed subdomains from our host. (First we tried 301 redirects, also listed as errors.) Now we have backlinks all over the web that are broken. How bad is this, from a pagerank standpoint?
Our MOZ crawl kept telling us we had duplicate page content even though our subdomains were redirected to our main site. (Pages from Wineracks.vigilantinc.com were 301 redirected to vigilantinc.com/wineracks.) Now, to solve that problem, we have removed the wineracks.vigilantinc.com subdomain. The error report is better, but now we have broken backlinks - thousands of them. Is this hurting us worse than the duplicate content problem?
Technical SEO | | KristyFord0 -
Help with google news application url question
Hi, i am going to be applying to have out site in google news but i have come across the below and not sure how we do this. I use joomla and our site is www.in2town.co.uk and the page we are including is http://www.in2town.co.uk/latest-news-headlines Article URLs. To make sure that we only crawl new articles, please make sure your URLs are unique with at least 3 digits, and are permanent. can anyone please let me know how i do this with the url please
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Google News Referral Traffic Gone after CMS Upgrade
Hoping someone can help. I've tried the Google forum which is it's usual vacuous hole of no help. We recently upgraded our CMS which now includes automated sitemaps (not sure if this impacts news sitemaps, though). Anyway, after rollout, we're no longer getting any traffic from Google News. Sequence of Events: 1. Dec. 13 launch 2. Google news referral traffic stopped 3. IT tried to 'fix' and now we're getting the elusive 'publication name' message The publication name specified in your Sitemap does not match the publication name we have for your site in our database. Please check that the publication name in your Sitemap exactly matches the publication name displayed for your articles in Google News. 4. Retested sitemap When I retest the news sitemap, it returns 0 errors. When I do a site:mnn.com (our website) on the Google New Homepage, new content is showing up in SERP Yet, still no google news referral traffic. Our news sitemap is www.mnn.com/googlenews.xml Can someone help? We're a news site, and can't afford to lose this traffic. Would love an early Christmas present. Thanks!! Lisa
Technical SEO | | Aggie0 -
Removing irrelevant items from Google News?
A client wants to know if it's possible to get Google to remove stories from Google News feeds if those stories have nothing to do with the client? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | JamesAMartin0 -
Article Marketing for Backlinks
Ok I know there's a lot of information already on here about Article Marketing for SEO, but I need to know if anyone here has recently ran an article campaign successfully? Correct me if I am wrong, but submitting the same article to a bunch (more than 1-2) article directories for back links is a bad idea. Right? Maybe it worked in 2006, but now even the site themselves (Article Directories) are just so polluted with spam from the pass that, that Even if you submitted a genuine article.. it would still not give you as much Juice because the sites themselves are considered spamy. Looking at Alexa's ranking of Ezine Articles kind of proves that, after Panda Hit. The bottom line is, my boss says I have to start writing articles for backlinks. He wanted me to blast them across multiple directories. So I need to be absolutely certain that where I place these articles will have Quality impact on our sites SEO. Tips, Advice, Links, THANKS! We are a prominent ecommerce site in the food service industry.
Technical SEO | | Burkett.com0 -
Backlinks to home page vs internal page
Hello, What is the point of getting a large amount of backlinks to internal pages of an ecommerce site? Although it would be great to make your articles (for example) strong, isn't it more important to build up the strength of the home page. All of My SEO has had a long term goal of strengthening the home page, with just enough backlinks to internal pages to have balance, which is happening naturally. The home page of our main site is what comes up on tons of our keyword searches since it is so strong. Please let me know why so much effort is put into getting backlinks to internal pages. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | BobGW0 -
Why do I rank so differently in Bing and Yahoo?
Howdy SEOmozers, I've noticed that I rank very differently in Bing and Yahoo compared to Google (and it’s the bad kind of different) for many of the terms that I'm targeting. Can anyone give some advice on how I can put this right or link me to some good resources about the differences in their ranking algorithms? Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | pauldoffman1