Links from a penalised site.
-
Hey Mozzers,
Recently we have had a series of agencies in to pitch for work, one group mentioned that due to our association with a possibly penalised product review website, any links and activity associated with the brand would hinder our SEO.
We currently have a good rating, but we are now no longer pushing our customers to the site as we move to a new platform. The current link back from this website is also no-followed.
Any thoughts on how this could impact us? And how the agencies determined the site was penalised and causing us problems.
Cheers
Tim
-
Hey Tim!
Definitely an interesting question. If the links are tagged as "nofollow" than you should be OK in general. Even if they weren't, there's a good chance that Google is simply discounting the value of the links.
If you're really worried about it, you could test adding the domain to your disavow file and waiting to see if there are any positive shifts in rankings during this time. In our experience with disavowing domains, if a site doesn't pass the eye-test of "this adds value to my site", than it's generally safe to disavow.
If you post the link I'd be happy to take a look!
-
Matt Cutts said once in a video that "the punishment will not be passed on to your site. However, you will lose the value of the untrusted site's link." But if it was nofollow, it never had value.
How they figured that out? Maybe they talk to each other, or they are simply not visible in Google anymore. But they can't know that for sure . At least it wont hurt you. Google them, put them into rank trackers (semrush or whatever) and see if there is some big change in visibility. Than you can asume a penalty or update hit. But, I bet John Muller also said, what Matt Cuts was saying, normal case - no passing of punishment.
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
-
Links
Hi 64% of our links come from a .com website and only 30% from .co.uk. We only do business in the UK should I continue with the .com links as they are easier to source. Does this hurt my SEO efforts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Redirecting an Entire Site to a Page on Another Site?
So I have a site that I want to shut down http://vowrenewalsmaui.com and redirect to a dedicated Vow Renewals page I am making on this site here: https://simplemauiwedding.net. My main question is: I don't want to lose all the authority of the pages and if I just redirect the site using my domain registrar's 301 redirect it will only redirect the main URL not all of the supporting pages, to my knowledge. How do I not lose all the authority of the supporting pages and still shut down the site and close down my site builder? I know if I leave the site up I can redirect all of the individual pages to corresponding pages on the other site, but I want to be done with it. Just trying to figure out if there is a better way than I know of. The domain is hosted through GoDaddy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | photoseo10 -
Viewing search results for 'We possibly have internal links that link to 404 pages. What is the most efficient way to check our sites internal links?
We possibly have internal links on our site that point to 404 pages as well as links that point to old pages. I need to tidy this up as efficiently as possible and would like some advice on the best way to go about this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Merging B2B site with B2C site
Hi, A mobile phone accessory client of ours has a retail site (B2C) and a trade site (B2B). The retail site does pretty well and ranks highly for a number of terms. The trade site doesn't really rank for anything as they don't optimise it. They would like to merge the two sites and allow trade customers to log-in and purchase goods in bulk for their business. If they were to merge the trade site into the already successful consumer site, what would be the best way of doing this and what, if any, implications would it have on the organic visibility of the B2C site? Would it be possible to target retail and trade customers on one website? Cheers, Lewis
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Nofollow Outbound Links on Listings from Travel Sites?
We oversee a variety of regional, county, and town level tourism websites, each with hundreds (or even thousands) of places/businesses represented with individual pages. Each page contains a link back to the place's main web presence if available. My fear is that a large portion of these linked to sites are low quality, and may even be spammy. With our budgets there is no way to sort through them and assign nofollows as needed. There are also a number of broken links that we try to stay on top of but at times some slip through due to the sheer number of pages. I am thinking about adding a nofollow to these outbound links across the board. This would not be all outbound links on the website, just the website links on the listing pages. I would love to know peoples thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Your_Workshop0 -
Getting Rid Of Spammy 301 Links From An Old Site
A relatively new site I'm working on has been hit really hard by Panda, due to over optimization of 301 external links which include exact keyword phrases, from an old site. Prior to the Panda update, all of these 301 redirects worked like a charm, but now all of these 301's from the old url are killing the new site, because all the hyper-text links include exact keyword matches. A couple weeks ago, I took the old site completely down, and removed the htaccess file, removing the 301's and in effect breaking all of these bad links. Consequently, if one were to type this old url, you'd be directed to the domain registrar, and not redirected to the new site. My hope is to eliminate most of the bad links, that are mostly on spammy sites, that aren't worth linking to. My thought is these links would eventually disappear from G. My concern is that this might not work, because G won't re-index these links, because once they're indexed by G, they'll be there forever. My fear is causing me to conclude I should hedge my bets, and just disavow these sites using the disavow tool in WMT. IMO, the disavow tool is an action of last resort, because I don't want to call attention to myself, since this site doesn't have a manual penalty inflected on it. Any opinions or advise would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
Too many links?
I've recently taken over a site from another agency, which has hundreds of linking root domains. These domains are of very low quality and, in my opinion, are being ignored by Google. Is it best to 'clean up' some of these links, or leave them and start building quality links? I just don't want to waste time cleaning link profiles if there's no need.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A_Q0 -
Dynamic Links vs Static Links
There are under 100 pages that we are trying to rank for and we'd like to flatten our site architecture to give them more link juice. One of the methods that is currently in place now is a widget that dynamically links to these pages based on page popularity...the list of links could change day to day. We are thinking of redesigning the page to become more static, as we believe it's better for link juice to flow to those pages reliably than dynamically. Before we do so, we need a second opinion.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RBA0