Spammy nofollow links
-
Hello,
One of our clients - a cleaning business - has a heck of a lot of spammy nofollow links pointing to their site.
The majority of the links are from comments or 'pingbacks', most with the anchor text 'cheap nfl jerseys' or 'cyber monday ugg boots'.
After researching the subject of spammy nofollow links, it seems there is a lot of uncertainty regarding the negative affect these could have on your SEO efforts.
So I guess my question to the community is: if your site was suddenly hit by a plethora of spammy nofollow links, what would you do and why?
Cheers,
Lewis
-
Ah sorry, I misunderstood Louis - skim reading too quickly!
No, don't bother if it is a nofollow link as this is essentially what Google does to a dofollow one.
Apologies for the confusion.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
I would always just add to the disavow file. But what I'd like to know is how will disavowing nofollow links affect a site? Google is already ignoring them...
-
Hi Lewis,
The important thing to remember here is that if you just overwrite your disavow file, you lose what is already in there.
Download the file that is in place and add those links to the new file so everything is included for the new upload.
-Andy
-
Thanks for the quick reply, Andy.
As disavowing is the process of telling Google to ignore links from certain domains, would this have any effect on nofollow links that are apparently already being ignored by them?
-
Hi Lewis,
The actual fact is, noone other than Google knows exactly what a link will do do you, but based on the fact that there is no guarantee the next Penguin refresh will be incorporated into the main algorithm, and how long it can take between the current refreshed, I wouldn't want to get caught in Penguin. I would be looking to mitigate any possible damage and do what I can to clean my link profile and spend time building better quality ones.
Google only want to see worthwhile links, but you will find a very high percentage of spammy links will just be discounted. I would tend to look for those with over-optimised anchor texts that are do-follow and then disavow them.
Marie has a great post here that will help you understand what you need to be doing.
-Andy
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
-
Linking to my Site so I should Link Back?
I remember hearing a few years ago that it was a good practice to link back to a site that was linking to you. My company's site was referenced and linked to in a news article. The news company has an above average domain authority, which is pretty good for my company's backlink profile. Is it still or was ever a "best practice" to link back to this website/domain? I feel like linking back was a best practice, but when I try to search this, all I get back is backlinking 101 and backlinking articles. Nothing really answering my question straight forward. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | aua0 -
#Page Jump link sharing
Hi I'm managing an in-house link building campaign in order to help in our key search term 'Location Holidays'. We were historically number 1 for this term until a recent re-design in May where our web design agency butchered our SEO. All of the main issued fixed, we're now fluctuating between 3rd & 4th on a daily basis. I'm putting together a social share comp to promote through the press in order to boost our backlink profile. We're nesting the competition within the body of the page we want to improve the rankings for. I will be including a #page jump link to quickly access it as it will be further down the page. My question is that if we get press to link to http://holidaycompany.com/destination/#comp will http://holidaycompany.com/destination/ receive the link juice or will http://holidaycompany.com/destination/#comp be looked upon as a whole new page? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | MattHolidays0 -
Does reciprocal linking carry any value?
No matter how much I research this one, there's no definite answer and there's a lot of contradictions. Basically we're looking to launch an article on 24 expert interior design tips for 2015. Each tip is submitted from a different interior designer we have chosen who have a reputable, trusted website. The main goal for this article is to generate various inbound links for our site from the designers and it will help to create engagement on social media. Although if we're giving out links to these designers for their contributions, the inbound links we receive in return will be little or no value as this is reciprocal linking? Some say this is okay as it's completely natural within the blog posts, others say to avoid it as it can be seen as an obsolete practice to deceive Google. Does anyone have any more information on this and how it should be carried out? Would a better process be to link to their social media accounts? Rather than reciprocal linking? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Jseddon920 -
INTERNAL ANCHOR TEXT LINKS
If your site has say 50 pages, and you have a anchor text link from the home page to that page, what should you do in response to last friday, I have 60 keywords in the top 10 and now thye are all in the top 30 at best. PAGE RANK is still 5s and 6s on all of these pages.... NO PROBLEM ON THIS SITE UNTIL LAST FRIDAY!
Technical SEO | | jdcline0 -
Remove Links or 301
Howdy Guys, Our main site has been hit pretty hard by penguin and we are just wondering what steps we should now take. For the past 2 months we have been working through our back link profile removing spammy / un-natural links, we have documented everything in a spreadsheet... We recently submitted a reconsideration request to Google and they have now responded saying we still have bad links. I'm just wondering would be it easier just to 301 redirect our site to another TLD we have for our main site? Or Do we keep working through our links 1 by 1 and removing them? Has anyone had any success in 301ing? Thanks, Scott
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Advice on too many onpage links
Hi Just done a 250 crawl on a new site I am working on (still under development), all 250 pages seem to have too many on page links, however they do not have any links I can take away This page, for example, http://empleous.com/gb/store/category/398743/shoes?price=20-50 has (according to moz crawl) 252 links on. Seems a little high. What would be the best way to correct this please? I cannot find that many links. I know there are about 85 links in the menu bar but they are all needed and none of the others can really be replaced either. Thanks Carl
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Canonical Link for Duplicate Content
A client of ours uses some unique keyword tracking for their landing pages where they append certain metrics in a query string, and pulls that information out dynamically to learn more about their traffic (kind of like Google's UTM tracking). Non-the-less these query strings are now being indexed as separate pages in Google and Yahoo and are being flagged as duplicate content/title tags by the SEOmoz tools. For example: Base Page: www.domain.com/page.html
Technical SEO | | kchandler
Tracking: www.domain.com/page.html?keyword=keyword#source=source Now both of these are being indexed even though it is only one page. So i suggested placing an canonical link tag in the header point back to the base page to start discrediting the tracking URLs: But this means that the base pages will be pointing to themselves as well, would that be an issue? Is their a better way to solve this issue without removing the query tracking all togther? Thanks - Kyle Chandler0 -
What link tracking solution do you use?
What solution do you use to keep track of links that you have acquired or purchased?
Technical SEO | | qlkasdjfw0