Secretly back-linking from whitelabel product
-
Lets say a company (provider.com) offers a whitelabel solution which enables each client to have all of the content on their own domain (product.client.com), with no branding by the content provider.
Now lets say that client.com is a site with a lot of authority, and to promote the launch of product.client.com, they put a lot of links from their main site to the subdomain. This can be very valuable link juice, and provider.com would like to be able to take advantage. The problem is, that client.com wouldn't like it if provider.com put in links on their whitelabel site.
Suppose the following:
All pages on product.client.com start to have a rel="canonical" link to themselves, with a get variable (e.g. product.client.com/page.htm -> product.client.com/page.html?show_extra_link=true)
When the page is visited with the extra get parameter "show_extra_link" a link appears in the footer that points to provider.com
My question is, would this have the same effect for provider.com as placing a link on the non-canonical version of the pages on the whitelabel site would?
-
I'm with Alan - in theory, the canonical would pass the link-juice to the version with the link, but you're not only misleading the client - you're one step away from cloaking the link. You could actually get your own clients penalized for this, and that seems very short-sighted.
Add the NOINDEX on top of this, and I'd be willing to bet that the value of these links would be very low. Even if the client approved followed white-label pages with footer links, for example, we're seeing those types of links get devalued - they're just too easy to get. Now, you add these links all at once, NOINDEX the page, and canonical to a weird variant, and you've painted a very suspicious picture for Google. It might work for a while, but you're taking a significant risk for potentially a very small gain.
-
i would say the canonical.
if the pages are not indexed, but follow, then they would have no value themselfs unless they had in-coming links. if they do have in-coming links then yes they will pass link juice, but only from the canonical i would think, based one what i said above about a canonical being much like a 301
-
Hi Alan,
All of the pages on the subdomain have a robots meta with noindex, follow on them. The pages are only used for data collection (forms), and the clients do not want their pages showing up in google, which is why extracting link juice shouldn't be a problem. As such, the canonical url need not be indexed.
From what I understand, if a page has duplicate content and specifies a rel=canonical, url, the inbound link juice effectively gets syphoned into the original content page. What I'm wondering is, which page does google use for the purpose of propagating outbound link juice?
-
With prev next the content of every page is given to page 1, in that case the link would be part of the content. But with a canonical I am not sure.
If you go by comments by Matt Cutts and Bings Duane Forrester canonicals are the same as a 301 execpt they dod not pyhsiclly move the viewer to the canonical page. so in the case of a canonical the content would not be merged, only the content on the canonical page would be indexed, the links from other verrsions would be redirected. so the link on the show_extra_link version of the page would not be indexed.
As for the morality of this, i would not do it, you are not being honet with the clint and you would be caught out sooner or later when the url was seen in the index(if it was indexed)
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
-
Competitor Black Hat Link Building?
Hello big-brained Moz folks, We recently used Open Site Explorer to compile a list of inbound linking domains to one of our clients, alongside domains linking to a major competitor. This competitor, APBSpeakers.com, is dominating the search results with many #1 rankings for highly competitive phrases, even though their onsite SEO is downright weak. This competitor also has exponentially more links(602k vs. 2.4k) and way more content(indexed pages) reported than any of their competitors, which seems physically impossible to me. Linking root domains are shown as 667 compared to 170 for our client, who has been in business for 10+ years. Taking matters a step further, linking domains for this competitor include such authoritative domains as: Cnn.com TheGuardian.com PBS.org HuffingtonPost.com LATimes.com Time.com CBSNews.com NBCNews.com Princeton.edu People.com Sure, I can see getting a few high profile linking domains but the above seems HIGHLY suspicious to me. Upon further review, I searched CNN, The Guardian and PBS for all variations of this competitors name and domain name and found no immediate mentions of their name. I smell a rat and I suspect APB is using some sort behind-the-scenes programming to make these "links" happen, but I have no idea how. If this isn't the case, they must have a dedicated PR person with EXTREMELY strong connections to secure this links, but even this seems like a stretch. It's conceivable that APB is posting comments on all of the above sites, along with links, however, I was under the impression that all such posts were NoFollow and carried no link juice. Also, paid advertisements on the above sites should be NoFollow as well, right? Anyway, we're trying to get to the bottom of this issue and determine what's going on. If you have any thoughts or words of wisdom to help us compete with these seemingly Black Hat SEO tactics, I'd sure love to hear from you. Thanks for your help. I appreciate it very much. Eric
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EricFish0 -
Embedded links/badges
Hi there Just picking up on something Rand said in his blog analysing his predictions for 2014. Rand predicted that Google will publicly acknowledge algorithmic updates targeting...embeddable infographics/badges as manipulative linking practices While this hasn't exactly materialised yet, it has got me thinking. We have a fair few partners linking to us through an embedded badge. This was done to build the brand, but the positives here wouldn't be worth being penalised in search. Does anyone have any further evidence of websites penalised for doing this, or any views on whether removing those badges should be a priority for us? Many thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HireSpace0 -
Link Building / Link Removal
Hey, I'm in the process of learning SEO, or attempting to, for my company and am chipping away at the process ever so slowly! How can I tell if a site that links to my company's site, www.1099pro.com, has a negative effect on my page/domain authority? Also, if a page doesn't show up in the search rankings at all for it's keywords when it really should (i.e it has the exact keywords and page/domain authority far surpasses even the top results) how can I tell if Google has removed the page from its listing and why? Thanks SEO Gurus
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Stew2220 -
How do you change the 6 links under your website in Google?
Hello everyone, I have no idea how to ask this question, so I'm going to give it a shot and hopefully someone can help me!! My company is called Eteach, so when you type in Eteach into Google, we come in the top position (phew!) but there are 6 links that appear underneath it (I've added a picture to show what I mean). How do you change these links?? I don't even know what to call them, so if there is a particular name for these then please let me know! They seem to be an organic rank rather than PPC...but if I'm wrong then do correct me! Thanks! zorIsxH.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Could lots of links pointed to 301 & 302 redirects be a problem?
Hello, We've got hundreds of links found in screaming frog that are pointing towards 301 & 302 redirects. Could this be hurting rankings? We've got very few 404s. A lot of the problem is breadcrumbs of categories pointing to 302s, but the original category pages that are 302ed are not indexed so we may be OK. We can't change the 302 redirects, it's part of the cart. Could all these non-updated hyperlinks be the cause of continual ranking drop in Google? We've gone from the top 3 to the second page for our main terms. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Obscene anchor text linking to non-existent pages on my site
My website seems to be rapidly accumulating links from what seem to be reputable websites and which are going to non-existent pages on my website. The anchor text of many of these links is obscene. Here is the URL of one of the pages that is linking to me. I contacted the originating site a couple of weeks ago and they are looking into it but I've not heard back. I'm guessing the originating sites have been hacked. Should I be concerned? Why are they linking to pages on my site that don't exist? http://www.radicalartistsagency.com/htmlarea/language/0content_abo_utus.html Looking at the page source of this page reveals the hidden links.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MartinDS0 -
Technorati links. good? or bad?
Hi all After an unnatural link warning I am about to do my third reconsideration request after having my previous two turned down. I have manually removed hundreds of spammy links (thousands if you include sitewide) and used the disavow tool on hundreds more where I could not get them manually removed. The backlinks I have remaining now all seem to be genuine. There are quite a few backlinks from technorati, I thought these were ligitimet links but am now thinking should I remove/disavow them. Does anybody have any opinions?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | shauny350 -
Links to partner sites
I have some partnerships in some portals, usually I put the banner of my company with a link to my site on a space partners. How should I proceed? To place the banner no link? To put the link nofollow? Can’t I do it? Don’t I need to worry about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | soulmktpro0