Tens of thousands of links to less than 10 pages from 1 domain

[vcj]

I was looking at 'Links to your site' in Google Search Console and noticed our website has around 60 thousand followed links to 8 pages from a single domain. This is happening because we run an ad on the referring domain (a blog) and the ad is in the sidebar along with other ecommerce stores in the same niche. As a result, our ad, and most of our competitor's ads, have links showing up across this blog's entire site.

Are this many links, and the type of links, a problem for SEO?

I'm wondering if it would be wise to discontinue this advertising. While we get a very modest amount of traffic as a result of the ad, it doesn't convert very well, and I'm wondering if there might be any SEO benefit to not having all of these inbound links from a single domain coming in.

Thanks!

J

[vcj]

Hi Dmytro,

That's precisely my concern. I got in touch with the owner of the website linking to us and asked him to nofollow our link. I'll monitor and see if there are any noticeable changes.

Cheers
J

[solvid]

Hi,

This is strange that sponsored ads have follow links, they should be nofollow, as ads should not directly affect you organic search. In your case they actually might, therefore, I would suggest to review the ad website and maybe consider moving somewhere else (as you said, it doesn't convert well).

Also, if we think about it, Google actually may consider your ads as buying links or as unnatural link building.

[vcj]

Thanks for the input, Eric.

We already have some editorial followed links from this domain, outside of the sidebar, so if we discontinued the sponsored links we'd still have some backlinks from their website. Their DA is 45 and ours is 41. We're only getting about 1% of our traffic and 0.25% of our sales from the sponsored link, low enough that I would be OK with killing if it's hurting us at all.

With the links being followed and so many, do you think it's hurting us?

[GlobeRunner]

Depending on the Domain Authority of the domain(s) that are linking to you, it would or would not be helping or hurting you. When evaluating links that are sponsored like this, we typically recommend looking at the traffic the site is sending. If you can clearly see traffic from the site and those clicks are converting for you, then you should probably keep those links.

If they are sponsored links, though, and they're in the sidebar, they should be labeled as such--and they should be nofollow links.