No Follows - Sister/manufacturer sites
-
What is the best practice nowadays for linking to sister sites? Should you do it, shouldn't you, and/or should you list them with no follows? What about the reverse - having them link to us. Is this bad for us in anyway? Should we have them no follow their link to us?
We are a distributor so manufacturers link to us as well, should we have them no follow their links?
Thanks!
-
In my opinion, I don’t think there is a problem and you should let them link to you but always make sure that they mostly target your brand name instead of a keyword because if they started to target any keyword across different website it will give Google a negative signal about the reputation of your website but having a link with a logo or brand name anchor text is fine and you can allow your manufacturers to link to you!
-
How many sites are involved?
If you have two or three sites and each of them has a few relevant links to the others I don't think that it is a problem.
However, if you have 150 sites and they are all linking to each other or all pointing to a single domain then you are going to have a problem.
One day I heard Matt Cutts tell a guy (who like a dummy with a big grin asked... "How many sites can I link together?".).... Matt told him... "If you can't quickly name every domain involved in this linking then you are probably stepping over the line."
-
Links from manufacturers is fine. You want them to link to you, those are good links.
Links from sister is a little trickier, but it's pretty standard practice to link to sister sites from the sidebar or footer. If you're worried about Penguin, you can keep the link to just the homepage or about page.
-
I have dealt with this quite a bit and I think first off it is important to mention that your sites are about your customers.
Do you think that a client or potential client could end up on one site but intending to find the other? With Google, Yahoo and Bing out of the question, what would you do?
I spent my first 3 years trying to SEO for Google. In the end, they did not purchase a single item from me. My point is that even if they were to hit you on SEO (which I do not think is going to happen) I would choose the hit vs leaving a client stranded on the wrong site with no way to get to the content they are searching.
Google has cracked down on single purpose sites for a single business trying to dominate the SERP ie. one restaurant with the same content on 4 sites trying to get 40% of the first page SERP. So if you have two location of Bob's Restaurant you should have one website for this. However, if you own Bob's Restaurant and Lucy's Diner, you should have two. They should be connected via links as they should connect to other local restaurants as well.
There is nothing wrong with linking to other sites you own, ++ if they have similar topics.
What to avoid? Linking to them on every page. Forget Google! Where would you put the links so that it best helps your users? Now remember Google, they want to see you put the links where it will best help your users.
You can read more on the Google Product Forums
-
IMHO in this specific situation I don't think it matters a whole lot, one way or the other. As long as you don't have a page filled with 500 manufacturers and you're linking to all of them, which would be horrible for your users, I really don't think it matters.
Regarding whether or not you should have the manufacturers who've been gracious enough to link to you put "nofollow" on your links? Please don't do that. The business relationship you have naturally warrants a link. If they've been kind enough to give you a regular link, thank them and move on. If you have manufacturers who aren't linking to you and you think they probably should, contact them and ask them for a link. We do this all of the time. We deal with many manufacturer who don't sell directly to the public. They often include a directory that allows regular consumers to "Contact a Local Dealer" or "Find a Reseller Near You." Asking to be included in that type of directory is a completely natural business relationship. Whether that link is rel="nofollow" or not doesn't matter nearly as much as making sure potential customers searching in that manufacturer's directory can find you there and click through to your site.
Regarding "nofollow" of your links out to sister sites or other manufacturers, I would make that decision based on what you want your visitors to do. Do you really want them to go visit these other sites? If so, leave off the "nofollow." If you are simply referencing another site within your content, or to make people aware that you carry specific brands, you might want to use rel="nofollow" You might also consider just mentioning them in the text without a link at all (if your goal isn't really to funnel traffic to their site).
I hope that helps a little!
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
-
Any more info on potential Google algo update from April 24th/25th?
Apart from an article on Search Engine Roundtable, I haven’t been able to find anything out about the potential algorithm update that happened on Monday / Tuesday of this week. One of our sites (finance niche) saw drops in rankings for bad credit terms on Tuesday, followed by total collapse on Wednesday and Thursday. We had made some changes the previous week to the bad credit section of the site, but the curious thing here is that rankings for bad credit terms all over the site (not just the changed section) disappeared. Has anyone else seen the impact of this change, and are there any working theories on what caused it? I’m even wondering whether a specific change has been made for bad credit terms (i.e. the payday loan update)?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | thatkinson0 -
Exchange link from sites in same google account
Hi everyone, Anybody have experience when you have some websites which stored in Google Webmaster Tool and they exchange links between sites. So is it good for sites? We are hosted on different server. Thank you so much
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Do Ghost Traffic/Spam Referrals factor into rankings, or do they just affect the CTR and Bounce Rate in Analytics?
So, by now I'm sure everyone that pays attention to their Analytics/GWT's (or Search Console, now) has seen spam referral traffic and ghost traffic showing up (Ilovevitaly.com, simple-share-buttons.com, semalt.com, etc). Here is my question(s)... Does this factor into rankings in anyway? We all know that click through rate and bounce rate (might) send signals to the algorithm and signal a low quality site, which could affect rankings. I guess what I'm asking is are they getting any of that data from Analytics? Since ghost referral traffic never actually visits my site, how could it affect the CTR our Bounce Rate that the algorithm is seeing? I'm hoping that it only affects my Bounce/CTR in Analytics and I can just filter that stuff out with filters in Analytics and it won't ever affect my rankings. But.... since we don't know where exactly the algorithm is pulling data on CTR and bounce rate, I guess I'm just worried that having a large amount of this spam/ghost traffic that I see in analytics could be causing harm to my rankings.... Sorry, long winded way of saying... Should I pay attention to this traffic? Should I care about it? Will it harm my site or my rankings at all? And finally... when is google going to shut these open back doors in Analytics so that Vitaly and his ilk are shut down forever?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seequs2 -
Site De-Indexed except for Homepage
Hi Mozzers,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | emerald
Our site has suddenly been de-indexed from Google and we don't know why. All pages are de-indexed in Google Webmaster Tools (except for the homepage and sitemap), starting after 7 September: Please see screenshot attached to show this: 7 Sept 2014 - 76 pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools 28 Sept until current - 3-4 pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools including homepage and sitemaps. Site is: (removed) As a result all rankings for child pages have also disappeared in Moz Pro Rankings Tracker. Only homepage is still indexed and ranking. It seems like a technical issue blocking the site. I checked for robots.txt, noindex, nofollow, canonical and site crawl for any 404 errors but can't find anything. The site is online and accessible. No warnings or errors appear in Google Webmaster Tools. Some recent issues were that we moved from Shared to Dedicated Server around 7 Sept (using same host and location). Prior to the move our preferred domain was www.domain.com WITH www. However during the move, they set our domain as domain.tld WITHOUT the www. Running a site:domain.tld vs site:www.domain.tld command now finds pages indexed under non-www version, but no longer as www. version. Could this be a cause of de-indexing? Yesterday we had our host reset the domain to use www. again and we resubmitted our sitemap, but there is no change yet to the indexing. What else could be wrong? Any suggestions appeciated. Thanks. hDmSHN9.gif0 -
Pleasing the Google Gods & Not DeIndexing my site.
Hey Mozzers, So plenty of you who follow these threads have come across my posts and have read bits and pieces of the strange dark dark gray hat webspace that I have found myself in. So I'm currently doing some research and I wanted all of your opinion too. Will Google always notify you before they stop indexing your website? Will Google always allow you back if you do get pulled? Does Google give a grace period where they say "fix in 30 days?"? What is every bodies experience with all of this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
I think My Site Has Been Hacked
I am working with a client and have noticed lots of 500 server errors that look very strange in their webmaster tools account. I am seeing URLs like this blog/?tag=wholesale-cheap-nfl-jerseys-free-0702.html and blog/?tag=nike-jersey-shorts-4297.html there are 155 similar pages yet the client does not sell anything like this and hasn't created these URLs. I have updated WP and all plugins and cannot find these links or pages on the site anywhere but I am guessing they are slowing the site down as GWT keeps highlighting them as errors. Has anybody had any experiences with these types of hacks and can point me in the right direction of how to clean it up properly? Ta
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | fazza470 -
Failed microsites that negatively affect main site: should I just redirect them all?
While they are great domain names, I suspect my 7 microsites are considered spammy and resulted in a filter on my main e-commerce site for the important keywords we now have a filter blocking from showing up in search. Should I consider it a sunk cost and redirect them all to my main e-commerce site, or is there any reason why that would make things worse? I've fixed just about everything I can thinking of in response to Panda and Penguin, before which we were on the first page for everything. That includes adding hundreds of pages of unique and relevant content, in the form of buyers guides and on e-commerce category pages -- resolving issues of thin content. Then I hid URL parameters in Ajax, sped up the site significantly, started generating new links... nothing... I have tons of new keywords for other categories, but I still clearly have that filter on those few important head keywords. The anchor text on the microsites leading to the main site are typically not exact match, so I don't think that's the issue. It has to be that the sites themselves are considered spammy. My bosses are not going to like the idea because they paid for those awesome domains, but would the best idea be to redirect them to the e-commerce site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ElBo9130 -
Are back links from audio sites any good?
In light of G's view of links from directories and other sources I have heard that links for audio sites like soundcloud.com can be beneficial. Has anyone had any positive experiences building likes from sources like this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Aikijeff0