Value / Risk of links in comments (nofollow)
-
Recently I noticed a couple of comments on our blog that seemed nice and relevant so I approved them. The site is wordpress and comments are configured nofollow. We don't get many comments so I thought "why not?". Today I got one and noticed they are all coming from the same IP. They all include urls to sites in the same industry as us, relevant sites and all different. Looks like an SEO is doing it for various clients.
My question is what is the value of these nofollow links for the poster? Are these seen as "mentions" and add value to Google?
And am I better off trashing them so my site is not associated?
Thanks
-
Would that be Google's "Badger"?
-
I think that there are a lot of people out there who have not gotten the "message" about nofollow.
Also, a lot of people, maybe including me, who believe in the "reverse psychology algo".
-
Thanks Patrick and EGOL. I will be trashing them.
Still curious about why the tactic when it is a nofollow. The clients appear very reputable but have no clue what the SEO is doing, no doubt. Feel bad for them.
-
lol Yes. We sell hammers here. I have some good ones and have close to seven decades of experience at swinging them.
-
In other words, the hammer came down.
-
I have opened my blogs to comments on a couple of occasions. Each time weasels came in and posted their rubbish. Some of them are idiots who leave comments that are obvious spam. However, some are so skillful that you don't realize that they are spam with a shallow reading.
So, my decision was between not allowing links and closing the comments. I closed the comments and am happy about it.
-
Hi there
I would trash them, especially if you can see that they are manipulative and repeating.
You want to have integrity for your comments section, so even though they are nofollow, you don't want to become a link dump for a SEO who is a hack.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Unrelevant links
Hi there, In my website, There are lots of unrelevant/unnatural links coming in Google Search, we have removed it Through Remove URLs option, Also Cleared All Spammy backlinks, made website Content Cleared , But still it gives us unnaural links,, because of that our website rank loosed. We have also Disavow that All links, But Still not got any Solution, Can any Buddy Suggest Where We are making Mistake? any body can help please?? Thanx in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pooja.verify040 -
Malicious links on our site indexed by Google but only visible to bots
We've been suffering from some very nasty black hat seo. In Google's index, our pages show external links to various pharmaceutical websites, but our actual live pages don't show them. It seems as though only certain user-agents see the malicious links. Setting up Screaming Frog SEO crawler using the Googlebot user agent also sees the malicious links. Any idea what could have caused this or how this can be stopped? We scanned all files on our webserver and couldn't find any of malicious links. We've changed our FTP and CMS passwords, is there anything else we can do? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEO-Bas0 -
Recovering from Black Hat/Negative SEO with a twist
Hey everyone, This is a first for me, I'm wondering if anyone has experienced a similar situation and if so, what the best course of action was for you. Scenario In the process of designing a new site for a client, we discovered that his previous site, although having decent page rank and traffic had been hacked. The site was built on Wordpress so it's likely there was a vulnerability somewhere that allowed someone to create loads of dynamic pages; www.domain.com/?id=102, ?id=103, ?id=104 and so on. These dynamic pages ended up being malware with a trojan horse our servers recognized and subsequently blocked access to. We have since helped them remedy the vulnerability and remove the malware that was creating these crappy dynamic pages. Another automated program appears to have been recently blasting spam links (mostly comment spam and directory links) to these dynamically created pages at an incredibly rapid rate, and is still actively doing so. Right now we're looking at a small business website with a touch over 500k low-quality spammy links pointing to malware pages from the previously compromised site. Important: As of right now, there's been no manual penalty on the site, nor has a "This Site May Have Been Compromised" marker in the organic search results for the site. We were able to discover this before things got too bad for them. Next Steps? The concern is that when the Penguin refresh occurs, Google is going to notice all these garbage links pointing to those malware pages and then potentially slap a penalty on the site. The main questions I have are: Should we report this proactively to the web spam team using the guidelines here? (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1) Should we request a malware review as recommended within the same guidelines, keeping in mind the site hasn't been given a 'hacked' snippet in the search results? (https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/4598410?hl=en&ref_topic=4596795) Is submitting a massive disavow links file right now, including the 490k-something domains, the only way we can escape the wrath of Google when these links are discovered? Is it too hopeful to imagine their algorithm will detect the negative-SEO nature of these links and not give them any credit? Would love some input or examples from anyone who can help, thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Etna0 -
How do I place the product link on my blog?
I have a shop and also a blog where I explain better the products on the site, such as: how to use, tips, recipes and more. How do I place the product link on my blog? Should I put a link with nofollow? Should not I put link? To put the link anchor text or just put the page URL? Don’t I need to worry about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | soulmktpro0 -
Does anyone have any suggestions on removing spammy links?
I have some clients that recently got hit by "Penguin" they have several less than desireable backlinks that could be the issue? Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these removed? What are the odds that a webmaster on these spammy sites are going to remove them, and is it worth the time and effort?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin3 -
Thought on optimising the perfect keyword location link
My site works a bit like a directory, so say I have a page called "Ice Cream Vendors" - on that page I would talk a bit about Ice Cream Vendors, then I will have a list of Ice Cream Vendor Locations. My list of locations can be quite big depending on the product and the amount of locations they occur in - when you click a location, it goes to a page showing all "ICeCream Vendors" in that location. So Currently I will have a table on the page a bit like this: ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | James77
New York
Miami
Las Vegas This is all perfectly nice, simple and usable - BUT it is not producing perfect keyword links - for perfect keyword links the list should be like this: ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
New York Ice Cream Vendors
Miami Ice Cream Vendors
Las Vegas Ice Cream Vendors Now I have my perfect anchor links - BUT it looks rediculous and is NOT user friendly. So What do I do?
1/. Build it for users and not have perfect anchor links, and loose in SEO?
2/. Build a perfect SEO links and make it less usable and looking spammy? OR 3/. Deliver the search engine the perfect SEO links, and the user the userfriendly version? In this I mean I could do the following:
SE's (and screen readers I think would see):
ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
New York Ice Cream Vendors
Miami Ice Cream Vendors
Las Vegas Ice Cream Vendors Users would See
ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
New York
Miami
Las Vegas Now in my view I am doing nothing wrong - I am mearly giving the user the most userfriendly version and I am giving the SE more information on the link, that the user doesn't need. So - In my view I am doing something that is honest - but what are your thoughts?? Has anyone tried to do this? Thanks0 -
Buying Links
Hello, I have talked to many SEO companies about their services and rates. I noticed that all of them will buy thousands and thousands of links once you first join. That is why they always want a start-up fee, so they can purchase the links. I know the best method is doing it the ethical hard way of asking sites to link to them, but I dont have time to do that. I mainly want to know where the SEO companies buy their links from. I am figuring that them buying the links are not negatively affecting the sites or they would lose their clients if they got into black hat links. It must be good inorder for them to keep their clients. I was interested in buying links, but do not know who to trust. Does anyone have a recommendation?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | neeper670 -
Why Does Massive Reciprocal Linking Still Work?
It seems pretty well-settled that massive reciprocal linking is not a very effective strategy, and in fact, may even lead to a penatly. However, I still see massive reciprocal linking (blog roll linking even massive resource page linking) still working all the time. I'm not looking to cast aspersion on any individual or company, but I work with legal websites and I see these strategies working almost universally. My question is why is this still working? Is it because most of the reciprocally linking sites are all legally relevant? Has Google just not "gotten around" to the legal sector (doubtful considering the money and volume of online legal segment)? I have posed this question at SEOmoz in the past and it was opined that massively linking blogs through blog rolls probably wouldn't send any flags to Google. So why is that it seems that everywhere I look, this strategy is basically dismissed as a complete waste of time if not harmful? How can there be such a discrepency between what leading SEOs agree to be "bad" and the simple fact that these strategies are working en masse over the period of at least 3 years?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Gyi0