Spammy nofollow links
-
Hello,
One of our clients - a cleaning business - has a heck of a lot of spammy nofollow links pointing to their site.
The majority of the links are from comments or 'pingbacks', most with the anchor text 'cheap nfl jerseys' or 'cyber monday ugg boots'.
After researching the subject of spammy nofollow links, it seems there is a lot of uncertainty regarding the negative affect these could have on your SEO efforts.
So I guess my question to the community is: if your site was suddenly hit by a plethora of spammy nofollow links, what would you do and why?
Cheers,
Lewis
-
Ah sorry, I misunderstood Louis - skim reading too quickly!
No, don't bother if it is a nofollow link as this is essentially what Google does to a dofollow one.
Apologies for the confusion.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
I would always just add to the disavow file. But what I'd like to know is how will disavowing nofollow links affect a site? Google is already ignoring them...
-
Hi Lewis,
The important thing to remember here is that if you just overwrite your disavow file, you lose what is already in there.
Download the file that is in place and add those links to the new file so everything is included for the new upload.
-Andy
-
Thanks for the quick reply, Andy.
As disavowing is the process of telling Google to ignore links from certain domains, would this have any effect on nofollow links that are apparently already being ignored by them?
-
Hi Lewis,
The actual fact is, noone other than Google knows exactly what a link will do do you, but based on the fact that there is no guarantee the next Penguin refresh will be incorporated into the main algorithm, and how long it can take between the current refreshed, I wouldn't want to get caught in Penguin. I would be looking to mitigate any possible damage and do what I can to clean my link profile and spend time building better quality ones.
Google only want to see worthwhile links, but you will find a very high percentage of spammy links will just be discounted. I would tend to look for those with over-optimised anchor texts that are do-follow and then disavow them.
Marie has a great post here that will help you understand what you need to be doing.
-Andy
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
-
Should internal links in my table of contents be tagged as nofollow?
Hi All, I have the LuckyWP Table of Contents plugin installed. I recently noticed that you can tag your internal links with and nofollow. I understand that it's always a good idea to link internally and to pass link juice to my own content. But with detailed posts that have over 20 headings, I'm thinking that internal linking for headings may actually hurt me because it takes my links well above 100. Any ideas what the best practises are in this scenario? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | nomad_blogger0 -
What do I do with these back links?
In the last two weeks, I've got 10 pingbacks from this http://caraccidentlawyer.cc/coroner-ids-berkeley-bodies-who-were-killed-in-recent-car-accident/ and sites like it. The featured attorney is a competitor of ours and, since the links aren't sex/drugs/rock&roll related, (and he's linked too) I doubt this is a negative SEO campaign, but I want it to stop. These blogs are basically pure spam. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Is there a tool to find a strange link
hi, i have used screaming frog seo and it has brought up a link to another site we run but this is a strange link the link is http://www.in2town.co.uk/www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy i have gone through the site on the home page as this is where it is and i cannot find, so i was just wondering if there was a tool that i can use to pin point where it is. any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Devalued links or negative affect?
Hi there, I'm looking into an issue with a site that was hit after Penguin was introduced. The site lost 70% of traffic over night. The site in question seemed to have a large number of backlinks with over optimized anchor text which seems to most likely be the reason for drop in rankings. But there is also some links from blog networks here too unfortunately, so my question here really is do Google just devalue these links and discount them from consideration in their ranking algorithm or do the links still count but instead of adding positive affects in SERPs add a negative affect? My reason for this question is I'm trying to determine whether it's worth saving this website or just starting fresh with a new domain. That does bring me to another question, if I have to start fresh on a new domain is it a possibility to reuse the content from the old site? (providing I remove the URLs from Google via Webmaster tools). Any help/advice/answers here would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | jayderby0 -
How to get rid of back links?
I would like to clear all of the links linking to us to start over fresh? Our site has become non existent on Google with no messages or warning from them through webmaster tools. From tools on here and other sources it indicates that we should be ranked ahead of our competitors or atleast comparable. We are not found under the keywords that we use to be...."parts washers" "part washer" industrial cleaning systems etc.. our site is www.vortexpartswashers.com. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | mhart0 -
Pinterist links no follow or followed?
in OSE it says we are getting lots of good links from pages like this on pinterest; pinterest.com/cbn456/inspiration-at-home However if you look at the code it says nofollow. Am I missing something or is OSE just missing it?
Technical SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Effect of rel canonical on links
Has anyone done any experimentation on how Google treats links that are on a page that is being "rel canonical'd" to another page? For eg, example.com/b has a canonical pointing to example.com/a How does Google treat the internal links that are on page example.com/b?
Technical SEO | | Burgo0 -
Javascript funtion as link? Why not show up?
We joined our Chamber of Commerce for the "link" as much as anything. After 9 months of having a link from our local chamber it has never showed up anywhere. You can see the link on my Chambers page, and you can click on it and it works. But it does not show up anywhere else....Not in any backlink checker, not in SEOmoz, not in Google Webmaster Tools. When I hover over our link on their page I see "javascript:encodeclick........my url" Is this link worth anything? What is a javascriptencodeclick? Does Google know it exists and give me credit for it? Our Chamber is clueless... they hire someone to do their website. Their webmasters response to my question was: Hi, These links look like this because this is just the way our system parses URLs that are entered into the membership directory so they can be clickable when displayed in the lister. These links will not have a negative effect on Google or SEO indexing purposes if that is what you are concerned about. They are not encoded or encrypted, this just happens to be the name of the Javascript function.
Technical SEO | | SCyardman0