Spammy nofollow links

[PeaSoupDigital]

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

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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

[PeaSoupDigital]

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...

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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

[PeaSoupDigital]

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?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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