Help! Someone's inserted my link in the footer of another site!
-
There's a site in my industry where (I'm guessing on flawed SEO advice) all of their pages contain footer links to rival sites – with each page containing a different set of links.
One page has a link to my site, which I've just found out from GWT as the link now produces a 404.
Should I
a) ignore it?
b) ask them to replace it with a live link from my site (their site's highly relevant to mine)? or
c) ask them to remove it altogether as no-one wants footer links? -
Ah I think this answers my question:
....John Mueller of Google did confirm at Google Webmaster Forum that, if a page is made 404 or 410, links to such a page are not counted by Google.
-
Thanks for the input.
I agree they look spammy. I'm also going by this thread here:
http://moz.com/community/q/footer-link-2Qu: the single footer link to my site produces a 404 Not Found (it was for a real estate listing that we deleted months ago).
Do I still need to take action or can I simply ignore? -
If you are referring to the anchor text links at the bottom I'd get it removed. They look extremely spammy and is probably doing you no good whatsoever.
Ask them to remove the link but if they refuse to or you don't get a response, use the disavow file.
-
Now why didn't I think of that?
However, my question remains: You would take the link despite its being in a footer? -
Or you could just use your htaccess file to 301 redirect their broken link to whatever page on your site you want it to go to.
-
Footer link, though? Isn't that a no-no?
-
I would recommend what you
ve mentioned under point b) ... I cant see why you should not take a little advantage from such a link?! As long as this site that gives you this link is not a "bad" one...
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
-
Redirecting dofollow, high-domain-authority links from one site to another: good idea?
I have two sites that offer help for freelance writers. The first gets almost no search traffic and is very low priority for me. The second is my main priority and gets substantial search traffic. The low-priority site has a significant number of dofollow backlinks from high-domain-authority sites. Is it a good idea to 301 redirect these links to similar/related posts on my high-priority site? Would this potentially boost the SEO of my high-priority site? Thanks for any help!
Link Building | | John88990 -
Disavow Links - how do you know if it's worked?
I asked another SEO company to analysis my link structure (as I was too busy!) As I was flat lining on some work I was doing. They said I potentially had an algo penalty and that i need to do a disavow , even though I had no messages from Google saying I had unnatural links. stupidly I agreed to the disavow. Looking at Webmasters tools it seems they've submitted a bunch of links. Since they've done this traffic dropped by 60%, ranking dropped massively. In google Webmasters all the links which are meant to be removed are still showing. How do I know if the actual disavow has been done? And should I do a reconsideration request? Even though Google hadn't flagged an issue ??
Link Building | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Spam Links sent to my site.
Hello, I'll try to be concise as I can. I run a coupon codes site.
Link Building | | affigroup
Today when I loggein in webmaster tools I noticed many new links to my website. And all to a single page. (mydomain.com/stores/companyname).
I tend to think that spam was made by the person who owns that company because he/she used achors related to his bussiness rather than the company name + coupon or company name + discounts. Besides the fact that these links have no value and created automatically by software there are also links from pornographic websites. (bet he paid someone on fiverr for link building and made my website tier 1) I was thinking of 2 options:
1. I remove that page from my website. (mydomain.com/stores/hiscompany) and use disallow. Not sure I can find all the links poiting to that page.
2. Redirect that page mydomain.com/stores/company to hiscompany.com so he can enjoy his spam. I would appreciate if someone can answer me.1 -
Site not responding well to Link Building
I worked on around 15 EMDs and all of them have similar template but different content. They are all two KW EMDs. Now I did KW research and changed Title tags and Did around 10- 15 links for them in and they all reacted very well to link building except one site. I did the link building for this site in 3 batches- 7 links in first 10 days, then another 7 in next 10 days and another 7 links after 7 days. Site's ranking decreased with each link building. Then I removed the low quality links recently. Now What do you guys suggest should I again do link building?? (though everytime I did link building site lost rankings as mentioned earlier) or WHAT IS THE NEXT STRATEGY AFTER REMOVING BAD LINKS? START LINKING AGAIN, WAIT FOR SOMETIME ?
Link Building | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Joomla's weblink component, do the links count as backlinks?
If your using the default Joomla weblink component do the links you add to others sites count as backlinks to those sites? example: http://www.yakangler.com/helpful-links/26-fishing-blogs-sites
Link Building | | mr_w0 -
Helpful or Hurtfull / Distributor Links to Our site on every product page?
We have a distributor site with a page rank of 3 on its home page, and 0-1'ish on its product pages. While our manufacturing site is PR 4 getting close to 5... We are thinking about adding a link from our distributors product pages to our manufacturing appropriate material information page. This would be about 10k links spread out among 7 materials. We want to add these links to help our distributor sites customers, but we don't want to hurt our manufacturing site in the process. I personally don't know of any problem this would cause, but our manufacturing site is so important I need to verify adding this many links wouldn't hurt us. Your thoughts and knowledge is appreciated.
Link Building | | donford0 -
What's the real deal with nofollow
I had a few questions regarding nofollow links. It seems like more and more sites, forums, etc. nofollow their links. Is it still worth trying to get a link from? I've heard only Google takes nofollows into consideration. Do other search engines (Bing specifically) "listen" to nofollows? Finally, when checking for nofollow, does it need to be right by the link(s) or can it be anywhere in the source? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | DevonIntl0
