Powered by/Credit backlinks and nofollow
-
Pseudo question:
I have a website that has 100K pages. On about 50K of those pages I have information that is fed to me via an outside 3rd-party website.
Now, I like to give credit where credit is due, so I add a backlink to the website that is feeding me this content. A simple backlink like so:
Information provided by: Company ABC
Now, this 3rd-party website wants me to remove the nofollow tags from the backlink, but I am very, very skeptical because to me, sending ~50K dofollow backlinks to a single site might make the Google monster upset with me.
This 3rd-party site is being very hard-headed about this, to the point where I am thinking of terminating the relationship all together. I digress.
Scoured the net before writing this, but couldn't really find anything directly related to my issue.
Thoughts? Is a nofollow required here? We're not talking 1 or 2 links here; we're talking tens of thousands (50K is low; it will probably be upwards of 100K when all is said and done as my site has many, many pages).
Thanks in advance.
-
Yes it did become more complex and will continue to do so. However SEOmoz has always for the most part suggested building for the users within Googles guidelines.
I like to think of Google as the God of information and its rules as a bible that SEOs need to follow... Just like the bible everyone interpits it in their own way
and tries to be good... -
This is what I'm really leaning towards. At the end of the day, and one of the first "tips" I ever read regarding SEO and Google/crawlers, is: "does whatever you're doing look natural?"
SEO has become very, very complex over the years in terms of what you can/can't, should/shouldn't do. I don't even know what's natural and what's not anymore it seems.
-
Yeah this makes sense, it's ok to have links within articles to other sites that help the users. However thousands of links appearing at once is playing rush and roulette with a fully loaded gun. IMO you are better off taking their content down then giving them thousands of followed links in one shot.
-
Thanks for the prompt reply!
And we're talking ~100,000 backlinks as that's how many pages on my site that will be using their content. The content is actually mortgage rates that they offer, and is ultimately an affiliate program.
Their link would be a standard brand name backlink with no targeted, rich anchor text. Literally, it will be the exact same anchor text/backlink URL on every single page their content is used.
I have looked at how many big players on the net handle this kind of situation, and it appears that they all have nofollow on the backlinks in identical situations, but with other companies.
-
This is very tricky.. Giving them thousands of backlinks in one shot might raise a flag. However, are these links all anchored the same or would it look like natural links? (natural link profile = mostly URLs/brand mame some with exact/diverse anchor text.)
IMO they do deserve the credit for their work (do follow). However, doing all this in one shot with a thousand links is going to look like you sold them links/that they bought those links (NOT a natural progression). This may negatively influence both parties. I would recommend asking them if they are ok with a few links so it looks naturalt and let them pick the links they want. Also, let them know that by you giving them thousands of links in one shot can hurt their site...
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
-
Why is it still effective to manually create backlinks?
Hi I'm the manager of a training site
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jamalinani
My question is why buying backlinks is still effective
Except Google has stated that it will penalize sites that buy backlinks0 -
Will pillar posts create a duplication content issue, if we un-gate ebook/guides and use exact copy from blogs?
Hi there! With the rise of pillar posts, I have a question on the duplicate content issue it may present. If we are un-gating ebook/guides and using (at times) exact copy from our blog posts, will this harm our SEO efforts? This would go against the goal of our post and is mission-critical to understand before we implement pillar posts for our clients.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Olivia9540 -
Which is Important? Backlinks or Internal Links? For SEO purpose.
Which is Important? Backlinks or Internal Links? For SEO purpose.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BBT-Digital0 -
Mobile Redirect - Cloaking/Sneaky?
Question since Google is somewhat vague on what they consider mobile "equivalent" content. This is the hand we're dealt with due to budget, no m.dot, etc, responsive/dynamic is on the roadmap but still a couple quarters away but, for now, here's the situation. We have two sets of content and experiences, one for desktop and one for mobile. The problem is that desktop content does not = mobile content. The layout, user experience, images and copy aren't the same across both versions - they are not dramatically different but not identical. In many cases, no mobile equivalent exists. Dev wants to redirect visitors who find the desktop version in mobile search to the equivalent mobile experience, when it exists, when it doesn't they want to redirect to the mobile homepage - which really isn't a homepage it's an unfiltered view of the content. Yeah we have push state in place for the mobile version etc. My concern is that Google will look at this as cloaking, maybe not in the cases where there's a near equivalent piece of content, but definitely when we're redirecting to the "homepage". Not to mention this isn't a great user experience and will impact conversion/engagement metrics which are likely factors Google's algorithm considers. What's the MOZ Community say about this? Cloaking or Not and Why? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jose_R0 -
Recovering from Black Hat/Negative SEO with a twist
Hey everyone, This is a first for me, I'm wondering if anyone has experienced a similar situation and if so, what the best course of action was for you. Scenario In the process of designing a new site for a client, we discovered that his previous site, although having decent page rank and traffic had been hacked. The site was built on Wordpress so it's likely there was a vulnerability somewhere that allowed someone to create loads of dynamic pages; www.domain.com/?id=102, ?id=103, ?id=104 and so on. These dynamic pages ended up being malware with a trojan horse our servers recognized and subsequently blocked access to. We have since helped them remedy the vulnerability and remove the malware that was creating these crappy dynamic pages. Another automated program appears to have been recently blasting spam links (mostly comment spam and directory links) to these dynamically created pages at an incredibly rapid rate, and is still actively doing so. Right now we're looking at a small business website with a touch over 500k low-quality spammy links pointing to malware pages from the previously compromised site. Important: As of right now, there's been no manual penalty on the site, nor has a "This Site May Have Been Compromised" marker in the organic search results for the site. We were able to discover this before things got too bad for them. Next Steps? The concern is that when the Penguin refresh occurs, Google is going to notice all these garbage links pointing to those malware pages and then potentially slap a penalty on the site. The main questions I have are: Should we report this proactively to the web spam team using the guidelines here? (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1) Should we request a malware review as recommended within the same guidelines, keeping in mind the site hasn't been given a 'hacked' snippet in the search results? (https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/4598410?hl=en&ref_topic=4596795) Is submitting a massive disavow links file right now, including the 490k-something domains, the only way we can escape the wrath of Google when these links are discovered? Is it too hopeful to imagine their algorithm will detect the negative-SEO nature of these links and not give them any credit? Would love some input or examples from anyone who can help, thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Etna0 -
Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow
Hi Mozzers I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it. So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes, I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*. So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs) If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow? PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks, Chris Captivate.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DROIDSTERS0 -
Would linking out to a gambling/casino site, harm my site and the other sites it links out to?
I have been emailed asking if I sell links on one of my sites. The person wants to link out to slotsofvegas[dot]com or similar. Should I be concerned about linking out to this and does it reduce the link value to any of the other sites that the site links out to? Thanks, Mark
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Markus1111
