Is it bad to no follow all External LInks at the same time?
-
I am working on more than 40 EMDs. They are good quality brand sites but they all are interlinked to each other through footer links, side bar links. (and they dont have much of linking root domains)
Now Some of those sites have been renovated with new templates and these new sites has very few external links (links going out to our own sites) but some of these old sites has 100s of external links (all these external links of course link to our own sites).
But anyways, we are planning to no follow all those external links (links that are linking to our own sites) slowly to avoid penalty?
question is, can it be bad to implement no follow to all those links on those sites at the same time?Will Google see it as something fishy? (I don't think so)
Also, Is it good strategy to no follow all of them? (I think it is)
What you guys think ?
-
Thanks Simon. Yeah I saw that blog.
-
Thanks Marcus. And No they are not doorway pages and they are all proper genuine brand sites. That's why they are not affected by recent EMD update.
-
That's a great answer from Marcus.
A blog post here on SEOmoz from last week entitled "The Exact Match Domain Playbook: A Guide and Best Practices for EMDs" is well worth a read too, check out the section towards the end, "A few things to consider for solving problems with EMD sites".
Regards
Simon
-
Hmm, sounds like you have your own little network of sites so any interlinking of them purely for SEO purposes is going to be problematic. The guidelines page on link schemes has recently been updated and makes for a good read and specially, this point seems relevant:
From - Link Schemes: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
"The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results:
- Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link
- Excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you")
- Linking to web spammers or unrelated sites with the intent to manipulate PageRank
- Building partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking
- Using automated programs or services to create links to your site"
It is hard to comment with certainty without seeing the sites but seeing as these are all EMD's there is always the possibility that these are essentially doorway pages that exist purely to capture search traffic and direct them to another site. Again, this is not advisable and to again quote the specific Google guidelines:
From - Doorway Pages: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2721311
"Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination. Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users."
"Having multiple domain names targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page"
The bolding in all cases is mine and I have not seen your sites but it's time to be honest and ask yourself if these sites exist purely for these reasons and then further debate the value of them going forward as a potential negative equity.
To go back to your original point, if you are looking to nofollow the links then I would not worry about any slow or steady approach, just make the changes to be within the guidelines as quickly and painlessly as possible.
As ever, without examples, only general guidelines can be given but all too often these kind of EMD sites exist to rank for a specific term and if you are linking back to other sites then they likely are problematic in a variety of ways.
Hope that helps.
Marcus
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
-
Why Google not disavow some bad links
I have submitted bad links that I want to disavow on google with the Moz Pro hight spam score. Its almost 4 months completed yet I have a bad link that exists with high spam score any solution? https://fortniteskinsgenerator.net/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | marktravis0 -
Link Building / Link Removal
Hey, I'm in the process of learning SEO, or attempting to, for my company and am chipping away at the process ever so slowly! How can I tell if a site that links to my company's site, www.1099pro.com, has a negative effect on my page/domain authority? Also, if a page doesn't show up in the search rankings at all for it's keywords when it really should (i.e it has the exact keywords and page/domain authority far surpasses even the top results) how can I tell if Google has removed the page from its listing and why? Thanks SEO Gurus
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Stew2220 -
Competitor outranking you with link spam. What would be your next steps?
FYI: I've already searched the forums for previous posts on this topic and although some are helpful, they don't tend to have many responses, so I'm posting this again in the hope of more interaction from the community 😉
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | adamlcasey
So can I please ask the community to tell me what course of action you would take, if this was happening to you? We have been ranking in position 1 for a major keyword in our space for the past 18 months. Today I logged into my Moz account and to keyword rankings to find that we have dropped to 2nd. So I placed the competitors website; who's now in 1st position, into OSE and looked under the "Just Discovered" tab. There are 258 newly discovered links, 95% of which use keywords in the anchor text!
So I reviewed the rankings for all of these other keywords being targeted and sure enough they are now dominating the top 1-3 spots for most of them. (some of which we are also attempting to rank for and have subsequently been pushed down the rankings) Their links are made up of: Forum and blog comments - always using anchor text in the links Article's posted on web 2.0 sites (Squidoo, Pen.io, Tumblr, etc) Profile page links Low quality Press Release sites Classified ad sites Bookmarking sites Article Marketing sites Our competitors sell safety solutions into the B2B market yet the topics of some of the sites where these links appear include: t-shirts sports news online marketing anti aging law christian guitars computers juke boxes Of the articles that I quickly scanned, it was clear they had been spun as they didn't read well/make sense in places. So my conclusion is that they have decided to work with a person (can't bring myself to call them an seo company) who have provided them with a typical automated link building campaign using out dated, poor seo practices that are now classified as link spam. No doubt distributed using an automated link publishing application loaded with the keyword rich anchor text links and published across any site that will take them. As far as I was aware, all of the types of links we're supposed to have be penalised by Google's Penguin & Panda updates and yet it seems they are working for them! So what steps would you take next?0 -
Still Battling On With Link Profile Audit
I'm getting there, I can see the light! 🙂 I have covered one complete audit of the link profile and I am now going back over it looking at the links I had 'question marked' - I should have this completed by the end of this week and I will then focus on using DISAVOW for the links that I am really struggling with, the foreign sites that are in Chinese or Russian, the sites that have absolutely no 'contact us' information and have been privately registered (in WhoIs) I have come across this domain which links to our site about 8 times and although I cannot find any contact info I can't quite make my mind up, to be honest I would rather get rid of it BUT I'm trying to avoid taking the easy option of disavowing where I can; http://www.askives.com/ Fo anyone who has gone through what I am currently going through, please help me just this once and tell me 'should it stay or should it go'?! 🙂 Many thanks! Andy
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TomKing0 -
Sure, but what about non-keyword rich anchor text links?
Could spammy non-keyword rich anchor text liks help your website rank? Of course, there's been a lot of discussion around Google's update of its link scheme. Specifically, they target press releases with do-follow links on keyword-rich anchor text and "Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links". Well, that leaves the question unanswered, what if you're doing these spammy linking techniques, but on non-keyword rich anchor text, such as "click here", "find information", and "click here". Will you still get smacked down by Google then? Given that links on non-keyword anchor text can still help increase domain authority, it seems like Google left a door open here for large scale publication of a certain class of spammy links that can still assist rank, no? Also, in answering, please distinguish between best practice, and effective. For instance, purchasing links isn't a good practice, but it can still be an effective technique. While spammy links on non-keyword rich anchor text is certainly not a good practice, is it nonetheless effective?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ExploreConsulting0 -
Links from same brands?
Hi, We have around 25 sites around the world under different domains and brand names. I was wondering if its safe or not to interconnect (linking) all these sites. Please let me know, Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ferratum0 -
Manual Penalty Removed - Recovery Times...
Howdy Mozzers, For anyone who has had experience of a manual penalty i'd appreciate your feedback. How long did it take to recover from a Manual Penalty? Of course every situation is different and its only been 8 days so perhaps it's to soon. Below is the email we received, I highlighted "believed" they didn't state we had. We highlighted a bunch of back links we didn't like however most of these remain in our profile in GWT so not sure what was really the problem. "Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site." Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
Link farming and related websites
In my niche I have about 17 sites I have created. They all provide unique content, html, and all have a variety of uses that differ from each other mostly, some repetition but not really. All these sites are related to the same niche. I do link to each other in my sites. I don't go crazy and link every site to every other site or span links on footers. I somewhere in the content link here to there. Not even consistent, just linking to related pages from others. I was wondering if this is something I need to be careful about or could I get hit with link farming?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cbielich0