Changed all external links to 'NoFollow' to fix manual action penalty. How do we get back?
-
I have a blog that received a Webmaster Tools message about a guidelines violation because of "unnatural outbound links" back in August. We added a plugin to make all external links 'NoFollow' links and Google removed the penalty fairly quickly.
My question, how do we start changing links to 'follow' again? Or at least being able to add 'follow' links in posts going forward? I'm confused by the penalty because the blog has literally never done anything SEO-related, they have done everything via social and email. I only started working with them recently to help with their organic presence. We don't want them to hurt themselves at all, but 'follow' links are more NATURAL than having everything as 'NoFollow' links, and it helps with their own SEO by having clean external 'follow' links. Not sure if there is a perfect answer to this question because it is Google we're dealing with here, but I'm hoping someone else has some tips that I may not have thought about.
Thanks!
-
I would probably move forward based on the following two assessments:
A) by a site's traffic figures, content quality, and backlink profile (assessing this within reason). If they receive a lot of traffic, produce great content, and seem to have an appreciable amount of good quality links, then the site in question is very likely "good" and "trustworthy"
B) by the the types of links that are being provided to the site in question. If a certain instance of a link is not promotional, unlike in the case of a sponsored review, then this criterion checks out
If both check out, then I would say it's safe to remove the "nofollow" tag for that particular link.
Now, thinking about things holistically, I would say that if the site does not link out to a degree that seems above-average or high, then I wouldn't worry about potentially "following" nearly all of your links again. You received the penalty because of the the nature of the linking, the specific links that you linked out to, and/or the volume of external linking.
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
-
Duplicate Content through 'Gclid'
Hello, We've had the known problem of duplicate content through the gclid parameter caused by Google Adwords. As per Google's recommendation - we added the canonical tag to every page on our site so when the bot came to each page they would go 'Ah-ha, this is the original page'. We also added the paramter to the URL parameters in Google Wemaster Tools. However, now it seems as though a canonical is automatically been given to these newly created gclid pages; below https://www.google.com.au/search?espv=2&q=site%3Awww.mypetwarehouse.com.au+inurl%3Agclid&oq=site%3A&gs_l=serp.3.0.35i39l2j0i67l4j0i10j0i67j0j0i131.58677.61871.0.63823.11.8.3.0.0.0.208.930.0j3j2.5.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..8.3.419.nUJod6dYZmI Therefore these new pages are now being indexed, causing duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea about what to do in this situation? Thanks, Stephen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyPetWarehouse0 -
Site wide external links analysis tool?
Hi Guys, I just got a remove url email from someone asking us to remove their link. What website or tool is best to see ALL of your external links sitewide from your website? And as a bonus, columns of "nofollow" and "follow". Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Change domain whilst under a partial manual links penalty
Hi there We're currently under a manual penalty for some unnatural links to our domain and have been working on fixing that but had our first re-consideration request rejected so we're doing a second round of link removals The issue we have is that we were planning to change our domain before the SSL certificate expires in a couple of weeks and renew the certificate with the new domain but are unsure whether to stop working on the reconsideration request, change the domain and wait until the manual penalty moves to the new domain before continuing the link removal. Alternatively try and use the domain change to select which links are 301'd to the new site and leave behind the bad links in the hope that the manual penalty wouldn't be applied to the new domain Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
Site Penalty After Changing Hosting Companies?
In one week's time, we've dropped from #3 on Page 1 of Google to Page 7 (similar on Bing). It looks like our traffic started to drop on 9/5 to 9/7 and has been a steady, rapid decline ever since. 1000s of pages are indexed, just suddenly ranking poorly -- even for branded terms. History:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ddwilliamson
--In January, we switched to a web redesign & new domain
--In August, our hosting server was slow & kept crashing so we migrated our site to a new hosting company. We're not currently using the old hosting server. All domains, redirects, .htaccess files should now be correct and site speeds are improved.
--In early September, our NEW hosting company had a DNS issue causing more slow speeds and downtime for about 1 wk. Originally they thought it was htaccess so they changed our htaccess file - no luck - then discovered it was DNS. DNS issue was finally resolved on September 6th -- one day before the penalty/traffic issue seemed to begin.
-- According to GWMT, it looks like there were crawls completed around 9/4-9/5 What we've tried:
--Webmaster Tools - Googlebot dropoff since 9/5 (see attached screenshot). Nothing flagged. No site health alerts. Fetch as Google works. No manual webspam actions found.
-- W3C link checker, screamingfrog SEO spider, Xenu Link Sleuth, OSE (found some 4xx errors so we've updated those links)
-- Majestic SEO - backlinks reviewed 9/3 to 9/8
-- spoke to two different Adwords salespeople; unable to help
-- Bing Webmaster Tools
-- not showing organic search traffic since 9/6
-- 15% fewer pages crawled this month
-- top keywords are very odd -- stuff like "mt1 google apis" and "aaremel"
-- there are 4xx crawl errors under Crawl Information. We've fixed those URLs but they still appear in Webmaster Tools
-- some missing h1's and meta's, and dup titles, which we're working to fix
-- spike in crawl errors 9/11-9/12 and again on 9/14-9/15 It's been one thing after another this year, but all issues are now resolved with the exception of this newly-discovered penalty. We also have sites on a separate hosting server (with a different hosting company) that rank just fine. googlebot-crawls.jpg0 -
Do links from twitter count in SEOMoz's Toolbar link count?
I am using the Chrome extension and looking at a SERP, when a page is said to have 2000 incoming links, does that include tweets with a link back to this page? What about retweets. Are those counted separately or as one? And what about independent tweets that have exactly the same content (tweet text + link)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davhad0 -
How do I find the links on my site that link to another one of my pages?
I ran IIS Seo toolkit and it found about 40 pages that I have no idea how they exist. What tool can I use to find out what internal link is linking to them so I can fix them or get rid of them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
"Jump to" Links in Google, how do you get them?
I have just seen yoast.com results in Google and noticed that nearly all the indexed pages show a "Jump to" link So instead of showing the full URL under the title tag, it shows these type of links yoast.com › SEO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters
yoast.com › Social Media
yoast.com › Analytics With the SEO, Social Media and Analytics all being clickable. How has he achieved this? And is it something to try and incorporate in my sites?0 -
Does the home page must get the biggest amount of internal links?
Hi All, I have an e-commerce website with thousands of unique pages. The site is built with quick access through the navigation bar to the main product categories. All of the product pages have navigation trees in them.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
What happened is that in one of the main categories I have so many pages (products) that it actually gets more links than the home page - it is getting the links both from the menu (in each page in the site) and from the product pages that belong to that category whereas the homepage gets only the one link from the menu. Is that OK or should I add a level in the navigation tree that points to the homepage? Thanks0