Nofollow advertisers with high value sites
-
A site with a high PA/DA links to all of their advertisers on their home page using nofollow. The advertisers generally have high quality sites and none of them are spammy. Having read this forum for the past couple months, it is my understanding that nofollow should be used to control spam links, and is commonly used in the forum section where site owners can not control or vouch for the outgoing links. However, as I understand the topic, there is no benefit to using nofollow for high value sites for which you can recommend, and in particular, when the site is receiving money from the advertisers. The link juice is divided by all the links on the page, both follow and nofollow, and the juice for the nofollow is discarded.
I ask this question because we are one of the advertisers on the site. I want to contact them about this issue, and request that they remove the nofollow from the advertiser links.
Comments?
Best,
Christopher -
Does it matter that this site has a DA of 72 with 5K plus domains linking in, and the majority of advertisers have big advertising budgets? We're much smaller than most advertisers on the site, but all the advertisers are real sites that sell real products with healthy volume.
That said, I understand the purpose of the Google policy. It's just a shame in cases like this, because we are linked from their home page and that link juice just vanishes into the ether.
Best,
Christopher -
I don't know that we are saying two different things. I agree that dofollows should gain you advertisers who appreciate what you do for them. Unfortunately, with professional practices and small businesses I see tons of people advertising with companies who state they are doing organic, ppc, content, and building sites for the client.
The sites are all template sites without imagination and the SEO is the same from site to site. (Which begs the question how can you tell one client you are going to help them to rank higher and higher and then tell their ten competitors the same thing when you are selling them). These guys then put links to the client sites and I have seen NoFollows along with 302's in dynamic urls. First when it says "Company Website" the click takes you to another page on the advertising site. If you search you eventually find a link t the client URL. 8 times out of ten it is either 302 or no follow. As to image links and lack of anchor text, if you or I told a client we were going to link to their site and provide them juice, would we use an image or leave out anchor text? I think it is deliberate. But, I am a cynic on odd days.They actually believe they hurt themselves by helping their client. Odd, isn't it?
-
Hey Robert, I respectfully disagree with this theory:
"The reasoning (this is my opinion) is that they do not want the advertiser to grow and leave them so they try to prevent any juice from going to them. To, in essence, endeavor to keep them captive. "
Giving an advertiser a dofollow link is like gold, so not only will you get more advertisers, but if they do see better rankings as a result they would be less hesitant to leave because losing their links on your site could cause a drop in rankings so just the opposite is actually true regarding keeping them captive.
Also, image links do not pass PR which a lot of people don't know and also there is not anchor text so SEO benefit is minimal. If someone wants to advertise on your site and says they want their image link dofollowed I see no problem, that is of course assuming it's a clean site (which should go without saying because you only want to associate yourself with clean sites anyway)
-
Thanks!
Best,
Christopher"Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know." -- King Arthur
-
Likely the primary reason they do this is to comply with Google's wishes regarding paid links, outlined at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736. They do not like to see links sold to manipulate pagerank, and adding a nofollow tag complies with their guidelines. They are doing it so their site doesn't get hit with a rankings penalty.
-
If you look at sites like those whose titles end in "pages," it is common for them to no follow their links. The reasoning (this is my opinion) is that they do not want the advertiser to grow and leave them so they try to prevent any juice from going to them. To, in essence, endeavor to keep them captive.
When we take on a client who uses an advertising medium that uses no follows in their links to their clients, we generally also find they are the type who do "ppc" but have "no way to show you what they paid for a given keyword", etc. We suggest the clients do not continue unless the advertising medium is bringing them a really good ROI that is demonstrable.
I doubt the site you advertise on will change its policy to assist you based on my experience with this type. It is not a question of their fear of losing juice, but a fear that they will be increasing their clients value and therefore more likely to lose the client. However, if you want to try the place to put the pressure is on your individual rep. Tell them you are unhappy and you think they owe you the link in an uncorrupted way. Reps want to keep their commissions and not lose clients.
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
-
How to get High Quality backlinks to a new site
Hey I am new to SEO and I have a completely brand new domain can anyone suggest me a way to get high quality backlinks to improve my site ranking ??
Link Building | | tupwi0 -
Backlinks with high DA but PA1
Whenever we get new backlinks, its always on a PA 1 page, does this pass a lot of link juice as long as the DA is high? I know the PA can go up by promoting the page, but i rather promote my own website than one page linking to my site. Any thoughts on this?
Link Building | | MozVpn0 -
Does this lose link value?
I have a link to my site from a post on an online forum. I now want to include the forum in a blog post about good industry-related e-forums. If I link to them in this article, will I lose the value from the link on the post in their forum, and could it be seen as spammy?
Link Building | | AHC_SEO0 -
How Does Google Treat Scapper Sites?
I have seen several sites that have data or some type of information about a website. Often the site appears to be trying show the value of a site. How does Google treat the links this scrapper type sites give? Should these types of links be ignored or should they be disavowed? Here is an example: http://www.sitetracer.com/www.tourexperience.com
Link Building | | Firestarter-SEO0 -
Observation on Linking to other sites
Hello, I have a blog for one year now and in the overwall is going great. In all this time it was an awesome way to discovery some SEO mysterious and learn with experience wich in my point of view is the best way to do it. Now my observation is about links to other sites and what does that do. At the present I have about 35 keywords in the 3 first places in Google, bing e Yahoo. All good. I notice that the posts that I have links (dofolow) to other sites are performing better then those ones that only have internal-links. And Its curious that this change as starting to surface in Dezember of 2011. Now the confusion is about the SEOmoz observation towards external links. "You should avoid having too many (roughly defined as more than 100) hyperlinks on any given page. When search engine spiders crawl the Internet they are limited by technology resources and are only able to crawl a certain number of links per webpage. In addition, search engine algorithms divide the value of some popularity metrics by the amount of links on a given page." Now hell with this observation I say. Its working for me and for now on I will actually apply this SEO strategy when Im talking about a subject in a post:) What do you guys think? Whats your experince on this? Regards, Pedro M Pereira
Link Building | | PedroM0 -
Please take a look at the SEO of my site
Hello, I was wondering if you guys could analyze my site and give me pointers on how I could improve it's SEO. I'm a health and wealth coach, NLP coach, and life coach in the Boise, Idaho area. bobweikel.com Also, any link building advice you can give would be great. Here's my backlink criteria Age (as old as possible) A lot of unique content A clean site Backlinks going to that site Facebook followers Which of course means high search engine rankings Thanks
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
What to do with a new good looking site?
With a new site comes new challenges. We have recently finished one of our clients websites in the Retirement (financial) field. www.retirementireland.ie In my opinion the site is looking good, fast loading(very little js, optimized images) and good SEO structuring. As being a new site i feel like the decisions taken now are crucial. If SEO is done properly could save a lot of time. If not would take us a while until we get 1-5 positions for retirement, retirement options, retirement planning, retirement ireland. Any thoughts on existing design / structure / content. Any extra suggestions are welcome.
Link Building | | mosaicpro0 -
Links from .edu sites
I have a band website and was thinking of making some link bait pages specifically designed to get links from high page rank music colleges and then funnel that page rank to my landing pages on my band site. I am planning on finding out what these colleges link to and create great information on pages on my site that the high page rank college websites will link to thereby boosting my trust and authority. How much will the trust and authority boost my site in the search engines? Because the colleges will be music colleges they should be relevant to my band site. Does this sound like a good strategy? Take care, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100