Linking from purchased businesses to my own
-
Hi All,
An SEO and Google guidelines question.
We've recently purchased several local businesses that have websites. Legally, we've put a disclaimer saying we've purchased those businesses, the question is whether we should link from those sites to our main site.
Will this bring a manual action from Google?
It's legitimate that we'd like the visitors from those websites come to our main site because those business no longer named the way they were.
So, is it OK to link from these sites to ours? Will this violate Google's guidelines regarding backlinking? Should we even link and if so add the rel:nofollow tag?
Thanks!
-
I agree with Stephan: you have actually bought the businesses so you can decide to link to your main site.
It is of course a good thing to look out for penalties but don't see what you would be doing wrong if you would display a link from the purchased companies back to the parent company. As you can read: Andy wrote that the chance is probably very slim in this case.
Bas
-
Just do it, as long as the topic from the purchased business is relevant to your link.
The link should be a dofollow link and it's OK for Google since you wrote a disclaimer.
-
If someone is trying to build links by interlinking footer links, they are going to be very disappointed.
If you read what I said again, it is highly unlikely that Google would penalise with a few footer links, but there is no clear cut black & white guarantee that nothing would happen with this. There are so many other factors that could play a part in any decision that Google makes.
To avoid doubt, no-follow them. The links are still present and the benefit to the users is still there.
-Andy
-
I do not agree. All media websites list their sites in their footer and these may be the only authority links they receive.
-
Hi Gal,
I always advise in these cases, that the links are no-followed. This removes any doubt and concern over if Google will object. You are right to be cautious because you don't want any penalties to come from this, but it is highly unlikely that any would anyway. Footer links are largely ignored by Google.
There is a reason for the links to show to the different businesses, but I would just err on the side of caution.
-Andy
-
Hello,
If it's an important information for yours visitors, then there's no problem. You've purchased stores, so you want to show that they be part of a group.
Think about big companies with footer that list all their websites. They want to show that they own many websites and can reach a large audience. It can be useful to their users so no problem.
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
-
How to determine the value of these links?
Hi Guys, How can you determine the value of external links which are deep inside a website. Two examples: http://www.sheknows.com/community/home/ten-tips-buy-car-insurance Two sub-folders deep. http://www.dogfoodhowto.com/899/whats-the-best-puppy-food-for-cockapoo-puppy-at-home.html One sub-folder deep. These links are clearly far from the homepage, so was wondering if they are worthless or how can you determine the value of them? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nattyhall0 -
Research on building links to a website
Hi building a brand new site with no domain authority. I have created all the content and now want to start building links to the website. Mostly through guest posting, niche directories, broken link building and other whitehat methods. Anyway i was wondering if anyone has seen any good research on the way you should link to a brand new website or any site for that matter. Like in terms of % you should focus at the homepage, inner pages, anchor distribution, internal link structure, etc. A good start would be looking at successful competitors, but i wanted to see if anyone knows any studies on this. My goal is to build a link profile which meets the standards of Google and that lasts! Thanks, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mikey0080 -
Link Research Tools - Detox Links
Hi, I was doing a little research on my link profile and came across a tool called "LinkRessearchTools.com". I bought a subscription and tried them out. Doing the report they advised a low risk but identified 78 Very High Risk to Deadly (are they venomous?) links, around 5% of total and advised removing them. They also advised of many suspicious and low risk links but these seem to be because they have no knowledge of them so default to a negative it seems. So before I do anything rash and start removing my Deadly links, I was wondering if anyone had a). used them and recommend them b). recommend detoxing removing the deadly links c). would there be any cases in which so called Deadly links being removed cause more problems than solve. Such as maintaining a normal looking profile as everyone would be likely to have bad links etc... (although my thinking may be out on that one...). What do you think? Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaescentAdam0 -
Linking Within Website
Hello - I have about 10 landing pages that I am focusing on ranking for and I'm doing okay. My question is should I have all these pages on a drop down menu from my home page or is the innerlinking too much? http://www.kasplacement.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ksundheim10 -
Removing Canonical Links
We implemented rel=canonical as we decided to paginate our pages. We then ran some testing and on the whole pagination did not work out so we removed all on-page pagination. Now, internally when I click for example a link for Widgets I get the /widgets.php but searching through Google I get to /widgets.php?page=all . There are not redirects in place at the moment. The '?page=all' page has been rated 'A' by the SEOmoz tool under On Page Optimization reports and performs much better than the exact same page without the '?page=all' (the score dips to a 'D' grade) so need to tread carefully so we don't lose the link value. Can anyone advise us on the best way forward? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jannkuzel0 -
Content linking ?
If you have links on the left hand side of the website on the Navigation and content at the bottom of the page and link to the same page with different anchor text or the same would it help the page (as it is surrounded by similar text) or is the first one counted and this is it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Links to Facebook pages
I would like to ask if anyone has any knowledge regarding linking to a company's facebook page. I have built a few links to a client's facebook page in an effort to have it rank better in SERPs. I just learned that unlike twitter and linkedin, it is apparently not possibly to directly link to facebook pages. At least it is not possible from a search engine's perspective. If you follow any facebook page link while you are not logged into facebook, you are redirected to the facebook home page. I can't think of any way around this obstacle. I'd love some clever solution such as providing a URL which includes a basic dummy facebook login but there is nothing I am aware of to achieve this result. Does anyone have any ideas on this topic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0 -
Quantifying Linking Campaign Value
Is there any way to predict if and how Organic traffic would change if we sucesfully added some high-quality links to our website? Quantifying link value would help to plan how much time/efforts we should spend on quality link-building. I understand that the more good links we get - the better. But beyond that, I am looking for some methodology/data/formulas that would help to decide if links are worth pursing. Here is an example: Let's say we acquired 20 high-quality links from PR 0-5 pages of some trusted web sites of PR6-8. Let's say that on these pages would also link to 10-20 other web sites. Would such campaign be of some direct value to our ecommerce website of PR6? My question is limited to how high-quality links improve overall Google search traffic to the website only. I am not interested in calculating value of individual keywords - most of our search traffic comes from long tail. I am also not interested in how to estimate referral traffic - both seem much easier topics to tackle. But how would I be able to measure the value of lets say 1 link from PR 8 site with a PR3 page, when there are 10 other external links on that page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Quidsi0