Rel="no follow" for All Links on a Site that Charges for Advertising
-
If I run a site that charges other companies for listing their products, running banner advertisements, white paper downloads, etc. does it make sense to "no follow" all of their links on my site?
For example: they receive a profile page, product pages and are allowed to post press releases. Should all of their links on these pages be "no follow"?
It seems like a gray area to me because the explicit advertisements will definitely be "no followed" and they are not buying links, but buying exposure.
However, I still don't know the common practice for links from other parts of their "package".
Thanks
-
Hello all,
Thanks for the input. I'm on the marketing side with a site that presents our products. I'm tryign to clean up inbound links.
I pulled the Inbound links report from Moz.com and have concluded that I want to focus on the sites that are NOT listed as "no_follow." Troouble I'm having is the report headers:
<colgroup><col width="90"><col width="115"><col width="143"><col width="95"><col width="37"></colgroup>
| Link Equity | No Link Equity | Only rel=nofollow | Only follow | 301 |
| Yes | No | No | Yes | No |Does a 'Yes' value in the 'Only rel=nofollow' column mean that the link is marked as nofollow? As in "Affirmative, this link is marekd as nofollow, yes."
Then there is the 'Only follow' and other headers. Know where I can find a Moz article explaining these?
Thanks in advance for any and all help.
Regards,
Joe
-
Right?! When you hit 200 Moz points you get a do follow - rock it Anthony!
-
I did not know that about SEOmoz. I guess I need to work on getting more points!
-
In that I case I would guess that they are PR sculpting as Google would not be able to discern if they are passing links through a paid service.
Also, if the site is relevant to a specific niche and not just a link farm I would further believe that Google would not penalize the site.
Its kind of like SEOMoz - after a certain amount of points you get a do follow on one of your links. I don't think Google would be able to discern if SEOmoz was asking for people to pay or not.
-
Thanks Mark, what I'm trying to get people's opinion on is whether it would be considered people "paying for links" if I give them followed links on my site that are not explicitly paid for (i.e. not in their advertisements).
Most companies I have done advertising with in the past have allowed follow links in profiles, press releases, etc. , but I've also encountered those that no follow everything and told me they were doing it to protect themselves from getting penalized by Google.
I wonder if they were scared of being penalized, or just wanted to sculpt PR and keep it all on their site?
-
No follow keeps the link juice on your site. Do follow passes it to their site. It all depends. Do you want to pass page rank authority to their site? Some find that appealing and will get ad space just for that reason alone. Others won't care as they will just be looking for a good solid site to get the word out.
So if you site has great traffic and is providing value for someone in their niche market I say go with no follow as your site will do better in the rankings by keeping the page authority within your site.
-
Just don't approve porn, illegal, and spam filled website urls. If a company's website is deemed acceptable to be placed on your website, I see nothing wrong with giving them dofollow links.
-
Oleg- Thanks for the answer. I should be more clear with the question. All user submitted links will be set at "no follow". I was interested in what to do about company profile pages, product pages and press releases which we will enter and/or approve.
-
Follow links you have to approve. If people can sign up and get followed links without any editorial review, you will be spammed sooner or later.
G recommends you nofollow all user submitted links (to be on the safe side).
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569
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
-
What is the difference between "Referring Pages" and "Total Backlinks" [on Ahrefs]?
I always thought they were essentially the same thing myself but appears there may be a difference? Any one care to help me out? Cheers!
Technical SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
"Links to your site" in google webmaster tools not showing any data
Hello All I have a very strange query regarding the "Links to your site" section in webmaster's account my account does not show the Link data after so many days (more then 30 days) of verification. Can you please help me out how can I get my data in the webmaster's account?
Technical SEO | | barnesdorf
Please note I have verified the account using Google Analytic verification process. (does this affect?) I have seen this issue in my two websites which I have verified by Google Analytics. Please help me out.0 -
Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built. Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed. What is the best way to solve this problem? I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?
Technical SEO | | melen0 -
Really stuck guys. how do you earn links for an ecommerce site?
Hi seomoz guys So I read a lot on seomoz and other sites, and see a lot of info about earning links, but this all seems to be aimed at blogs and brochure sites. Being blunt, we sell stuff. Our competitors sell the same stuff. We are limited on what we can do product description content wise as our suppliers expect us to use the content they supply. We are now putting together q and a pages based on a great article in the seomoz blog. Does anyone have any great ideas for developing link bait or just getting links to an eCommerce site? We know our service is good, and our product is good, but that's not enough to convince someone to link to us. Help Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | TheUniqueSEO0 -
Campaign Issue: Rel Canonical - Does this mean it should be "on" or "off?"
Hello, somewhat new to the finer details of SEO - I know what canonical tags are, but I am confused by how SEOmoz identifies the issue in campaigns. I run a site on a wordpress foundation, and I have turned on the option for "canonical URLs" in the All in one SEO plugin. I did this because in all cases, our content is original and not duplicated from elsewhere. SEOmoz has identified every one of my pages with this issue, but the explanation of the status simply states that canonical tags "indicate to search engines which URL should be seen as the original." So, it seems to me that if I turn this OFF on my site, I turn off the notice from SEOmoz, but do not have canonical tags on my site. Which way should I be doing this? THANK YOU.
Technical SEO | | mrbradleyferguson0 -
My site has a "Reported Web Forgery!" warning
When I check my bing cached page it comes up with a "Reported Web Forgery!" warning. I've looked at google web tools and no malware has been detected. I do have another site that has a very similar web address jaaronwoodcountertops.com and jaaron-wood-countertops.com. Could that be why? How do I go about letting bing and or firefox know this is not a forgery site?
Technical SEO | | JAARON0 -
Different version of site for "users" who don't accept cookies considered cloaking?
Hi I've got a client with lots of content that is hidden behind a registration form - if you don't fill it out you can not proceed to the content. As a result it is not being indexed. No surprises there. They are only doing this because they feel it is the best way of capturing email addresses, rather than the fact that they need to "protect" the content. Currently users arriving on the site will be redirected to the form if they have not had a "this user is registered" cookie set previously. If the cookie is set then they aren't redirected and get to see the content. I am considering changing this logic to only redirecting users to the form if they accept cookies but haven't got the "this user is registered cookie". The idea being that search engines would then not be redirected and would index the full site, not the dead end form. From the clients perspective this would mean only very free non-registered visitors would "avoid" the form, yet search engines are arguably not being treated as a special case. So my question is: would this be considered cloaking/put the site at risk in any way? (They would prefer to not go down the First Click Free route as this will lower their email sign-ups.) Thank you!
Technical SEO | | TimBarlow0 -
Rel canonical with index follow on query string URLs
Hi guys, Quick question regarding the rel canonical tag. I have lots of links pointing at me with query strings and previously used some code to determine if query strings were in the URL and if they were then not to index that page. If there weren't query strings then the page would be indexed and followed. I assume I can now use the rel canonical tag on each of these pages so the value goes to the proper URL minus any query string. However do I need to have the rel canonical tag above the index, follow tag on the page? So URL is site.com/page.html?ref=ABC meta robots is "index, follow" Rel canonical is "site.com/page.html" Does the order of the meta robots and canonical tag matter? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | panini0