I think you need to take a look at the page and how these have been used because it sounds like you haven't understood what the actual problem is fully.

With regards to relevance, it will probably give search engines signals that this page is no longer relevant and therefore affecting the frequency of the crawl for that domain/subdomain/page

It won't do that because they aren't complete links.

This is basically a means to an end. It serves a purpose and while there are better options to achieve what they want, this is certainly not an SEO issue.

-Andy

It looks like it's been done to activate certain functions, but it might have been a bit of a lazy way to do it.

However, because of the fact that they are a null link but they might show a description or more information, I can't see that this would ever cause issues to SEO.

Have you noticed that there has been any drop in positions that make you feel like they could be causing problems?

-Andy

Hi,

Is there a reason they are there? Do they serve any purpose at all?

I would be surprised if Google did anything with them and would probably just see it as a bit of spurious code. Are you able to share an example?

-Andy

Hi,

I don't use the plugin, but it is worth making sure that you tick all the boxes for Google News. They are still picky about what they show and internal news and product launches are something they can be a bit funny about.

However, I do have 2 clients that use this without issue and it works really well for them

-Andy

Hi David,

Well, if you use a tool that can change the name of the bot that comes after a site, then you can't do anything about it. However, I do know that SEMrush is causing problems for some hosts and the likes of Heart Internet, they block access to the SEMrush bot on all of their servers.

To be honest with you, it is quite difficult to block everything and time consuming and unless you have some secret formula to keywords that are magically drawing in more traffic, then I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Take Accuranker. I use this for tracking and part of setting up, is it will find new phrases that I perhaps haven't been using or looking at before. It doesn't get these from either SEMrush or Ahrefs. All of this information is available from many sources.

I would honestly spend the time making your pages as good as they can be. Look at your cometitors. Are they winning? How are they doing it? Fight back against them rather trying to hide yourself from view.

-Andy

Please keep in mind that I have absolutely no idea what you do and don't do or knew anything about your market until you replied.

But specifically, If you get a link from a site once, you gain all the benefit that Google is going to give you. Anything additional might have a very small benefit on a diminishing scale, but the general rule is that more than one link from a domain is all that is going to pass the majority of the benefit.

That's not to say that if you gain additional links that these won't help you in other ways.

There is a lot in the Google Raters Guidelines about E.A.T (Expertise, Authority and Trust) that Google use to gauge a site but I doubt that articles posted about the web are going to pass these messages on to them.

There is a huge discussion you can have around this subject before you finally come up with an answer to "are you doing your linkbuilding correctly or not"

-Andy

it sounds to me like they really don't know what they are doing.

Look at your market - what is being searched for? What is getting shared well? What is inviting natural backlinks? Are there any on-going questions? Are you pitching yourselves as experts, and if so, are you proving this?

There is so much more to link building than posting an article, so I would try not to focus on what others are doing, but look at the current winners and do something better than them.

-Andy

Hi,

Have a read of this Whiteboard Friday where Rand talks about this exact issue - Number 1...

_Number one: I'm worried because I have too many links pointing to my site from one particular domain. Maybe it's a site-wide link. Maybe they just embedded you in their blogroll, and it's linking to you. This isn't a problem unless the links are coming from a highly manipulative source, in which case you'd hope they weren't linking to you anyway. But I wouldn't stress too much about it. I'll get to people pointing bad links to you in a second. If you have 80,000 links pointing to you from one particular site, don't stress. This isn't going to kill your SEO. It's not the end of the world. If there's a good, editorial, natural reason why those links should exist, it's probably going to help you. What it won't do is help you 79,000 times more than if you just had a few pages on there, but it will help. It's not a terrible thing. Don't panic. I would almost never worry about this unless the links are from particularly terrible, spammy pages, in which case you might sort of worry, right? _

-Andy

HI Allie,

How long has now passed since the changes were made on the site? Has anything updated since posting this?

-Andy

Hi,

Have you noindexed & nofollowed the site and pages? I would also suggest you block all crawlers by disallowing access in the robots.txt file.

Do you know if this has all been done?

-Andy

Hi Michael,

Then I would guess you want to be optimising for something like "Inspirational quotes from Edmund Hilary" or "Inspirational quotes from Albert Einstein"? There is a much bigger discussion to be had here that could reach more people.

Perhaps give the page some time and see if there are opportunities to create some internal links. Look at the stats from your other page and see why this is ranking, but the new one isn't. I am sure if you performed a mini audit, you would see lots of options that could help with this.

-Andy

Hi Michael,

The first thing I would say, is that the page is somewhat lacking in actual content. There are only 168 words on there and this to me would suggest a thin page in Google's eyes.

You then have to ask yourself, who am I trying to attract to the page and what do I offer them when they get there? Do I answer a question in enough detail that Google is going to rank me well for it?

Is the page about Mountaineering or Edmund Hilary? What is the purpose of the page? What phrase are are you trying to optimize for?

I hope this makes sense?

-Andy