Reciprocal links and nofollow tag
-
What happens if I link to a site using the nofollow tag and they are linking back to me with a dofollow link?
Will it give me as much power and link juice as if it was a one way link (to me) or will Google discount the link because it's reciprocal?
-
Bad idea in my book. It sounds like you're trying to cheat Google instead of win it properly, that never works out in the long-term.
-
Thanks guys. What I've done is to create a top-10 list of bloggers in one blog category. I link to each blog with a nofollow link and in return get links to my post from most of the bloggers (most will return a dofollow link). This will give my site traffic + potentially link juice (at least what I was hoping for).
I realize this is somewhat black hat borderline since most of the bloggers don't realize I've added the nofollow tag.
Good or bad idea?
-
In addition to what AndieF said, there's the possibility it could be seen like this too: Why should google give you any value for a back link from a site to which you're not going to attest to its credibility (via a do follow link)?
-
You certainly would have the upper hand in theory in that situation, however nofollow is just a rule of thumb and Google's algorithm may be smart enough to figure out it's a reciprocal link.
Ask yourself if the reciprocal link is adding value to your (and their) customers? Is it in relevant content, or is it on a "Links" page? If the link is there purely for SEO, don't bother risking it - I'd say.
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
-
Nofollow versus data-href
We have a couple of Tier-1 websites that contain a lot of affiliate links. These outgoing affiliate links currently have the rel="nofollow" element. Yet, I am seeing a lot of other websites and competitors, use data-href="" instead of nofollow. Is the latter better for SEO purposes or are they just using data-href for better tracking?
Technical SEO | | LoyensT0 -
Spam link? Links from linguee
Hi Everyone My site received a notification of unnatural links in Webmaster Tools and the site has had a penalty applied. I can see there are a lot of links from a site : linguee.com .de. nl. ect ..more than 30k of them! I am not sure where did those links come from! The suddenly appeared over the weekend. Does anyone has similar experience before and any suggestion? Thanks Ricky
Technical SEO | | SEO-SMB0 -
Help with duplicate title tags.
Hi Just going through Seomoz crawl diagnostics for one of my clients sites & see that the title tags for over 2,000 pages are the same due to the way there site software generates the titles using php, examples : **home page** = <title>Home - Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discounttitle> other page = <title>A0 Frames - Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discounttitle> So as you can see the page titles have the page name given to the beginning of the title which is fine as they have the keyword, then the text : Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discount Now if i take out the text : Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discount the home page is going to have just the word Home which is rubbish & the other pages will have the keyword which is better but not great, just wondered if any one has a better solution?.
Technical SEO | | askshopper0 -
Links to Website Author
I'm a website developer, and in the past I have usually added a tiny backlink to the footer of my clients' websites like this: Website Design by MyCompanyName I understand that Google sees this as a low-quality backlink. However, I was wondering if such links can hurt my rankings. Does Penguin sees these links as spam? If so, should I add a rel="nofollow" to the links? Is there anything else I should change? I do not want to remove these links completely because they are good for marketing my business. I just want to minimize any negative SEO impact of the links. I appreciate your input. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SiteWizard_LLC0 -
Forum Profile Links
Are they really important? Many preach they are, and there are tonnes of services out there who give you thousands of forum profile links in no time. I strictly believe in genuine links built the hard way, and definitely don't want to get into anything which is black hat. Please suggest if building several Forum Profile Links is an appropriate way of building links?
Technical SEO | | KS__2 -
Broken LInks Tool?
Hi I am trying to find broken links on my site, Is there a tool for this? Free or Paid tool is fine thanks.
Technical SEO | | daracreative0 -
Does Google follow links in "id" tag?
Hello, For functionality purposes, I need to wrap separate blocks of content with a tag. The main question is whether Google will follow this URL, even though it is not a hyperlink on the page, just a URL used for functionality purposes. We will have 10-20 of these types of span tags with a different URL for each one, and we just want to be sure that Google will not be following these URLs that are not links. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0 -
Canonical Tag Pointing To The Same URL
Does it matter if a canonical tag points to the URL in which the tag is on? Example Page: http://www.domain.com Canonical tag: rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com" /> I only ask because a client of mine has a CMS that automatically does that to every page on the site and there's no way to remove it. Will this have a negative impact or does it not matter at all? Any insights would be great because I can't find a clear answer anywhere online. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0