Backlink Question
-
I have a backlink on a very popular sports news site PR5 this is a sitewide link. The link is near the top on righthand side. As you scroll down, the page keeps loading more and more information. According to my Google webmaster tools the link is on the site over 21,400 pages. As the stories being submitted are new most of the pages have no PR however there are around 30-40 categories that have PR ranging from 0-4.
According to my AHREFS account on a daily basis it picks up between 100-200 new links with on average around 10-20 being lost as the stories are being removed.
Would anyone advise I just ask for my link to be on the category pages only or should I leave it as it is?
Many Thanks in Advance for any Feedback.
-
I wouldn't worry about the fact that you are seeing hundreds of thousands of links from one site. It's not the number of links that make a link unnatural, but rather, whether the link is there primarily for SEO reasons. It sounds like this link is bringing you good traffic. It's probably a good one. Provided it's not a paid link or one that is there in exchange for something, I'd keep it as is.
-
Hi there
As this is one link that just keeps getting recounted, I wouldn't see this as an issue.
You could also ask for the link to have a more permanent position on a static page that's relevant to your site.
My suggestion is just from the perspective of having a link that's recounted and seen thousands of times.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
ATP
Thank you for replies. I have looked into our Google analythics and it appears iwe had the following visits:
38 referrals from 5th June to 5th July
20 of those were from there homepage
13 from category pages
5 from individual storiesI have contacted the company who we advertise with and they have agreed to place our link on the home page and the highest traffic category pages.
Thank you to all who have taken the time to help me out not only with this question but all of my previous questions. You are helping a small business stay afloat against some very big competition.
-
Patrick you may know more than me here but to follow up.
I understand that nofollow link wont hurt his site in anyway, and its a great link to confirm that.
However, he would be loosing the "juice" from the high authority main page and all the cateogry pages. Whilst the nofollow links wont hurt him, loosing this surly could?
-
Hi there
While I can't say "rankings will drop", Matt Cutts has stated that this will not hurt your rankings. You can read more on that here.
Hope this helps!
-
Patrick
Thank you for your answer, being new to link building would my rankings drop if i nofollowed this link?
John
-
This isn't as simple as just looking at your backlink profile and wanting only high PR links.
There is a diminishing returns effect on anything over 2-3 links from a single website. Google recognises they are all from the same root domain and acts accordingly. I do believe in a penguin update many web hosting companies were affected as many had link profiles with this due to "created by" footer links. However, links like this from a single website shouldnt be enough to arrouse suspicion on their own, it your website isn't spammy and the website linking to you isnt spammy then dont worry too much.
Ideally yes, you would normally aim for only a couple of links from the highest PR pages on their website but there is a big BUT!
Do you get much referral traffic from these links? If so does this traffic come from the category pages of their site or the news pages? Don't shoot a your own referral traffic in the foot by trying to optimise your back-link profile.
If you have good traffic being driven from this collection of pages.... leave them be and focus on getting more good quality links elseware.
If they dont provide any traffic then look at the rest of your link profile, if this is an isolated case and eveything else meets good SEO standard and isnt spammy. I wouldnt personally worry about it until google gave me a reason to.
EDIT: My terrible english lol
-
Hi there
I would see if I could get this link nofollowed. Now, that will probably sound counterproductive, but remember, you're not link building for rankings - you're link building to provide a relevant and quality experience - you want to add to the conversation, not distort it. Plus, brand mentions are a great thing.
I'd rather have the link and have it nofollowed than have the link followed thousands of times and it ultimately be considered counterproductive or spammy. That's just me though - it's upto you to research and weigh your actions!
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Does building backlinks help improve Google rankings? If so which links work nowadays?
Hi Guys, Please only reply of you have real experience.... So as the title implies does building backlinks work in improving the rankings in Google? I know they are not on the same level as some are spammy, in blog networks etc but how about other backlinks that are of higher quality? If yes, what sorts of backlinks work nowadays in boosting rankings but not risking getting penalized? So should you build backlinks ongoing? If so how many per month? I have a real struggle trying to get backlinks on really high quality sites. Any advice? Cheers John
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whiteboardwiz1 -
Question regarding Aggregate Rating
We have a directory site with multiple listings. Currently, our page structure is fragmented for each of the tabs (about, products, reviews, etc) with canonicals going back to the main listing page. This includes the reviews as well. Review aggregate is marked up and the stars are rendering in the SERPs. We are planning to break out reviews to /reviews and including a paginated series, then all of the tabs (about, products, NOT reviews) will be javascript loading content so no more fragmented URLs. Right now, I suspect that the stars are rendering on the main listing page because the review page that is currently fragmented has a canonical back to the main listing page. The main listing page also is marked up with the review aggregate. if we break out /reviews, all of the reviews will live on /reviews. If we break out /reviews to it's own URL, will we have to have a small amount of reviews on the main listing page to have the stars render in the SERPs for the main listing page?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imjonny0 -
Clean-up Question after a wordpress site Hack added pages with external links from a massive link wheel?
Hey All, Thought I would throw this out to ensure I am dotting my "i's" and crossing my "t's"..... Client WordPress site was hacked injected 3-4 pages that cross linked to hundreds (affiliate junk spam link wheel). Pages were removed, 3rd party cleared all malware/viruses. Heavy duty firewall and security monitoring are in place. Hacked pages are now showing as 404. No penalties, ranking issues....If anything there was a temporary BOOST in rankings due to the large link-wheel type net that the pages were receiving....That has since leveled out rankings. I guess my question is, in your opinion is it best to let those pages 404, I am noticing a large amount of links going to them from all over the world from this large link net that was built. I find the temptation to 301 re-direct deleted pages to the homepage difficult...lol..{the temptation is REAL}. Is there anything I am missing? Any other steps that YOU would take? I am assuming letting those pages 404 would be the best bet, as in time they will roll off index.... Thank you in advance, I appreciate any feedback or opinions....
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Anthony_Howard0 -
Backlinks for the same IP address
Hi Everyone I've been doing a backlink clean up as my site has dropped quite a lot in the search engine results over the last 4 months. While doing the backlink clean up I cam e across 20 different domains all based in the Washington/ VA area all with the same IP address. To make matters worse the contents and link to my site are all duplicated. Is this seen as bad practice from Google's perspective i.e. a link network.?? I look forward to hearing you comments Many thanks Jonathan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JonnytheB0 -
A Straight Answer to Outsourcing Backlinking, Directory Submission and Social Bookmarking
Hey SEOmoz Community! I've spent a bit of time now reading about SEO in books as well as online here within the SEOmoz community. However, I've still struggled to find a straight answer to whether or not directory submissions to non-penalized websites is acceptable.I suspect the reason I haven't found a straight YES or NO answer is because it isn't so straightforward and I respect that. My dilemma is as follows: I want to raise the domain authority for a few websites that I optimize for. I've submitted and gotten listed a bunch of excellent backlinks, however it still is a painfully slow process. My clients understandably want to see results faster, and because they have virtually no past outsourced link-building campaigns, I am beginning to think that I can invest some money for outsourcing directory submissions. I see more and more people talking about the latest Penguin updates, and how many of these sites are now penalized. BUT, is there any harm to submitting to directories such as the ones on SEOmoz's spreadsheet that aren't penalized? My concern is that in the future these will be penalized anyways, and is there a chance then that my site will also be de-listed from Google? At what point does Google completely 'blacklist' your site from its engine? Furthermore, I don't understand how Google can penalize a website to the point of de-listing it, because what would prevent other competitors from sending mass spammy back-links to another? What it all comes down to: At this point, are verified mass directory submissions through outsourcing still much more beneficial than detrimental to the ranking of a website? Thanks SEOmoz community, Sheldon
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | swzhai0 -
Powered by/Credit backlinks and nofollow
Pseudo question: I have a website that has 100K pages. On about 50K of those pages I have information that is fed to me via an outside 3rd-party website. Now, I like to give credit where credit is due, so I add a backlink to the website that is feeding me this content. A simple backlink like so: Information provided by: Company ABC Now, this 3rd-party website wants me to remove the nofollow tags from the backlink, but I am very, very skeptical because to me, sending ~50K dofollow backlinks to a single site might make the Google monster upset with me. This 3rd-party site is being very hard-headed about this, to the point where I am thinking of terminating the relationship all together. I digress. Scoured the net before writing this, but couldn't really find anything directly related to my issue. Thoughts? Is a nofollow required here? We're not talking 1 or 2 links here; we're talking tens of thousands (50K is low; it will probably be upwards of 100K when all is said and done as my site has many, many pages). Thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | THB0 -
Negative backlinks
Hi I have heard that penguin penalizes a site for bad backlinks. Do you think that it is true? Do you think that is possible for someone to penalize my website adding my link to some spam website? I'm worried that someone could do it...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | darkanweb0 -
Farmer Update Case Study. Please question my logic here. (Very long!)
Hi SEOmoz community! I would like to try to give a small (well...) case study of a Farmer victim and some logical conclusions of mine that you are more then welcome to shred to pieces. So, I run MANY sites ranging from low to super quality and actually have a few that have been hit by farmer but this particular site had me scratching my head as to why it was torched. Quick background: Sitei s in a very competetive niche, been around since 2004 initially as a forum site but from 2005 also a content driven site. Site is an affiliate site and has been ranking top 5 for many high-value commercial KW's and has a big long-tail of informational kw's. Limk profile is a mix between natural, good links and purchased links from various qualilty sources. Content is high quality written articles, how-to's, blog posts etc. by in-house pro writers plus UGC from a semi active forum (20-30 posts a day). Farmer: After Farmer, this site's vertical is pretty much same as before with the biggest exception being my site. I quickly discounted low-quality content (spider-food) and focused instead on technical reasons. I took this approach since this site isn't the most well kept site I have and I figured the crappy CMS + PHPBB might have caused isseus. I didn't want to waste my time crawling the site myself so I quickly downloaded all the URLs that Majestic had crawled. Too my surprise the result of Majestic's crawler was over 3 million URLs when the real number would likley be 30-40k and Google has about 20k indexed. After scanning through the file with URLs I knew I had issues. Massive amounts of auto-generated dupe pages from the forum and so on. By adding around 20 new lines to robots.txt I was able to block millions of pages from being crawled again. My logic: Ok, so now I think I've found what caused the drop. Milllions of dupe pages and empty pages could have tripped the Farmer algo update to think the site is low quality or dupe or just trying to feed the spiders with uselessness. My WEAK point in this logic is that I can't prove that Google even knew about (or smart enough to ignore them). Google WMT tells me they've crawled an average of around 10k pages the last 90 days. Given this I'm doubting my logic and if I've found the issue or not. My next step is to see if this gets resolved algorithmically or not, if not i feel I have a legitimate case to submit a reinclusion request but i'm not sure? Since I haven't been a contributing member to this community I'm not looking to get direct help with my site, but hopefully this could spark some discussion about Farmer and maybe some flaming of my logic regarding the update 🙂 So, would any of you have drawn similar conclusions as I did? (Sweet blog bro!)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | YesBaby0