Best way to do site seals for clients to have on their sites
-
I am about to help release a product which also gives people a site seal for them to place on their website.
Just like the geotrust, comodo, symantec, rapidssl and other web security providers do.
I have notices all these siteseals by these companies never have nofollow on their seals that link back to their websites.So i am wondering what is the best way to do this. Should i have a nofollow on the site seal that links back to domain or is it safe to not have the nofollow.
It wont be doing any keyword stuffing or anything, it will probly just have our domain in the link and that is all.The problem is too, we wont have any control of where customers place these site seals. From experience i would say they will mostly likely always be placed in the footer on every page of the clients website.
I would like to hear any and all thoughts on this. As i can't get a proper answer anywhere i have asked.
-
Google might consider this to be a "link scheme"....
One part of their definition of a link scheme is.... "Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites..." You can read their full document on link schemes here... https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
If the "seals" have a link in them with nofollow then they will not be considered to be manipulative.
-
Hi Paul,
For anything like this, I would always suggest that you nofollow the image links simple because they are not 'earned'.
I couldn't tell you what others are doing or if not nofollowing has had any impact, but from a safety point of view, nofollow is the way to go here.
Would google have a problem if not? Hard to say because they might recognise what is going on, but I tend to err on the side of caution here.
-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
-
I need help on how best to do a complicated site migration. Replacing certain pages with all new content and tools, and keeping the same URL's. The rest just need to disappear safely. Somehow.
I'm completely rebranding a website but keeping the same domain. All content will be replaced and it will use a different theme and mostly new plugins. I've been building the new site as a different site in Dev mode on WPEngine. This means it currently has a made-up domain that needs to replace the current site. I know I need to somehow redirect the content from the old version of the site. But I'm never going to use that content again. (I could transfer it to be a Dev site for the current domain and automatically replace it with the click of a button - just as another option.) What's the best way to replace blahblah.com with a completely new blahblah.com if I'm not using any of the old content? There are only about 4 URL'st, such as blahblah.com/contact hat will remain the same - with all content replaced. There are about 100 URL's that will no longer be in use or have any part of them ever used again. Can this be done safely?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brickbatmove1 -
How much SEO damage would it do having a subdomain site rather directory site?
Hi all! With a coleague we were arguing about what is better: Having a subdomain or a directory.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gaston Riera
Let me explain some more, this is about the cases: Having a multi-language site: Where en.domain.com or es.domain.com rather than domain.com/en/ or domain.com/es/ Having a Mobile and desktop version: m.domain.com or domain.com rather than domain.com/m or just domain.com. Having multiple location websites, you might figure. The dicussion started with me saying: Its better to have a directory site.
And my coleague said: Its better to have a subdomain site. Some of the reasons that he said is that big companies (such as wordpress) are doing that. And that's better for the business.
My reasons are fully based on this post from Rand Fishkin: Subdomains vs. Subfolders, Rel Canonical vs. 301, and How to Structure Links for SEO - Whiteboard Friday So, what does the community have to say about this?
Who should win this argue? GR.0 -
Shoemaker with ugly shoes : Agency site performing badly, what's our best bet?
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxialDev
We're a web agency and our site www.axialdev.com is not performing well. We have very little traffic from relevant keywords. Local competitors with worse On-page Grader scores and very few backlinks outrank us. For example, we're 17th for the keyword "agence web sherbrooke" in Google.ca in French. Background info: In the past, we included 3 keywords-rich in the footer of every site we made (hundreds of sites by now). We're working to remove those links on poor sites and to use a single nofollow link on our best sites. Since this is on-going and we know we won't be able to remove everything, our link profile sucks (OSE). We have a lot of sites on our C-Block, some of poor quality. We've never received a manual penalty. Still, we've disavowed links as a precaution after running Link D-Tox. We receive a lot of trafic via our blog where we used to post technical articles about Drupal, Node js, plugins, etc. These visits don't drive business. Only a third of our organic visits come from Canada. What are our options? Change domain and delete the current one? Disallow the blog except for a few good articles, hoping it helps Google understand what we really do. Keep donating to Adwords? Any help greatly appreciated!
Thanks!2 -
How is my 301 redirected site stealing rankings from the main site?
Hello, I have a site, drhobelt.com, that 301 redirects to the main site, drhonow.com. Not only is drhobelt.com still indexed, but it recently stole rankings from drhonow.com for "decompression belt" related terms. What could be causing this? How do I reclaim the rankings for drhonow.com? Thanks for reading!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Best way to block a sub-domain from being indexed
Hello, The search engines have indexed a sub-domain I did not want indexed its on old.domain.com and dev.domain.com - I was going to password them but is there a best practice way to block them. My main domain default robots.txt says :- Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml global User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /category//
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /?0 -
Micro sites?
Hi, I have been speaking to seo firms regarding strategies and they mentioned setting up micro sites under domains that are relevant. i.e setting up armanidoamin.co.uk and we use it as a blog type site to update all info, product reviews, news relating to armani. Whats peoples thoughts on this? Does it work? Is it worth the effort? Im not so sure but obviously looking for ideas. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc. We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did: -We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt -Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index -Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.) -removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site. We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect. There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all. The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com. There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist. The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name. Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new? ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line: "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document." This may be what is happening here. And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it. Confused yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Franchise sites on subdomains
I've been asked by a client to optimise a a webpage for a location i.e. London. Turns out that the location is actually a franchise of the main company. When the company launch a new franchise, so far they have simply added a new page to the main site, for example: mysite.co.uk/sub-folder/london They have so far done this for 10 or so franchises and task someone with optimising that page for their main keyword + location. I think I know the answer to this, but would like to get a back up / additional info on it in terms of ranking / seo benefits. I am going to suggest the idea of using a subdomain for each location, example: london.mysite.co.uk Would this be the correct approach. If you think yes, why? Many thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0