Does Google crawler understand & flag a blog post has text asserting sponsorship with dofollow outbound link?
-
I kind of know the answer, but just wanted to get some feedback from others.
For the sake of argument, assume there are no other issues with the linking blog, such as: too many ads, thin content, etc.
Question: If you make a payment for a blog post with a dofollow link, and in the blog post there is something to the effect of: "this post has been sponsored by..."
Will Google crawlers detect that and flag that as an unnatural link?
-
Hi there. What we know for certain is that these kinds of signals show up in manual warnings delivered via Search Console, and are a signal that a human quality reviewer would pay attention to. Everything about exactly what Google is doing algorithmically has some element of guesswork to it, but this is a machine-detectable pattern that I would think would be very likely to be detected automatically and the links discounted.
[Sidenote: it wouldn't be the crawler that did this - it would happen at some stage after that - just a semantic difference, but thought it was worth adding for clarity.]
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
-
Regular links may still
Good day: I understand guest articles are a good way to pass linkjuice and some authors have a link to their website on the "Author Bio" section of the article. These links are usually regular links. However, I noticed that some of these sites (using wordpress) have several SEO plugins with the following settings: Nofollow: Tell search engines not to spider links on this webpage. My question is: If the setting above was activated, I would assume the author's website link would look like a regular link but some other code could still be present in the page (ex, header) that would prevent this regular link from being followed. Therefore, the guest writer would not experience any linkjuice. Any idea if there's a way of being able to see if this scenario is happening? What code would we look for?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Audreythenurse0 -
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 -
Bot or Virus Creating Bad Links?
Hey Everyone, We are getting ready to engage a client for some potential marketing/SEO so in preparing for this have ran the site through OpenSiteExplorer. The site is relatively new and there are only two links under the inbound links section. They are relevant and add value, no issues there. Here is where it get strange. When I look under the 'Just Discovered' section there are many (hundreds) new links going back about a month. Virtually all of them have the anchor text 'Louis Vuitton outlet'. Now the client swears he has not engaged anyone for black hat SEO, so wondering who could possibly be creating these links. They do sell some Louis Vuitton items on the site, so I'm wondering if it is possible that some spam bot has picked up the site and began to spam the web with links to the clients site. So far today, 50 or so new links have been created with said anchor text and the clients root URL all on very poor quality, some foreign blog sites. Would like to find out why this is happening and put a stop to it for obvious reasons. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be a bot? Or maybe someone with an axe to grind against the client? Anyone could be doing this on their own, but just seems strange for it to be happening to a new site that does not even rank highly at the moment. Any advice or info is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Whebb0 -
Is article syndication still a safe & effective method of link building?
Hello, We have an SEO agency pushing to implement article syndication as a method of link building. They claim to only target industry-relevant, high authority sources. I am very skeptical of this tactic but they are a fairly reputable agency and claim this is safe and works for their other clients. They sent a broadly written (but not trash) article, as well as a short list of places they would syndicate the article on, such as issuu.com and scribd.com. These are high authority sites and I don't believe I've heard of any algo updates targeting them. Regarding linking, they said they usually put them in article descriptions and company bylines, using branded exact and partial matches; so the anchor text contains exact or partial keywords but also contains our brand name. Lately, I have been under the impression that the only "safe" links that have been manually built, such as these, should be either branded or simply your site's URL. Does anyone still use article syndication as a form of link building with success? Do you see any red flags here? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David_Veldt0 -
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 -
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 -
Text indent -9999px on logo, is it bad??
I saw a question on this forum that was saying that text-indent -9999px was bad SEO, or even worse blackhat seo... But isn't it what everyone is doing for image replacement in logos...? Is it really bad?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | i-kreo0 -
Purchasing an EXPIRING domain with quality related links
I'm about to purchase a domain that has highly trusted links pointed to it. I would like to 301 redirect that domain to point to a brand new domain in the same niche. Some of the links that the expiring domain would take me a long time to obtain so I am thinking to use this method to my advantage. I know that this is not really a legitimate way to go to build backlinks, but surely this is going to give me good serp improvement which is my main concern at the moment. I am going to test this method to see if it benefits me in anyway but I would like some opinions to this please.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | umtmedia0