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Hello,

Does anyone have any idea why these links show as followable when they were nofollowed 6 weeks ago?

Any answer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Steve

Hello Abe,

Nofollows were added on 15th March 2013.  Should that change have been picked up by now or should I wait?

Thanks

Steve

Hello,

I am looking at site explorer and sites linking to my site moneyfact.co.uk.

I've got thousands of links showing as 'followable' but when i check them they have rel="nofollow" tags.

e.g:

http://www.dianomioffers.co.uk/partner/moneyfacts.co.uk/brochures.epl?partner=93&partner_id=93&partner_variant_id=33

Why would they show as followable when the links are nofollowed?

Thanks

Steve

Hello Chiaryn,

I have just checked again and the nofollow links still show up as followed in site explorer.  Could you have a look at why this is happening please?

Kind regards

Steve Brumpton

Thanks for the reply Chiaryn.  These links were changed from followable (is that even a word?) to nofollow so that data rollback may be the issue.  I'll check again on Thursday.

Thanks

Hello,

I am looking at site explorer and sites linking to my site moneyfact.co.uk.

I've got thousands of links showing as 'followable' but when i check them they have rel="nofollow" tags.

e.g:

http://www.dianomioffers.co.uk/partner/moneyfacts.co.uk/brochures.epl?partner=93&partner_id=93&partner_variant_id=33

Why would they show as followable when the links are nofollowed?

Thanks

Steve

Last week I received an unnatural link warning from Google.  Sad times.

I followed the guidelines and reviewed all my inbound links for the last 3 months.  All 5000 of them!  Along with several genuine ones from trusted sites like BBC, Guardian and Telegraph there was a load of spam.  About 2800 of them were junk.  As we don't employ any SEO agency and don't buy links (we don't even buy adwords!) I know that all of this spam is generated by spam bots and site scrapers copying our content.

As the bad links have not been created by us and there are 2800 of them I cannot hope to get them removed.  There are no 'contact us' pages on these Russian spam directories and Indian scraper sites.  And as for the 'adult book marking website' who have linked to us over 1000 times, well I couldn't even contact that site in company time if I wanted to!  As a result i did my manual review all day, made a list of 2800 bad links and disavowed them.

I followed this up with a reconsideration request to tell Google what I'd done but a week later this has been rejected "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines."  As these links are beyond my control and I've tried to disavow them is there anything more to be done?

Cheers

Steve

I would agree noindex is not as good as removing the content but it still can work as long as there are no links or sitemaps that lead Google back to the low quality content.

I worked on a site that was badly affected by Panda in 2011.  I had some success by noindexing genuine duplicates (pages that looked really alike but did need to be there) and removing low quality pages that were old and archived.  I was left with about 60 genuine pages that needed to be indexed and rank well so I had to pay a copywriter to rewrite all those pages (originally we had the same affiliate copy on there as lots of other sites).  That took about 3 months for Google to lift or at least reduce the penalty and our rankings to return to the top 10.

Tom is right that just noindexing is not enough.  If pages are low quality or duplicates then keep them out of sitemaps and navigation so you don't link to them either.  You'll also nned redirects in case anyone else links to them.  In my experience, eventually Google will drop them from the index but it doesn't happen overnight.

Good luck!

Hello Ben,

I'd have a look in your Google analytics under Traffic sources / SEO / Queries.  This will show you where on average you rank for that key phrase and how often your site is chosen in the SERPs (CTR).

If your key phrase really does get that many searches you should see a high number of impressions.  If you are number one it should also tell you that under 'average position' and if you really are number one for a term with loads of impressions then your CTR must be really low if you're getting low traffic.

I suspect you'll find one of these shows where you have a problem but if your impressions and position are correct then the CTR will be terrible and you need to look at your page title and meta description to see what is putting people off.

Steve

Hello Ignitas,

I recently cleared 2 layers of slugs from the url of a page I was optimising.  I changed it from domain.co.uk/sub-folder/slug/key-phrase/ to just domain.co.uk/key-phrase/ and after a couple of weeks since Google indexed the change I've not seen any major uplift.  Still hovering between 7th and 9th place.

I suspect in time it may help as it will be easier for people to add deep links to my landing page with a simpler URL.  I think now people just link to the homepage as the full url is too long to include but thats just a theory.

I agree with you that shorter ones look better and when I look at competitors who hold top positions for my phrases they almost all have shorter slug-free urls so I'm continuing to move that way even if I haven't seen the ranking increases to back it up yet.

Steve