Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

'External nofollow' in a robots meta tag? (advertorial links)

Technical SEO

910

Alex-Harford last edited by

I believe this has never worked? It'd be an easy way of preventing any penalties from Google's recent crackdown on paid links via advertorials.

When it's not possible to nofollow each external link individually, what are people doing? Nofollowing and/or noindexing the whole page?
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
TextMarketing last edited by

If you believe your site's ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site.

Use this tool...

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1

Hope that helps!
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote -1

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

If I'm using a compressed sitemap (sitemap.xml.gz) that's the URL that gets submitted to webmaster tools, correct?

I just want to verify that if a compressed sitemap file is being used, then the URL that gets submitted to Google, Bing, etc and the URL that's used in the robots.txt indicates that it's a compressed file. For example, "sitemap.xml.gz" -- thanks!
Technical SEO | | jgresalfi

0
Meta descriptions for specific categories/tags not showing?

Hi -- I'm really confused as to why only certain blog categories are not able to be crawled for their descriptions when their source codes look identical to other, crawlable pages on the same site? Specifically, Moz/other tools are not able to pull a meta description from the page http://www.koonz.com/category/videos/premises-liability-videos (and a few others) - while the source code looks almost identical to http://www.koonz.com/category/videos/federal-torts-claims-act-videos ?? Can anyone shed some light into possible issues for me? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | jessicamcdaniel

0
Robots.txt

Hi All Having a robots.txt looking like the below will this stop Google crawling the site User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | internetsalesdrive

0
GWT returning 200 for robots.txt, but it's actually returning a 404?

Hi, Just wondering if anyone has had this problem before. I'm just checking a client's GWT and I'm looking at their robots.txt file. In GWT, it's saying that it's all fine and returns a 200 code, but when I manually visit (or click the link in GWT) the page, it gives me a 404 error. As far as I can tell, the client has made no changes to the robots.txt recently, and we definitely haven't either. Has anyone had this problem before? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | White.net

0
We just fixed a Meta refresh, unified our link profile and now our rankings are going crazy

Crazy in a bad way!I am hoping that perhaps some of you have experienced this scenario before and can shed some light on what might be happening.Here is what happened:We recently fixed a meta refresh that was on our site's homepage. It was completely fragmenting our link profile. All of our external links were being counted towards one URL, and our internal links were counting for the other URL. In addition to that, our most authoritative URL, because it was subject to a meta refresh, was not passing any of its authority to our other pages.Here is what happened to our link profile:Total External Links: Before - 2,757     After - **4,311  **Total Internal Links:   Befpre - 125        After - 3,221
Total Links:               Before - 2,882     After - 7,532Yeah....huge change. Great right? Well, I have been tracking a set of keywords that were ranking from spots 10-30 in Google. There are about 66 keywords in the set. I started tracking them because at MozCon last July Fabio Riccotta suggested that targeting keywords showing up on page 2 or 3 of the results might be easier to improve than terms that were on the bottom of page 1. So, take a look at this. The first column shows where a particular keyword ranked on 11/8 and the second column shows where it is ranking today and the third column shows the change. For obvious reasons I haven't included the keywords.11/8   11/14   Change****10        44       -34
10        26       -16
10        28       -18
10        34       -24
10       25       -15
15       29       -14
16       33       -17
16        32       -16
17        24       -7
17        53       -36
17        41       -24
18        27       -9
19       42       -23
19        35       -16
19       -         Not in top 200
19        30       -11
19        25       -6
19        43       -24
20        33       -13
20        41       -21
20        34      -14
21        46       -25
21         -       Not in top 200
21        33       -12
21        40       -19
21        61       -40
22        46       -24
22        35       -13
22        46       -24
23        51       -28
23        49       -26
24        43       -19
24        47       -23
24        45       -21
24        39       -15
25        45       -20
25        50       -25
26        39      -13
26        118   - 92
26        30       -4
26        139     -113
26        57       -31
27        48       -21
27        47       -20
27        47       -20
27        45       -18
27        48       -21
27        59       -32
27        55       -28
27        40       -13
27        48       -21
27        51       -24
27        43       -16
28        66       -38
28        49       -21
28        51       -23
28        58       -30
29        58       -29
29        43       -14
29        41       -12
29        49       -20
29        60       -31
30        42       -12
31        -          Not in top 200
31        59       -28
31        68       -37
31        53       -22Needless to say, this is exactly the opposite of what I expected to see after fixing the meta refresh problem. I wouldn't think anything of normal fluctuation, but every single one of these keywords moved down, almost consistently 20-25 spots. The further down a keyword was to begin with, it seems the further it dropped.What do you make of this? Could Google be penalizing us because our link profile changed so dramatically in a short period of time? I should say that we have never taken part in spammy link-building schemes, nor have we ever been contacted by Google with any kind of suspicious link warnings. We've been online since 1996 and are an e-commerce site doing #RCS. Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo

0
Old massive site, should I nofollow all out going links?

The company I work for is in the process of rebuilding our entire website profile. Our biggest site, FrenchQuarter.com ranks pretty well for our main term "French Quarter Hotels" And we use that to drive business directly to our hotel businesses. The site is very old and one I inherited, rebuilding it won't be a priority for another 9 months or so. This site act's as a bit of a directory for the city. There are links everywhere and it's probably passing link juice to a lot of businesses scott free. In the mean time would it benefit or hurt us if I went through and no-followed most of the links? Would nofollowing links help frenchquarter.com to rank any better than it does? And could I then direct some of that link juice directly at our hotel websites to boost those as well? My goal is to get our hotel websites to rank 1st page, we get exposure in the locations pack, for 2 of our 5 hotels, but placing below that is impossible with all the competition from the OTA's (expecia, bookit.com, etc) Seems near impossible no matter what my backlink profile looks like. Thanks for any feedback, Cyril
Technical SEO | | Nola504

1
How not to lose link juice when linking to thousands of PDF guides?

Hi All, I run an e-commerce website with thousands of products.
In each product page I have a link to a PDF guide of that product. Currently we link to it with a "nofollow" <a href="">tag.</a> <a href="">Should we change it to window.open in order not to lose link juice? Thanks</a>
Technical SEO | | BeytzNet

0
External Links on a Front Page

Does anyone have any links to information about external links on a front page ? I am advising a client that this is not the best idea and that they could be put in a different place but can't find any proof of this.
Technical SEO | | marcelo-275398

0