Odd backlinks from yahoo news
-
Can anyone explain what this backlink does? The original content was syndicated on Yahoo News from Mashable. At first glance it appears to be a straight up follow link from Yahoo to Mashable, but upon closer inspection I saw this in the code.
went public just three months ago
Here's the article on yahoo news: http://news.yahoo.com/facebook-zynga-generates-12-revenue-them-175509319.html
I've rarely seen backlinks from yahoo for any content partner let alone follow links. The us.lrd.yahoo.com in the hyperlink makes me highly suspicious.
-
Thanks Michael! That was quite insightful : )
-
Hey Mike Fan,
What you're looking at there is called a data reference link (that ylt= attribute gives it away). In short, it is indeed a followed link and would pass any authority you'd expect from a plain old link. The big difference is in how it's used.
The _ylt type variables are data packets. They contain specific base64 encoded data. The link could be a login, referential data, tracking data, or even spyware. The main point is someone making that link wants to keep track of who's doing what with it. On large sites, it's actually more common than you'd think for tracking purposes.
In short, this link is probably fine, even if it's a little scary looking in the page source. When a site that famously no=follows uses a followed link, you better believe they're going to track what's going on when they do.
Mike
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
-
Blog Comments & nofollow to follow backlink ratio
Hello I have a website with 2000 nofollow links backlinks and about 20 follow links. It is currently ranking 11<sup>th</sup> on Google. The websites that are outranking it have lower ranking stats and in some cases only 2 follow links. Most of the nofollow links are blog comments, could this be what is dragging down my stats. The only factor my website is worst on is the number of server requests per load, which is 194 as it is a theme. Blog comments can be very difficult to remove; I created these several years ago before I knew too much about SEO. Most of them are on other websites in same niche. Would I be best to ask website owners to delete my comments or restart on a new domain. Thanks Rob
Technical SEO | | tomfifteen0 -
WWW and Without WWW Backlinks
I have just seen through ahrefs and found without WWW have more backlinks instead of WWW. Is there any way to forward all those without WWW to WWW domain, is there any harm or effect in serp ranking?
Technical SEO | | chandubaba0 -
Is there a tool to figure out bad backlinks
With the new changes to the google algorithm. I'm trying to figure out what links google may think are hurting my site. Any thoughts? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MQMORAN23230 -
Removing irrelevant items from Google News?
A client wants to know if it's possible to get Google to remove stories from Google News feeds if those stories have nothing to do with the client? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | JamesAMartin0 -
Portfolio website: reciprocal backlinks and redirects
My company specializes in website design and development, and as such, the portfolio section on our website has lots of links to websites we've built. Generally, the way that we do this is that our portfolio sections links to URLs with a naming scheme as follows: http://ourcompany.com/client1 which is either a redirect to http://client1.com if the site is still up, or a version hosted on our website (http://ourcompany.com/client1) if the client is no longer hosting their site. In addition, most of our client sites contain a reciprocal link back to ourcompany.com, usually with the text "Website design and development by OurCompany". I have two questions about this arrangement: Might the reciprocal backlinks from the client sites be affecting the SEO results for ourcompany.com? I know that reciprocal backlinks can be occasionally problematic. If I do a search for "site:ourcompany.com", I'll get results for all of the client sites that we're hosting at http://ourcompany.com/client1, because I haven't excluded them in robots.txt. Of course, the content of these sites has little to do with that of our company, because we have a diverse array of clients and none of them do web design and development (which is the content focus of our site). Might this seemingly unrelated content be affecting our results? Should the client sites be excluded in robots.txt or via nofollow? Thanks very much!
Technical SEO | | fdepino0 -
Why is there such a big discrepancy between OSE and GWT regarding # backlinks?
Hello, We have been doing some analysis around our backlink profiles for our sites and have been experiencing a massive discrepancy between what is reported as number of C class linking domains in OSE and the information returned in Google Webmaster tools. For a variety of sites OSE is reporting numbers < 10 for C class linking doamins while GWT shows >100 unique domains linking (we confirmed that the majority of these links are in different C classes) Is this simply a matter of the limited index size of OSE or could there be another explanation? It is interesting that the links that do show up in OSE a nearly exclusively sites that we own. /T
Technical SEO | | tomypro0 -
Do Backlinks to a PDF help with overall authority/link juice for the rest of the domain?
We are working on a website that has some high-quality industry articles available on their website. For each article, there is an abstract with a link to the PDF which is hosted on the domain. We have found in Analytics that a lot of sites link directly to the PDF and not the webpage that has the abstract of the article. Can we get any benefit from a direct PDF link? Or do we need to modify our strategy?
Technical SEO | | MattAaron0 -
Are there any tools to measure backlinks to email addresses?
Does anyone know of a tool that will allow you to track links to an email address hyperlink like mailto:[email protected]
Technical SEO | | dsonenberg0