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
-
On our site by mistake some wrong links were entered and google crawled them. We have fixed those links. But they still show up in Not Found Errors. Should we just mark them as fixed? Or what is the best way to deal with them?
Some parameter was not sent. So the link was read as : null/city, null/country instead cityname/city
Technical SEO | | Lybrate06060 -
Link profile
Hi All, I am doing a link profile audit I have few questions 1. Should i stop worrying about backlinks that i once had and now the websites is down or page is 404 2. The link is nofollow Also i have 60% of my site links few root link and many articles/blogs links pasted in sites without any anchor text, should i worry about them? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Too many links?
Hello! I've just started with SEOmoz, and am getting an error about too many links on a few of my blog posts - it's pages with high numbers of comments, and the links are coming from each commenter's profile (hopefully that makes sense they're not just random stuffed links). Is there a way to help this not cause a problem? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | PaulineMagnusson0 -
How do i show my link xls file to google?
i have removed lots of links and contacted lots of webmaster to clean up my link profile. I have a large xls file to send to google for them to see that we have done a lot to clean up the bad links. How would i show this file to google? is there a place where I can post it? or email ? thank you nick
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
Rel=nofollow for affiliate links?
Hi, For a holiday/travel website including hotels and holiday packages from affiliates I am currently using the rel="nofollow" attribute to link out to the affiliate's website and wanted to know if this is the right way? To be more precise: there are distinct pages for each city and on a city specific page there are ~50 available hotels listed with some other information such as price and address, etc. Each of these hotels have an outlink to the affiliate's hotel website which uses private branding and as such is running on a subdomain hotels.mytraveldomain.tld. So in order not to pass on the link juice to the affiliate's website I thought I would simply use rel="nofollow". Would you also use nofollow? or are there any other opinions out there about that?
Technical SEO | | socialtowards1 -
Do web pages have to be linked to a menu?
I have a situation where people search for terms like, say 1978 one dollar bill. Even though there never was a 1978 one dollar bill. I want to make a page to capture these searches but since there wasn't such a thing as a one dollar bill I don't want it connected to the rest of my content which is reality based. Does that make sense? Anyway, my question is, can I publish pages that aren't linked to my menu structure but that will be searchable or, am I going to have to figure out a way to make these oddball pages accessible through my menu?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Number of links in new nav bar
Hi We've just had a spanky new design implemented on Hypnosis Downloads.com My concern is over the top nav. While it's nice for users to get those handy dropdowns, it adds a lot of links to every page, and spreads link weight out equally over all sorts of pages. The place I really want the link weight is under the Downloads link - in those categories and so I am thinking about removing dropdowns for everything but this category. Does that sound like a sensible move to you? Is it likely to actually make a difference? Cheers Roger
Technical SEO | | RogerElliott0 -
4XX Broken Links
I am attempting to fix the issues SEOmoz found when crawling my site. I have a list of 4XX errors that I am attempting to fix. Basically I know one option is to redirect them to another page, but I would like to have the option to remove the links completely. The only problem is I can not find where the links are located. Does SEOmoz provide where on my site these broken links are? Or do they only provide the url that is linked to?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0