Portfolio website: reciprocal backlinks and redirects
-
My company specializes in website design and development, and as such, the portfolio section on our website has lots of links to websites we've built. Generally, the way that we do this is that our portfolio sections links to URLs with a naming scheme as follows:
which is either
- a redirect to http://client1.com if the site is still up, or
- a version hosted on our website (http://ourcompany.com/client1) if the client is no longer hosting their site.
In addition, most of our client sites contain a reciprocal link back to ourcompany.com, usually with the text "Website design and development by OurCompany".
I have two questions about this arrangement:
- Might the reciprocal backlinks from the client sites be affecting the SEO results for ourcompany.com? I know that reciprocal backlinks can be occasionally problematic.
- If I do a search for "site:ourcompany.com", I'll get results for all of the client sites that we're hosting at http://ourcompany.com/client1, because I haven't excluded them in robots.txt. Of course, the content of these sites has little to do with that of our company, because we have a diverse array of clients and none of them do web design and development (which is the content focus of our site). Might this seemingly unrelated content be affecting our results? Should the client sites be excluded in robots.txt or via nofollow?
Thanks very much!
-
Hi Frank,
First, let me answer your question to Alan.
The main advantage of NOINDEX, FOLLOW is that robots can still crawl these pages and pass any link juice that flows through them. So any links pointing to these pages, whether from your own site or external sources, can return back to your site through the links on these pages. Make sense?
If the search engines are excluded from crawling, then they can't discover any links on these pages that flows back to your site.
Also, it seems that you would want to keep these pages out of Google's index, as they are completely unrelated to your site (unless you wrapped them in branding and re-purposed the content as a sort of portfolio)
Sometimes you can get an over-optimization penalty for too many exact match anchor text links pointing back to your site, so watch the anchor text on the reciprocal links and try to vary them as much as possible.
-
Thanks for the reply, Alan.
Are you suggesting the meta tag "noindex, follow" on the pages like http://ourcompany.com/client1? If so, what's the difference between doing that and excluding /client1/* in robots.txt?
Also, can you elaborate on what you mean by "return the link juice"?
Thanks a lot!
-
i would not worry about the reciprocal links, this is natrual and not a worry.
but i would be concerned about them being under your domain as it may confuse the meain of your site, if you no index them, you will be giving link juice away still, but wont be getting any back. I would use a meta tag noindex,folow
this way they will not index the clinet sites, but will return the link juice
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
-
404s on subfolder - how to redirect?
Hi all,
Technical SEO | | MFSMarketing
we have a lot of 404s to subfolders. Eg
www.website.com/blog-post-title/imagename/
www.website.com/blog-post-title/author/ We don't have these subfolders or blog posts anymore.
How do i redirect them? These links (404s) don't seem to have any value or backlinks. Thanks,
Stef0 -
Redirects, 301's & 404's
I have tons of links that I have had added a redirect to after creating my companies new website. Is it bad to have all these 301s? How do I permanently redirect those links? Also, on Google Search Console it's telling me I have 1,000+ excluded links. Is this bad? Will it negatively affect me? Is this something to do with my sitemap? Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂
Technical SEO | | sammecooper0 -
301 Redirect Expert
I have hired two website people from odesk and had bad experience in 301 redirects. One never got it done and the other cause my website to crash on a 500 error code, he load all the redirects in a script on .htaccess on my wordpress site on godaddy, there were 1400 redirect.Can somebody recommend a expert for my redirect problem.
Technical SEO | | tjacquet0 -
Website Cached Version
Hi all Why my full content is not appearing in Text only version(cached version): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zakoopi.com&es_sm=93&strip=1 Original website link: http://www.zakoopi.com/ How can I resolve this issue?
Technical SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Holy Redirects
Currently working on a project for a medium sized site (http://sleeponcall.com/) but the SEOMoz crawl crawled over 14,000 pages because the report is showing more than 8,000 redirects. The client has no clue how this happened as their previous web programmers may not have been on the ball. What could be causing the problem and what is the best way to untangle this mess?
Technical SEO | | Nobody15330770827560 -
Free Blogs Backlinks
Hello I have a very basic question, hope you people don't mind answering this. I plan to create a 10 blogs with keyword specific domain name, where in footer i can place back-link pointing to my website and thought to run on C-Class IP's which will cost me of-course. Now 2nd option which will be free, where i can plan to have my blog on wordpress, Timblr, blogger etc free blogging website and use the backlinks from there and all will have different IP which will also best for SEO prospective. Can you suggest me which will be the best option to have blogs on owned domain name or free blogging site, keeping in mind this will be just s prospective to generate backlinks. Do recommend is this a genuine way to get backliks or its another spam, and where we will keep on updating the all blogs regularly. Thanks in Advance! Regards Danish Wadhwa
Technical SEO | | DanishWadhwa0 -
301 redirects and OSE
We run a blog/video real estate site (yochicago.com) as one of the venues for sponsored content for our clients looking for off-page SEO and inbound links. I'm working with a client who we've linked to a handful of times in the last few weeks, but I'm not seeing any external links from our site on PRO/OSE. Come to find that our writer has been linking to http://clientsite.com, instead of http://www.clientsite.com, which is the canonical site. I wouldn't have thought that this would make a difference, and about an hour of web research seems to confirm that it shouldn't make a difference, save for losing a little bit of SEO credit. What am I missing? Any input would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | mikescotty0 -
301 redirect issues
Hi all, I'm hoping someone will be able to help me with an extermley frustrating problem with 301 redirects in .htaccess. Basically I'm trying to redirect some old pages (from our old website) that stil rank to the new equivilent. For example - old url = www.domain.com/frames/news/company-news/news-reader.php?newsStoryID=395 New www.domain.com/news/article-title I've tried the simple redirect 301 /frames/news/company-news/news-reader.php?newsStoryID=395 http://www.domain.com/news/article-title But this doesnt work. I've also tried - RewriteEngine on
Technical SEO | | EclipseLegal
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^newsStoryID=395$
RewriteRule ^/news-reader.php$ http://www.domain.com/news/article-title/? [L,R=301] Could anyone help? I've followed lots of tutorials that all match the above but it just doesn't work! The only other thing within the htaccess file is from wordpress for pretty permalinks - BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Many thanks in advance!0