Anyone See This Before? Google Following Links that are Not Hyperlinks
-
Today I was going through my Google Webmaster URL Errors (404s) info. I came across two links in my URL Errors report that are NOT actually hyperlinks on the source page.
Both of these links are from two different forum-type websites. In both cases, the post references a URL on my website (incorrectly, hence the 404 error) in the text of the post but did NOT actually link to my site. I looked at the source code...no href.
Both forum posts simply had a
tag or
tag around the incorrect URL text referencing my site.
I have never seen this before or heard that Google will follow a URL that is not actually a hyperlink. Anyone else?
-
Had a bit of a dig and found this post which seems to confirm the reference being followed such as it is although not clear if any real ranking benefit.
http://dejanseo.com.au/seo-experiment-with-non-link-references/
Certainly is an interesting case and I agree nice to be able to 'fix' these errors and if there is some seo side benefits of any kind, so much the better!
-
Lynn:
A public service type thing letting you know about a bad URL and if someone copy and paste the URL it won't 404 anymore by setting up a 301 is possible.
I check my WMT about every month for 404s and this is the first time that I noticed these kinds of "links".
I just checked my latest backlinks report in WMT and these non-links don't show up in this report.
Perhaps there is some co-occurrence SEO benefit though? Even if there is no SEO benefit it is nice "fixing" these for the potential website visitor to my site and I like seeing people mentioning us.
-
Hi,
I just saw this in one of my gwt reports also, same case, a full url in a forum, http:// and all, but not linked and it is showing up in the 404 errors notices.
Is it likely that this is just a public service type thing from GWT letting you know that there is a bad url floating around?
At the end of the day a full url is pretty much the same as a link, its just not clickable! To be honest I would be a bit surprised if google wasn't noting these type of references. Open to abuse sure, but in many cases completely legitimate references to other pages that just happen to not be hyperlinks. Doubt it contributes much (if anything) to rankings but not that surprising I guess that google can see it for what it is (a reference to a url) and if that url is bad then it shows up in your gwt reports.
-
AndieF:
Sure. Here is a link to one...
http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/lighting/msg112233371417.html
The link that shows up in my Webmaster Tools is in the 2nd post from davidtay - http://www.pegasuslighting.com/4inch-12v-recessed-lighting-housing-rem odel-75w.html.
Here is another one...
http://www.opensourcescript.net/answers/question.php?qid=20130425170248AACa3M1
The link that shows up in my Webmaster Tools is in the 3rd Answer - http://www.pegasuslighting.com/under-cab
Thanks for sharing that video! I can definitely see Matt's point about potential abuse. However, from my Webmaster Tools it definitely looks like they are following these reference links and not completely ignoring them.
-
Really interesting. Would you be able to share with us the URLs of your site and the forums it's at?
Edit: I found this video at in which Matt Cutts suggests that they don't use it as a signal, although it is a few years old now.
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
-
Can google bots read my internal post links if they are all listed in a javascript accordian where I list my sources?
I post a JavaScript accordion drop down tab [ a collapsible content area ] at the end of all my posts. I labeled the accordion "Show Article Sources"., and when a user clicks it, then the accordion expands open and it shows all the sources I listed for my article. And this is where I post all of my articles links that I reference per each article. But I read somewhere that google crawlers can not read text in a drop down JavaScript tab. So I am wondering now if this is true because that would mean I have no internal linking SEO going on since it cant read the links? ..... if it is true, then I should remove the accordion from all my articles and some how include the links I reference in the actual body text so I can get SEO benefits from external linking similar content? If that's true, what is an aesthetic way to do this, any example links? Tips ? Thoughts ?
Technical SEO | | ianizaguirre0 -
Why Google ranks a page with Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW?
Hi guys, I was playing with the new OSE when I found out a weird thing: if you Google "performing arts school london" you will see w w w . mountview . org. uk at the 3rd position. The point is that page has "Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", why Google indexed it? Here you can see the robots.txt allows Google to index the URL but not the content, in article they also say the meta robots tag will properly avoid Google from indexing the URL either. Apparently, in my case that page is the only one has the tag "NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", but it's the home page. so I said to myself: OK, perhaps they have just changed that tag therefore Google needs time to re-crawl that page and de-index following the no index tag. How long do you think it will take to don't see that page indexed? Do you think it will effect the whole website, as I suppose if you have that tag on your home page (the root domain) you will lose a lot of links' juice - it's totally unnatural a backlinks profile without links to a root domain? Cheers, Pierpaolo
Technical SEO | | madcow780 -
Google authorship syntax, plus no follow
I have seen two forms of rel=author syntax. Are they both valid? (1) (2) Second, does 'no follow' take away authorship? Is there any point in doing rel=author for a link that is rel=no follow? Like this:
Technical SEO | | scanlin0 -
Crawling issues in google
Hi everyone, I think i have crawling issues with one of my sites. It has vanished form Google rankings it used to rank for all services i offered now it doesn't anymore ever since September 29th. I have resubmitted to Google 2 times and they came back with the same answer: " We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the web spam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search. " How i detected that it may be a crawling issue is that 2 weeks ago i changed metas - metas are very slow in getting updated and for some of my pages never did update Do you know any good tools to check for bad code that could slow down the crawling. I really don't know where to look other than issues for crawling. I validated the website with w3c validator and ran xenu and cleaned these up but my website is still down. Any ideas are appreciated.
Technical SEO | | CMTM0 -
No inbound links. Should I link-build or create new content?
I have a PR4 site with good traffic but the blog is not very popular--the posts do not generate any backlinks and hardly get any traffic. Yet, I continue to kick out a new post every week. Site: http://www.stadriemblems.com/
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept
Blog: http://www.stadriemblems.com/blog/ I keep posting content so that Google keeps crawling the site and viewing it as fresh (and yes, I'm posting for my human visitors' benefit too!), but I'm wondering if eventually this will hurt more than help if Google detects all these new pages are not being linked to, and therefore starts viewing the site as low quality and devalues it. So should I: Keep posting Stop posting and build links to the posts Try to promote my blog to get more traffic and hope people link to it Something else or some combination of the above0 -
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
Technical SEO | | askotzko0 -
If two links from one page link to another, how can I get the second link's anchor text to count?
I am working on an e-commerce site and on the category pages each of the product listings link to the product page twice. The first is an image link and then the second is the product name. I want to get the anchor text of the second link to count. If I no-follow the image link will that help at all? If not is there a way to do this?
Technical SEO | | JordanJudson0 -
Google penalty
Anyone have any success stories on what they did to get out of Google penalty?
Technical SEO | | phatride0