Linking from purchased businesses to my own
-
Hi All,
An SEO and Google guidelines question.
We've recently purchased several local businesses that have websites. Legally, we've put a disclaimer saying we've purchased those businesses, the question is whether we should link from those sites to our main site.
Will this bring a manual action from Google?
It's legitimate that we'd like the visitors from those websites come to our main site because those business no longer named the way they were.
So, is it OK to link from these sites to ours? Will this violate Google's guidelines regarding backlinking? Should we even link and if so add the rel:nofollow tag?
Thanks!
-
I agree with Stephan: you have actually bought the businesses so you can decide to link to your main site.
It is of course a good thing to look out for penalties but don't see what you would be doing wrong if you would display a link from the purchased companies back to the parent company. As you can read: Andy wrote that the chance is probably very slim in this case.
Bas
-
Just do it, as long as the topic from the purchased business is relevant to your link.
The link should be a dofollow link and it's OK for Google since you wrote a disclaimer.
-
If someone is trying to build links by interlinking footer links, they are going to be very disappointed.
If you read what I said again, it is highly unlikely that Google would penalise with a few footer links, but there is no clear cut black & white guarantee that nothing would happen with this. There are so many other factors that could play a part in any decision that Google makes.
To avoid doubt, no-follow them. The links are still present and the benefit to the users is still there.
-Andy
-
I do not agree. All media websites list their sites in their footer and these may be the only authority links they receive.
-
Hi Gal,
I always advise in these cases, that the links are no-followed. This removes any doubt and concern over if Google will object. You are right to be cautious because you don't want any penalties to come from this, but it is highly unlikely that any would anyway. Footer links are largely ignored by Google.
There is a reason for the links to show to the different businesses, but I would just err on the side of caution.
-Andy
-
Hello,
If it's an important information for yours visitors, then there's no problem. You've purchased stores, so you want to show that they be part of a group.
Think about big companies with footer that list all their websites. They want to show that they own many websites and can reach a large audience. It can be useful to their users so no problem.
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
-
Anchor Test (do follow link)
Hi, I am new to SEO, may I know how many anchor text with a do-follow link I should aim for a 500-1000 words guest post? also, what is the percentage of different type of anchor text per post, e.g. ( 20% Branded, 20% Exact-match, 20% Naked link and more? I know that quality is more important, but is there any magic number and the percentage I should really aim for? Kind regards CHRIS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KINSHUN0 -
Confusion about forums and canonical links
Like many people, I get a lot of alerts about duplicate content, etc. I also don't know if I am hurting my domain authority because of the forum. It is a pretty active forum, so it is important to the site. So my question is, right now there could be 50 pages like this <domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrickPicker
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-1
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-2
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-3
all the way to:
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-50</domain></domain></domain></domain></domain> So right now the rel canonical links are set up just like above, including the page numbers. I am not sure if that is the best way or not. I really thought that all the of links for that topic should be
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/ that way it would passing "juice" to the main topic/link. </domain> I do have other links setup for:
link rel='next',link rel='up',link rel='last' Overall is this correct, or is there a better way to do it?0 -
Link juice site structure?
If we have a top nav with contact us, about us, delivery, FAQ, Gallery, how to order ect but none of these we want to rank and then we have the usual left hand nav.are we wasting juice with the top nav and would we be better either removing it and putting them further down the page or consolidating them and adding an extra products tab so the product pages are first.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
Excessive navigation links
I'm working on the code for a collaborative project that will eventually have hundreds of pages. The editor of this project wants all pages to be listed in the main navigation at the top of the site. There are four main dropdown (suckerfish-style) menus and these have nested sub- and sub-sub-menus. Putting aside the UI issues this creates, I'm concerned about how Google will find our content on the page. Right now, we now have over 120 links above the main content of the page and have plans to add more as time goes on (as new pages are created). Perhaps of note, these navigation elements are within an html5 <nav>element: <nav id="access" role="navigation"> Do you think that Google is savvy enough to overlook the "abundant" navigation links and focus on the content of the page below? Will the <nav>element help us get away with this navigation strategy? Or should I reel some of these navigation pages into categories? As you might surmise the site has a fairly flat structure, hence the lack of category pages.</nav> </nav> </nav>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxcarpress1 -
Alternative links in the search results.
Hello, This is a short question Please look at this SERP screenshot: http://imgur.com/1EMen Who do they get the other links under their results. Cornel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornel_Ilea0 -
Internal links in blog posts?
What's the best strategy for internal links in a blog post? Example, if I write a blog should I always place a link to the main site at the bottom when I place my signature and contact info? Should I just put links in the content? Or should I do both?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Quantifying Linking Campaign Value
Is there any way to predict if and how Organic traffic would change if we sucesfully added some high-quality links to our website? Quantifying link value would help to plan how much time/efforts we should spend on quality link-building. I understand that the more good links we get - the better. But beyond that, I am looking for some methodology/data/formulas that would help to decide if links are worth pursing. Here is an example: Let's say we acquired 20 high-quality links from PR 0-5 pages of some trusted web sites of PR6-8. Let's say that on these pages would also link to 10-20 other web sites. Would such campaign be of some direct value to our ecommerce website of PR6? My question is limited to how high-quality links improve overall Google search traffic to the website only. I am not interested in calculating value of individual keywords - most of our search traffic comes from long tail. I am also not interested in how to estimate referral traffic - both seem much easier topics to tackle. But how would I be able to measure the value of lets say 1 link from PR 8 site with a PR3 page, when there are 10 other external links on that page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Quidsi0