Spammy nofollow links
-
Hello,
One of our clients - a cleaning business - has a heck of a lot of spammy nofollow links pointing to their site.
The majority of the links are from comments or 'pingbacks', most with the anchor text 'cheap nfl jerseys' or 'cyber monday ugg boots'.
After researching the subject of spammy nofollow links, it seems there is a lot of uncertainty regarding the negative affect these could have on your SEO efforts.
So I guess my question to the community is: if your site was suddenly hit by a plethora of spammy nofollow links, what would you do and why?
Cheers,
Lewis
-
Ah sorry, I misunderstood Louis - skim reading too quickly!
No, don't bother if it is a nofollow link as this is essentially what Google does to a dofollow one.
Apologies for the confusion.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
I would always just add to the disavow file. But what I'd like to know is how will disavowing nofollow links affect a site? Google is already ignoring them...
-
Hi Lewis,
The important thing to remember here is that if you just overwrite your disavow file, you lose what is already in there.
Download the file that is in place and add those links to the new file so everything is included for the new upload.
-Andy
-
Thanks for the quick reply, Andy.
As disavowing is the process of telling Google to ignore links from certain domains, would this have any effect on nofollow links that are apparently already being ignored by them?
-
Hi Lewis,
The actual fact is, noone other than Google knows exactly what a link will do do you, but based on the fact that there is no guarantee the next Penguin refresh will be incorporated into the main algorithm, and how long it can take between the current refreshed, I wouldn't want to get caught in Penguin. I would be looking to mitigate any possible damage and do what I can to clean my link profile and spend time building better quality ones.
Google only want to see worthwhile links, but you will find a very high percentage of spammy links will just be discounted. I would tend to look for those with over-optimised anchor texts that are do-follow and then disavow them.
Marie has a great post here that will help you understand what you need to be doing.
-Andy
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
-
Any need to worry about spammy links in Webmaster Tools from sites that no longer exist?
I own an ecommerce website that had some spammy stuff done on it by an SEO firm through SEOLinkVine a few years ago. I'm working on removing all those links, but some of the sites no longer exist. I'm assuming I don't have to worry about disavowing those in Webmaster Tools? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CobraJones950 -
Thousands of external links
My site has supposedly over 4,000 external links from it. Is there a good piece of software that could scrape my site that tell me from which page all the links originate from and where they're all going? I'm surprised that the number is this high because our entire site is only a few hundred pages. Here's the site XXXkidecalsXXX.com (just remove the XXX for the URL.) If you want to weigh in on any other issues you see with the site, I'd be happy for any suggestions in general.
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Page for Link Building
Hello Guys, My question is about a link building process. We all know that some directories/sites do require a reciprocal link. Does it make any sense to creat a page in website exclusively to reciprocal links? And what we do with this webpage in terms of indexing, do folow, crawling...etc. Any sugestions are more then welcome 🙂 Tks in advance! PP
Technical SEO | | PedroM0 -
What is link Schemes?
Hello Friends, Today I am reading about link schemes on http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 there are a several ways how to avoid Google penalties and also talk about the low quality links. But I can't understand about "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links" Is there he talked about low page rank, Alexa or something else?
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Back Link Question
Hi Folks, Our domain (www.alabu.com) has been around since 2000. We've accumulated a lot of back links over the years, many of which I don't recognize and didn't ask for. I've been reading on here recently about "cleaning up" back links. I do see a lot of ours that just aren't relevant and I don't know why they decided to link to us. We haven't gotten a warning from google or anything like that, but I wonder, how do I know if we could benefit from cleaning up our back links? Is there a benefit to it even if google hasn't warned us? Thanks! Hal
Technical SEO | | AlabuSkinCare0 -
Linking to related business?
If your working with a local business, is it a good idea to reach out to similar businesses in other states and ask for a link? Example: I own a paint shop in Minnesota, and I reach out to a paint shop in California to see if we want to link to each others site to help our SEO. Because we aren’t in competition with each other wouldn’t this help us both?
Technical SEO | | marker-3115280 -
Links from Youtube Channel
I stumbled across this blog post: http://garyreid.com/youtube-removes-nofollow/ and also this one : http://www.kevin-barnes.com/youtube-secret-authority-loophole/ which talks about no-follow links from your Youtube Channel Page. We've setup a Youtube channel, and have begun updating it regularly, however the link appears to be a redirect-type link -presumably this means no link juice is passed? The code of the link on our Youtube channel: http://www.pretavoir.co.uk The second blog mentions building PA on your Youtube channel by commenting on other videos which then links back to your channel page - if that juice can't go to your site, then I assume the technique is of limited use? Apart from boosting your Youtube Channel's rankings of course, which I guess can't hurt.
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Is this seen as a Link Exchange
If i give a self serve banner ad to someone on my blog or a image with a link and they give me a text link ad is that in googles eyes a link exchange or a one way link.
Technical SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0