Paid outbound links - do they have juice?
-
Hi,
A client is asking about a website that has a business model I don't normally work with - it's a site full of very informative articles - no harm there - and they are sponsored by companies who provide the service being discussed. Not really any harm there. But attached to the link is an outbound tracking device. The business model is pay per click. Has anyone had experience with this, specifically if larger search engines have picked up on this and filtered out those types of links to not count very much if at all?
Thanks!
-
Thank you both! So sorry on the delay to respond. Makes sense!
-
You said there's outbound link tracking. Check if those links are nofollowed as Ryan suggested. You can also check if if they are something like www.thatsite.com/redirect.php?id=1 and if the redirect.php has a noindex or www.thatsite.com/robots.txt has a disallow or something like that.
If the links are redirects via a tracking, they are not really being counted towards the linked to site's backlinks anyways, so I don't think there are any issues here.
-
Those links should have the "nofollow" tag applied to them as they are sponsored or paid links. If they do not have the tag applied, it is highly likely Google devalues those links anyway.
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
-
Internal Linking issue
So i am working with a review company and I am having a hard time with something. We have created a category which lists and categorizes every one of our properties. For example a specific property in the category "restaurant" would be as seen below: /restaurant/mcdonalds /restaurant/panda-express And so on and so on. What I am noticing however is that our more obscure properties are not being linked to by any page. If I were to visit the page myurl.com/restaurant I would see 100+ pages of properties, however it seems like only the properties on the first few pages are being counted as having links. So far the only way I have been able to work around this issue is by creating a page and hiding it in our footer called "all restaurants". This page lists and links to every one of our properties. However it isn't exactly user friendly and I would prefer scrapers not to be able to scrape all properties at once! Anyway, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
How to Break Up a Page with Too Many Links
My client has a live page with 100+ links subdivided into 10 categories that each have great potential keyword targeting opportunities. I'd like to improve this page and my intuition is to split it into 11 pages, one page with links to all the others and a bit of content about each. Here's an example of the potential IA: Dog Rescue Groups
Technical SEO | | elenarox
Golden Retriever Rescue - description
Poodle Rescue - description
Cocker Spaniel Rescue - description
Poodle Rescue - description
Labrador Retriever Rescue - description
etc. --------- Golden Retriever Rescue
Link 1 - description
Link 2 - description
Link 3 - description Is this a good idea and will I see a big traffic drop overall at first? Also, these are all internal links, not external.0 -
Link building to ROOT domain OR to WWW.?
Hello, Here I come with one more 'sensitive' question, hoping that you SEO gurus could give some input on. My title explains pretty much what I'm wondering about, but let me give you some short data. I have from .htaccess file set that all traffic goes to WWW.mydomain.com. I know that it is 'better' for search engines not to have duplicate destinations as that can give decreased page rank because of 'double content'. As for search engines http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com is totally different domains. Now wondering one thing: If I build a several thousands of backlinks at various sources, blogs, directories, web sites etc etc. - shall I link to domain ROOT or shall I include WWW prefix? When looking at Moz Keyword Analysis for my domains, I can see a block about 'Linking Root Domains' and 'Page Linking Root Domains'. But no 'www' variable (sub-domain) there. As I have already set canonical part so everything shows with WWW on my website - what logic shall I use when building backlinks? How will search engine translate the link juice in regards I wrote above? Thanks in advance, great forum!
Technical SEO | | SEOisSEO0 -
Do I need a link to my sitemap?
I have a very large sitemap. I submit it to both Google and Bing, but do I need a link to it? If someone went there it would probably lock their browser. Is there any danger of not having a link if I submit it to Google and Bing?
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Do pages that are in Googles supplemental index pass link juice?
I was just wondering if a page has been booted into the supplemental index for being a duplicate for example (or for any other reason), does this page pass link juice or not?
Technical SEO | | FishEyeSEO0 -
Linking from and to pages
My website, www.kamperen-bij-de-boer.com, tells people what campingssites can be found in The Netherlands for recreational purposes. In order for a campingsite to be mentioned on our website we ask them to place a link to our website (either using a text link or image link) and then we make a page for that campsite on our website with in the end a link to ther website, e.g. http://www.kamperen-bij-de-boer.com/Minicamping-In-t-Oldambt.html -> they in return link back to us. Since this comes natural will this or won't this be penalized by Google and so on for linkfarming. At this moment we have about 600 camping sites on our website alone linking to us (not all of them) and we are linking to them. Since this can be explained as link trading which is not as good for your ranking as one-way-linking what should be wise? Should i include a nofollow? I already have many links from other sites linking to mine without having to link back, is there anything else i can do with linking to ensure better ranking?
Technical SEO | | JarnoNijzing0 -
Link Building Advice
Hi Everyone, I have just joined the community and am looking for some help regards Offsite SEO and Link Building. I have done some basic SEO on my website 'Marketing Quotes' Added to web directories (although I am told they do not carry much weight) I have written content and articles around them (on ezine, squidoo etc.) I have written unique content for the site I have done guest posting on blogs Not sure what to do next though for high power links. I did notice a Q&A on contacting webmasters and asking for links (after building a relationship) but wondered if there was anything (offsite wise) that I have missed out? Appreciate any advice. Regards, David
Technical SEO | | Marketingquotes0 -
Nofollow internal links
Hi, we have problems with having too many links on page. Our website has a menu with 3 level sub-navigation drop down for categories which we want to maintain, for easy-navigation for the users. http://www.redwrappings.com.au/ After reading this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru, and some other articles, we came up with a solution. We can easily reduce the number of links per page by putting 'nofollow' on our categories links menu dropdown and create a separate 'landing page' that contains links to these categories (and allow 'follow' links for robots). Is it wise to do this? Or any better, easy solution that you can suggest? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Essentia1