Using rel="nofollow" when link has an exact match anchor but the link does add value for the user
-
Hi all, I am wondering what peoples thoughts are on using rel="nofollow" for a link on a page like this http://askgramps.org/9203/a-bushel-of-wheat-great-value-than-bushel-of-goldThe anchor text is "Brigham Young" and the page it's pointing to's title is Brigham Young and it goes into more detail on who he is. So it is exact match. And as we know if this page has too much exact match anchor text it is likely to be considered "over-optimized". I guess one of my questions is how much is too much exact match or partial match anchor text? I have heard ratios tossed around like for every 10 links; 7 of them should not be targeted at all while 3 out of the 10 would be okay. I know it's all about being natural and creating value but using exact match or partial match anchors can definitely create value as they are almost always highly relevant. One reason that prompted my question is I have heard that this is something Penguin 3.0 is really going look at.On the example URL I gave I want to keep that particular link as is because I think it does add value to the user experience but then I used rel="nofollow" so it doesn't pass PageRank. Anyone see a problem with doing this and/or have a different idea? An important detail is that both sites are owned by the same organization. Thanks
-
Thank you much. Reading your answer is giving me kind of a "duh" moment. I think if I were looking at this situation from the outside it would be a different story. I definitely am over thinking this. Thanks again!
-
I would say that obsessing over nofollows or no nofollows is over-complicating things much more than simply linking to more information about a subject. The vast majority of content on the internet that links to informational resources, such as the example you've given (even though you own both resources) is not written or linked to with nofollow / SEO in mind. This is what I mean by it being sad if no one can create content and link between properties, whether they belong to one or more parties, without considering Google, SEO and nofollow.
It's shortsighted to claim that links between owned properties should be nofollowed. This is far from a set rule. Google does not consider linking to your own properties to be spam in and of itself. It would consider deliberate link manipulation via link networks to be spam, but is it spam if amazon.com links to amazon.co.uk? If Moz.com links to Opensiteexplorer.org? If Virgin corporation links to its health club chain? Or if I link from my blog to my consulting site? Hell no, it's not. It would be manipulative of me to create 800 websites promoting SEO consulting and link them all to my own website, however, just as it would be spammy for Virgin to write a new blog post every other day on sites they own, linking to their health clubs with the anchor text "gyms in London".
It's very subjective whether nofollow should be used, but I really do not agree that there is a hard-and-fast rule that any link using "optimised" (i.e. descriptive) anchor text should be nofollowed, just as much as I disagree that links to things you own need to be automatically nofollowed. At which point is a link natural if every link on the internet that meets these criteria is "unnatural"?
I agree that if the link does not add value, it should not be there, but in your example, you mention a person and link to more information about that person. Since a quote from that person is the crux of the page's subject, it absolutely adds value to link to more information about that person, no matter how well-known that person might be to the website's audience. I find it hard to argue that the link does not add value.
-
Your welcome. Well it's to be honest I thought that "write and develop for your users" etc was stating the obvious but maybe I was to quick to draw this conclusion but II agree totally. Thing to me seems that people in general start making things progressively complicated when they start thinking and acting this accordingly while I believe that an effective link structure is the same for users and crawlers alike.
Crawlers and humans both read right to left starting at the upper left corner. All content closest to this point is more important than content after it. Also logical as we also do not place the name of a company at the bottom of the corporate website and start with the disclaimer (ok some people will never learn but I mean effectively function beings). So rule of thumb is we place our most important navigational links at the top left and then to the right. We link in 2-3 words to page because they are important and we want people and crawlers alike to find them. If we make those links nofollow then that’s the instruction for Google NOT to go and index these pages so the can be found. This would be the same if we correspondingly place the same link in the main menu and put a sign with it: to all readers: do not read this page.
Bit strange right? Use a nofollow for links in the main navigational menu that are not as important like your disclaimer and general terms etc. Link there once from a less significant place on the page that is a followed link. Get it?
Funny thing is that this script makes it very easy to see all links with anchors for a page and analyses for each link on the page how well the linked page is optimized for the anchor used in the link. Complicated? Not at all. Just fill in a front page of any website, set option to show links, wait a moment, find the followed links section and click the link to see for yourself.
Link follower script Hope this makes it more clear for you as it's not to difficult once you see the essence?
Gr Daniel
-
Thanks for the great answers. We created the example link I gave above, along with many others that are similar, so they are not natural and they are pointing to other sites also owned by us.
I asked this exact same question on the google product forums and got pretty different answers. This is one answer that the others were agreeing with:
" It really seems like you're over complicating things to me.
1 - if the link doesn't add any value to users, why is it on your website? 2 - nofollow links that are unnatural. Since they are sites owned by the same org, I'd nofollow. If you nofollow, then you're fine. I'd stop focusing too much on exact match/ratios and just keep it logical. Is this link natural? (if not nofollow, but that doesn't make it a BAD link) and is this useful for my visitors (if not, don't add it!). "She mentions she would nofollow the links that do have value but are owned by us.Any thoughts on this response?
-
I would say that this is absolutely not an instance where you would want to use nofollow. There is a huge difference between this and linking to a insurance company's commercial car insurance page with the anchor text "car insurance". It's sad that Google and the SEO community have jointly scared everyone to the extent that we are afraid of linking to information sources about non-commercial terms (e.g. "Brigham Young" linking to a Wiki page about Brigham Young). Nofollow is meant to indicate that you do not wish to vouch for the source of the information or that you have been paid to include the link and thus don't want to indicate that the link is purely editorial. This use is still true, eight years after nofollow's creation and it would be sad if we reached the stage where people are basically hesitant to link without it in almost every circumstance.
Put this in a commercial context and multiply the rate at which the target page or linking website receives / links out with high-value terms, and you have more of a problem. I have had clients ask me about ratios for years - "can we safely build links with 30% commercial anchor text?" - to which we'd have to say that there is no "safe ratio" for any particular keyword, niche or industry.
Google looks at far more than the anchor text when deciding on what is natural and what should be penalised / filtered. A page about a person or a product might use that person's or product's name nearly 100% of the time and be perfectly natural. I have also personally seen pages with 80%+ brand anchor text be penalised (not by Penguin but manually) because the links were clearly part of a sophisticated but fairly uniform paid link scheme, despite using anchor text links "Brand.com" and "visit their website". A high ratio of commercial anchor text is the icing on the cake for some of these penalties but there is no need to nofollow every link or even a selection of links just because it happens to be exact-match in terms of its destination.
-
Hi,
Don't worry about this to much, the case you described is a great example on how you can link without a nofollow in my opinion. As long as you won't do this externally multiple times it's very likely that you won't get in trouble.
-
Well if we would be punished for this then I would have no blog at all. I optimize for this exactly and rank nr 1 for months on end with dozens of nice saught after keywords. Like this one google-plus-marketing.nl/google-mijn-bedrijf-handleiding/ keyword Google Mijn Bedrijf handleiding (Google My Business guide)
or this one
http://google-plus-marketing.nl/google-mijn-bedrijf-opzetten/ for Google Mijn Bedrijf opzetten (set up Google My Business) It a landing page on position 1 since it has been created.So you see why I dont give a r.. as... what they say. It works just fine for me.
Hope this helps
Gr Daniel
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 I add external links to my sitemap?
Hi, I'm integrating with a service that adds 3rd-party images/videos (owned by them, hosted on their server) to my site. For instance, the service might have tons of pictures/videos of cars; and then when I integrate, I can show my users these pictures/videos about cars I might be selling. But I'm wondering how to build out the sitemap--I would like to include reference to these images/videos, so Google knows I'm using lots of multimedia. How's the most white-hat way to do that? Can I add external links to my sitemap pointing to these images/videos hosted on a different server, or is that frowned upon? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOdub0 -
Anchor text penalties and indexed links
Hi! I'm working on a site that got hit by a manual penalty some time ago. I got that removed, cleaned up a bunch of links and disavowed the rest. That was about six months ago. Rankings improved, but the big money terms still aren't doing great. I recently ran a Searchmetrics anchor text report though, and it said that direct match anchors still made up the largest part of the overall portfolio. However, when I started looking at individual links with direct anchors, nearly every one had been removed or disavowed. My question is, could an anchor text penalty be in place because these removed links have not been reindexed? If so, what are my options? We've waited for this to happen naturally, but it hasn't occurred after quite a few months. I could ping them - could this have any impact? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Site appears with ".com" but not without it
Hi, When I search for my site www.docslinc.com as "docslinc.com" the results on the SERPS have the home page and the site map but not the other indexed pages. The other issue occurs when I search for the company name alone "docslinc", the homepage does not show up at all, and some of the other pages show up. I have looked all over the place and cannot find an answer. I have checked the onsite optimization and it all seems to be correct. Any suggestions would be amazing. Thanks, zulumanf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zulumanf0 -
Should you bother with an "impact links" manual action
I have a couple sites that have these, and I have done a lot of work to get them removed, but there seems to be very little if any benefit from doing this. In fact, sites were we have done nothing after these penalties seem to be doing better than ones where we have done link removal and the reconsideration request. Google says "I_f you don’t control the links pointing to your site, no action is required on your part. From Google’s perspective, the links already won’t count in ranking. However, if possible, you may wish to remove any artificial links to your site and, if you’re able to get the artificial links removed, submit a reconsideration request__. If we determine that the links to your site are no longer in violation of our guidelines, we’ll revoke the manual action._" I would guess a lot of people with this penalty don't even know they have it, and it sounds like leaving it alone really doesn't hurt your site. If seems to me that just simply ignoring this and building better links and higher quality content should help improve your site rankings vs. worrying about trying to get all these links removed/disavowed. What are your thoughts? Is it worth trying to get this manual action removed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
Canonical use when dynamically placing items on "all products" page
Hi all, We're trying to get our canonical situation straightened out. We have a section of our site with 100 product pages in it (in our case a city with hotels that we've reviewed), and we have a single page where we list them all out--an "all products" page called "all.html." However, because we have 100 and that's a lot for a user to see at once, we plan to first show only 50 on "all.html." When the user scrolls down to the bottom, we use AJAX to place another 50 on the page (these come from another page called "more.html" and are placed onto "all.html"). So, as you scroll down from the front end, you see "all.html" with 100 listings. We have other listings pages that are sorted and filtered subsets of this list with little or no unique content. Thus, we want to place a canonical on those pages. Question: Should the canonical point to "all.html"? Would spiders get confused, because they see that all.html is only half the listings? Is it dangerous to dynamically place content on a page that's used as a canonical? Is this a non-issue? Thanks, Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Can use of the id attribute to anchor t text down a page cause page duplication issues?
I am producing a long glossary of terms and want to make it easier to jump down to various terms. I am using the<a id="anchor-text" ="" attribute="" so="" am="" appending="" #anchor-text="" to="" a="" url="" reach="" the="" correct="" spot<="" p=""></a> <a id="anchor-text" ="" attribute="" so="" am="" appending="" #anchor-text="" to="" a="" url="" reach="" the="" correct="" spot<="" p="">Does anyone know whether Google will pick this up as separate duplicate pages?</a> <a id="anchor-text" ="" attribute="" so="" am="" appending="" #anchor-text="" to="" a="" url="" reach="" the="" correct="" spot<="" p="">If so any ideas on what I can do? Apart from not do it to start with? I am thinking 301s won't work as I want the URL to work. And rel=canonical won't work as there is no actual page code to add it to. Many thanks for your help Wendy</a>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
Any advice on acquiring "jump to" via anchor link text?
Google says these types of references are generated algorithmically and that users should include a table of contents & descriptive anchor link text. Is there anything else we should take into consideration? Also, does anyone know how this works with pagination? Due to the design of our site, we can't make one really long article, but would need to divide it up into several 'pages'--even though it would all live on one URL (we'd use the # for pagination). Thank you in advance for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
So what exactly does Google consider a "natural" link profile?
As part of my company's ongoing SEO effort we have been analyzing our link profile. A colleague of mine feels that we should be targeting at least 50% branded anchor text. He claims this is what search engines consider "natural" and we should not go past a threshold of 50% optimized anchor text to make sure we avoid any penalties or decrease in rankings. 50% brand term anchor text seems too high to me. I pointed out that most of our competitors who outrank us have a much greater percentage of optimized links. I've also read other industry experts state that somewhere in the range of 30% branded anchor text would be considered natural. What percent of branded vs. optimized anchor text do you feel looks "natural" and what do you base your opinion on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DeannaTallman0