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
-
Redirect By IP location
Hi All, I have a client who operates in multiple countries with the sub directory structure. In AU for their main brand name .com site still ranks in the first position but /au ranks for most of the other terms. Current we have a 301 redirect in place for .com for anyone accessing the site from AU to /au. This is only for home pages as other .com pages don't rank in Australia. Just wondering what implication this can have on our SEO campaign. Cheers
Technical SEO | | SSP21
Thank you for your expertise and insights in advance.1 -
My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.
Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages. I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google. Does anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
Technical SEO | | Chophel
{YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
{HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php0 -
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
Hi Moz Community, I have a 301 redirect question... I just acquired an old domain: Totally in my niche Domain is 14 years old Website exists of 1000 pages Great amount of backlinks Website is offline since about 2 weeks Will place a new website online asap with new url structure For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages. My question: What to do with the 950 other url's? Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage? Should I forward those pages to the 404 page? Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones? Another solution maybe? Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | snorkel0 -
Redirects in site map
I have a site with the ace/sef ( creates friendly URLS) in a large data base site. It creates a site map dynamically. Yet I realize one issue which I am trying to think through. I recently changed my urls to include an ID number example: homepage/houses/1134-big-blue-house The prior url was: homepage/houses/big-blue-house the original url above redirects to the new one with the ID like I want. However the site map has both URLS in it which go to same page I am not sure but it seems rather stupid to have the new URL and OLD redirected URL in the site map. Yet beside stupid I am wondering if this is duplicate content and will cause a penalty from the google bot. What is your opinion ?
Technical SEO | | aimiyo0 -
Temporary redirects
why is wordpress creating redirects from trackbacks and what can i do about it? according to seomoz i have several of these kinds of temporary redirects: http://redlandsorthodontics.com/about-us-2/meet-the-staff/redlands-orthodontics/trackback/ redirects to http://redlandsorthodontics.com/about-us-2 what are trackbacks anyway since i didn't purposely create them?
Technical SEO | | dad7more0 -
0 Google Backlinks
A sudden drop in the number of google backlinks. Earlier this month I had 15 google backlinks and now all of a sudden I have none. My google impression has also dropped drastically, my website's average is 10000 impression per day and now we have none. I have increased the crawler's speed on the website, would this be the cause of it? 4pmdesign.com
Technical SEO | | 4pm0 -
Double 301 redirect
Hi together, due to some technical reasons I have redirect (301) an existing link two times. Example: www.mydomain.com/root/site.html > 301 > www.mydomain.com/site.html > 301 www.mydomain.com/site_new.html Is there anybody how has got some experience like doing a double redirect? What about link juice? Best regards Steffen
Technical SEO | | steffen_0 -
Redirect
How do I redirect this url: http://www.example.com/img/head/beauty-spa.jpg" width="114" height="50" alt="image"/></a> </div> <div class="c0 r"><a href="/m/imgres?q=short+holiday+treatments Thank you for your help.
Technical SEO | | petrakraft0