Should a business requestion nofollow links from businesses it has commercial relationships with?
-
I am working for a motor homes company that works with a network of dealers.
Having just analysed the site I notice that dealers are sending links to the site - lots of them. They are all follow links and are freely given. ADDED: There are upwards of a million new affiliate backlinks and then a load of pretty normal freely given backlinks with dealers who have commission arrangements, etc., with the company on motorhome sales.
Now this doesn't feel right to me because even if it isn't purposefully manipulative, it may appear so because of clear commercial relationships between my client company and the dealer businesses.
So I will recommend nofollow althought the site will lose a huge number of backlinks as a result. What are your thoughts on this?
-
It is indeed. One the one hand, err on the side of caution - on the other, links are required, but with that many affiliate links, I would have though Google was ignoring them.
-Andy
-
Thanks for your feedback Andy - In this instance the site has a history of penalties, so perhaps more vulnerable. It's hard to know for sure, of course.
-
As a matter of course, I would tend to nofollow affiliate links, but I can't say I have ever seen a site penalised for having inbound affiliate links.
Unless there was a manual penalty or some other reason, I still wouldn't rush to nofollow them if all is working well.
-Andy
-
Hi Matt - thanks for feedback - my main concern is upwards of a million affiliate backlinks that have come in recently - they are live, unfortunately.
-
The site is performing fine and many of the backlinks are freely given - just a few - however they have started some major affiliate marketing work and I see the backlinks coming in are nofollow and there are lots of them.
To give you an example - the latest company linking has sent through over 1,100,000 follow links to a few pages on the website (mainly a calculator for financing the motorhome).
These are all follow links and I'm thinking 302 or nofollow would be far safer, yet they're all live right now. I believe the client did ask for nofollow tags but they weren't implemented correctly.
One problem is the site is so reliant on these follow backlinks from affiliates for its rankings - if I just march in there and implement nofollows it will hit organic rankings.
-
Hi Luke,
Google is smarter than ever when it comes to links, so if something is freely given and isn't advertising, I wouldn't necessarily be no-following all of these.
Have a read through Google's guidelines on what they suggest for no-following here.
How is the site actually performing? Are they ranking badly in Google? Is visibility low? Are there any manual penalties? Have the site recently undergone any big changes?
Lots of other questions to look at before rushing at links.
-Andy
-
Luke,
I feel like you are jumping the gun, here. Is your site ranking poorly that might suggest a penalty?
You said there are a huge amount of links. How many? What is the context/ location of the links? Do the linking sites have high spam scores?
I wouldn't rush but consider those questions before proceeding.
Matt
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
-
How long Google will take to Disavow a link?
Just want to know how long will Google take to Disavow a link? I uploaded my file on 18 Dec 2020 and today is 5th January 2021 and still, that link is appearing in my Search Console in Top linking domains. Anyone who recently done this practice and how long it took? I mentioned the domain name below and hopefully, it will disavow all the links [subdomain+www+without www] coming from that domain. domain:abcd.com Help me out, please...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seotoolsland.com0 -
Does this type of link pass juice?
I have a backlink that looks like this: https://theirsite.com/go/?t=https%3A//www.mysite.com Will that pass link juice?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vcj0 -
Backlink, how to delete or find who is linking to me?
Hi there guys, Can someone tell me how I go about finding who is linking to my site or how to find backlinks to my site and if it is a spam site or a site I don't know or want linking to me, how to stop them from linking to me and also how to delete their link? Thanks appreciate the time Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Noindexed Pages with External Links Pointing to it: Does the juice still pass through?
I have a site with many many pages that have very thin content, yet they are useful for users/visitors. Those pages also have many external links pointing to them from reputable and authoritative websites. If i were to noindex/follow these pages, will the juice/value from the external links still pass through just as if the page didn't have the noindex tag? Please let me know!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | juicyresults0 -
Is guest posting good for main link-building tactic for eCommerce site
Hello, Is guest posting going to be devalued? We've been offering a guest post with one link in the body pointing towards one of our articles, and one home page link in the bio. We're looking at doing this as the main link building strategy. Is this still a good idea now and in the future? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
What is the best link delete service?
Does anyone know what is the best link delete service? I have heard of removem and linkdelete Which one do you think it best? Is there something better out there? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | shopwood0 -
Link farming and related websites
In my niche I have about 17 sites I have created. They all provide unique content, html, and all have a variety of uses that differ from each other mostly, some repetition but not really. All these sites are related to the same niche. I do link to each other in my sites. I don't go crazy and link every site to every other site or span links on footers. I somewhere in the content link here to there. Not even consistent, just linking to related pages from others. I was wondering if this is something I need to be careful about or could I get hit with link farming?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cbielich0 -
Problems with link spam from spam blogs to competitor sites
A competitor of ours is having a great deal of success with links from spam blogs (such as: publicexperience.com or sexylizard.org) it is proving to be a nightmare. Google does not detect these (the competitor has been doing well now for over a year) and my boss is starting to think if you can’t beat them, join them. Frankly, he is right – we have built some great links but it is nigh on impossible to beat 400+ highly targeted spam links in a niche market. My question is, has anyone had success in getting this sort of stuff brought to the attention of Google and banned (I actually listed them all in a message in webmaster tools and sent them over to Google over a year ago!). This is frustrating, I do not want to join in this kind of rubbish but it is hard to put a convincing argument against it when our competitor has used the technique successfully for over a year without any penalty. Ideas? Thoughts? All help appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RodneyRiley0