Is link cloaking bad?
-
I have a couple of affiliate gaming sites and have been cloaking the links, the reason I do this is to stop have so many external links on my sites.
In the robot.txt I tell the bots not to index my cloaked links.
Is this bad, or doesnt it really matter?
Thanks for your help.
-
I can't make a judgement on it, but you might check out Graywolf's recent post this month on masking affiliate links. http://www.wolf-howl.com/affiliate-marketing/how-to-mask-affiliate-links/
-
Thanks
-
Thanks
-
Okay... when I think of cloaked link I think of a link that is being hidden from the user and is there only for keyword or other SEO purposes. If your link has a function, I think you are okay and the nofollow should do the trick.
-
So you use robots.txt to disallow indexing of anything under the /bet/ folder, you link to 'bet/XYZ' using nofollow and 'bet/XYZ' has a redirect on it?
I'm going to go with safe. It's a fairly common practice.
-
Not sure I explained my self properly, so if I show an example that might help.
The links I am cloaking are behind buttons which say 'bet now', the cloaked link is http://www.comparebestodds.com/bet/betfair/ and is set as nofollow.
The link which is cloaking is
http://www.betfair.com/?clkID=16251_67988CCB46EC4C389F77AD796257F6&rfr=16251This links are important as its what will make money for my site, and they are important to the users as this is what they need to click to get taken to a site to place a bet.
Hope that makes it a little clearer.
Thanks
-
It sounds like you're already nofollowing the links. This will reduce the number of links on your page as the Search Engines see it, which looks to be your goal.
Assuming this is what you're aiming to do, there's no reason to hide your links. If you don't want search engines OR users to see them, just get rid of them altogether.
-
So are the links usable to visitors of the site?
If you think the links are valuable, you should add the "nofollow" tag to not send over any link juice. Keeping them hidden from the visitor is a bad practice and I think could potentially get you penalized. If you don't want them used, then don't have them on the page.
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
-
Rel Sponsored on Internal Links
Hi all. Should you use rel sponsored on internal links? Here is the scenario: a company accepts money from one of their partners to place a prominent link on their home page. That link goes to an internal page on the company's website that contains information about that partner's service. If this was an external link that the partner was paying for, then you would obviously use rel="sponsored" but since this is a link that goes from awebsite.com to awebsite.com/some-page/, it seems odd to qualify that link in this way. Does this change if the link contains a "sponsored" label in the text (not in the rel qualifier)? Does this change if this link looks more like an ad (i.e. a banner image) vs. regular text (i.e. a link in a paragraph)? Thanks for any and all guidance or examples you can share!
Technical SEO | | Matthew_Edgar0 -
Multiple Common Page Links
Hi everyone - I've taken over SEO for a site recently. In many cases, the reasons why something was done were not well documented. One of these is that on some pages, there are lists of selections. Each selection takes the user to a particular page. On the list page, there is often a link from an image, a name, and a couple of others. Each page often has 30 items with 4 links each. For some reason, the 4th of these internal links were no-followed. When I run this site through several different site evaluation tools, they are all troubled with the number of no-follow links on the site. (These instances from above add up to a 5 figure number). From a user perspective, I totally get why there is a link where each of these links exist. If I wanted to click on the image or the name or some other attribute, that totally makes sense. Its my understanding that Google / Bing are only going to consider the 1st instance. If this creates excessive links, wouldn't you want 3 of the 4 links in each set no-followed? If its only excessive unique links that really matter, then why would any be nofollowed.
Technical SEO | | APFM0 -
Fake Links indexing in google
Hello everyone, I have an interesting situation occurring here, and hoping maybe someone here has seen something of this nature or be able to offer some sort of advice. So, we recently installed a wordpress to a subdomain for our business and have been blogging through it. We added the google webmaster tools meta tag and I've noticed an increase in 404 links. I brought this up to or server admin, and he verified that there were a lot of ip's pinging our server looking for these links that don't exist. We've combed through our server files and nothing seems to be compromised. Today, we noticed that when you do site:ourdomain.com into google the subdomain with wordpress shows hundreds of these fake links, that when you visit them, return a 404 page. Just curious if anyone has seen anything like this, what it may be, how we can stop it, could it negatively impact us in anyway? Should we even worry about it? Here's the link to the google results. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amshowells.com&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58.1905j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 (odd links show up on pages 2-3+)
Technical SEO | | mshowells0 -
Internal link structure, find out if there are any internal links to this page
When i use this url in open site explorer it says that there are no internal links:
Technical SEO | | wilcoXXL
http://goo.gl/d2s6tJ
Page Authority is also 1, it should be higher of there are any internal links to it right? But i am very sure there are links to this url on my website. For example on this URL:
http://goo.gl/ucixRH How certain can i be of this? Because if i can be very certain, than we have a internal linkstructure problem on our entire site i believe.0 -
Solutions for too many on-page links?
We have just begun using SEO Moz a few months ago and have been busy cleaning up some of our warnings and errors. One of the errors that has been an issue is ... too many on-page links. I am trying to correct this issue and I am wondering how seo moz counts these links. For instance... we have links to many of our product categories in a drop down from our main menu, those same links are listed in our footer. Does this get counted as two or only one link. If two, should we make one of the link no follow or how would you best suggest correcting this. Our website is www.unikeyhealth.com Since the menu and the footer appear on virtually every page on our site correcting this issue will quickly sort out this problem. Thanks for any advice.
Technical SEO | | unikey0 -
Cn I use SEOMOZ to find "Bad Links"
We were hit by the Penguin update and I am told it make be because of "Bad Links", but no one can seem to tell me how to find them. We never buy links, and in fact the only links I know about are those from paid affiliates through shareasale - and these affiliates are paid based on performance, not links. 1. Does anyone know how to figure out what links are bad? 2. Once I know, how do I get them to stop linking to my site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Redirecting broken incoming links
I have a number of 404s happening on my site due to other websites incorrectly linking to my content. Perhaps they typed the word wrong, or their software did. Here are some examples from webmaster tools: learn/ingredie.. shop/accessories_and_extras/professional.. lore/idx.php.. learn/step_by_step_instruc shop/prod shop/product lore/email_ As you can see, none of those are actual pages - but truncated URLs of actual pages. Should I find a way to redirect these pages - or let them 404? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0 -
Canonical Link for Duplicate Content
A client of ours uses some unique keyword tracking for their landing pages where they append certain metrics in a query string, and pulls that information out dynamically to learn more about their traffic (kind of like Google's UTM tracking). Non-the-less these query strings are now being indexed as separate pages in Google and Yahoo and are being flagged as duplicate content/title tags by the SEOmoz tools. For example: Base Page: www.domain.com/page.html
Technical SEO | | kchandler
Tracking: www.domain.com/page.html?keyword=keyword#source=source Now both of these are being indexed even though it is only one page. So i suggested placing an canonical link tag in the header point back to the base page to start discrediting the tracking URLs: But this means that the base pages will be pointing to themselves as well, would that be an issue? Is their a better way to solve this issue without removing the query tracking all togther? Thanks - Kyle Chandler0