WebProNews

Tag: NoFollow

  • Google: Those Unnatural Link Penalties Are About The Product Reviews We Warned You About

    Google: Those Unnatural Link Penalties Are About The Product Reviews We Warned You About

    As previously reported, Google handed out a bunch of penalties over the weekend for unnatural outbound links. Now, the company has clarified that this is directly tied to product reviews that violate its guidelines.

    If you were affected by this, you can’t say you weren’t warned. Beyond this being pretty much common knowledge for years, Google posted a warning of sorts to its webmaster blog last month. In that, it laid out “best practices” for bloggers and companies when it comes to the latter giving the former free products, and the former reviewing them.

    It was this post Google’s John Mueller referenced in response to people complaining in the Google forums (via Search Engine Roundtable). In one thread, he said:

    In particular, if a post was made because of a free product (or free service, or just paid, etc), then any links placed there because of that need to have a rel=nofollow attached to them. This includes links to the product itself, any sales pages (such as on Amazon), affiliate links, social media profiles, etc. that are associated with that post. Additionally, I imagine your readers would also appreciate it if those posts were labeled appropriately. It’s fine to keep these kinds of posts up, sometimes there’s a lot of useful information in them! However, the links in those posts specifically need to be modified so that they don’t pass PageRank (by using the rel=nofollow).

    Once these links are cleaned up appropriately, feel free to submit a reconsideration request, so that the webspam team can double-check and remove the manual action.

    Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable links you to several separate threads in which Mueller responds similarly, but you get the gist.

    Image via iStock

  • Google Gives 3 ‘Best Practices’ For Bloggers Reviewing Free Products

    Google Gives 3 ‘Best Practices’ For Bloggers Reviewing Free Products

    On Friday, Google took to multiple company blogs to lay out a few “best practices” for bloggers and companies when it comes to the ladder giving the former free products, and the former reviewing them.

    These are to keep you compliant with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and therefore in the search engine’s good grace (i.e. not penalized).

    The first rule (and this is not new, mind you) is to make sure that links are properly nofollowed.

    “Links that pass PageRank in exchange for goods or services are against Google guidelines on link schemes,” Google says. “Companies sometimes urge bloggers to link back to: the company’s site; the company’s social media accounts; an online merchant’s page that sells the product; a review service’s page featuring reviews of the product the company’s mobile app on an app store.”

    “Bloggers should use the nofollow tag on all such links because these links didn’t come about organically (i.e., the links wouldn’t exist if the company hadn’t offered to provide a free good or service in exchange for a link),” it adds. “Companies, or the marketing firms they’re working with, can do their part by reminding bloggers to use nofollow on these links.”

    The other two best practices are pretty simple. Disclose the relationship, and “create compelling, unique content.”

    For disclosure, Google says this can appear anywhere in a post, but that the top is the most useful placement.

    Again, none of this stuff is really new, but it’s worth noting that Google is posting this on multiple blogs. The company could be looking at this stuff more closely than in the past.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Google: Don’t Use Nofollow On Internal Links

    In the latest Webmaster Help video, Google’s Matt Cutts discusses the use of rel=”nofollow” on internal links, addressing the following user-submitted question:

    Does it make sense to use rel=”nofollow” for internal links? Like, for example, to link to your login page/ Does it really make a difference?

    “Okay, so let me give you the rules of thumb,’ he begins. “I’ve talked about this a little bit in the past, but it’s worth mentioning again. rel=’nofollow’ means the PageRank won’t flow through that link as far as discovering the link, PageRank computation [and] all that sort of stuff. So, for internal links – links within your site – I would try to leave the nofllow off, so if it’s a link from one page on your site to another page on your site, you want that PageRank to flow. You want Googlebot to be able to find that page. So almost every link within your site – that is a link going from one page on your site to another page on your site – I would make sure that the PageRank does flow, which means leaving off the nofollow link.”

    “Now, this question goes a little bit deeper, and it’s a little more nuanced,” Cutts continues. “It’s talking about login pages. It doesn’t hurt if you want to put a nofollow pointing to a login page or to a page that you think is really useless like a terms and conditions page or something like that, but in general, it doesn’t hurt for Googlebot to crawl that page because it’s not like we’re gonna submit a credit card to make an order or try to log in or something like that.”

    He goes on to note that you would probably want a nofollow on pages pointing to other sites, like in cases where people abuse comment systems. The general rule for internal linking, however, is to go ahead and let the PageRank flow, and let Googlebot learn all about your site. Even in cases where you don’t want Google to crawl the page, you might as well just use noindex, he says.

    He also suggests that login pages can still be useful for some searchers.

    Image: Google

  • Matt Cutts On When Nofollow Links Can Still Get You A Manual Penalty

    Today, we get an interesting Webmaster Help video from Google and Matt Cutts discussing nofollow links, and whether or not using them can impact your site’s rankings.

    The question Cutts responds to comes from somebody going by the name Tubby Timmy:

    I’m building links, not for SEO but to try and generate direct traffic, if these links are no-follow am I safe from getting any Google penalties? Asked another way, can no-follow links hurt my site?

    Cutts begins, “No, typically nofollow links cannot hurt your site, so upfront, very quick answer on that point. That said, let me just mention one weird corner case, which is if you are like leaving comment on every blog in the world, even if those links might be nofollow, if you are doing it so much that people notice you, and they’re really annoyed by you, and people spam report about you, we might take some manual spam action on you, for example.”

    “I remember for a long time on TechCrunch anytime that people showed up, there was this guy anon.tc would show up, and make some nonsensical comment, and it was clear that he was just trying to piggyback on the traffic from people reading the article to whatever he was promoting,” he continues. “So even if those links were nofollow, if we see enough mass-scale action that we consider deceptive or manipulative, we do reserve the right to take action, so you know, we carve out a little bit of an exception if we see truly huge scale abuse, but for the most part, nofollow links are dropped out of our link graph as we’re crawling the web, and so those links that are nofollowed should not affect you from an algorithmic point of view.”

    “I always give myself just the smallest out just in case we find somebody who’s doing a really creative attack or mass abuse or something like that, but in general, as long as you’re doing regular direct traffic building, and you’re not annoying the entire web or something like that, you should be in good shape,” he concludes.

    This is perhaps a more interesting discussion than it seems on the surface in light of other recent advice from Cutts, like that to nofollow links on infographics, which can arguably provide legitimate content and come naturally via editorial decision.

    It also comes at a time when there are a lot questions about the value of links and what links Google is going to be okay with, and which it is not. Things are complicated even further in instances when Google is making mistakes on apparently legitimate links, and telling webmasters that they’re bad.

    Image: Google

  • Google Doesn’t Care How Many Nofollow Links You Have

    Adding the nofollow attribute to links prevents PageRank from being passed. This is something that Google wants webmasters to do for any links that have been purchased. To do otherwise is strictly against Google’s quality guidelines. Violating these guidelines can either get you hit with a manual penalty in Google, or get you snagged by Google’s Penguin updated, which will continue to see regular data refreshes.

    Some webmasters have wondered if having a large amount of links with the nofollow attribute pointing to a page could hurt that page in search. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to an interesting Google webmaster forum discussion, in which Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller sets the record straight.

    In that thread, user rickweiss writes, “Bloggers have apparently taken the issue of never having a dofollow on any link that is tied to something you are compensated for so seriously that they are putting nofollow on all links in their posts. In other words, the legitimate link to the products page is getting a nofollow.”

    Later, a user going by the name Bens Mom, asks, “I am incorrect in the belief that having too many rel=nofollow links can actually hurt a site? Because that is the impression I’m under.”

    Mueller responded:

    I’d like to back up what others said — having links (even a large number of them) with rel=nofollow pointing to your site does not negatively affect your site. We take these links out of our PageRank calculations, and out of our algorithms when they use links.

    If you’ve been doing this for a longer time, then it might even make sense to work to clean up those older links, and to have them either removed or the rel=nofollow attached (given that those kinds of paid posts would be against our Webmaster Guidelines).

    This isn’t much of a surprise, considering that nofollow is designed to do what its name would imply: keep the search engine algorithms from following these links. That would indicate that these links carry absolutely no weight one way or another.

    Google’s constantly changing algorithm has a lot of people paranoid about their linking strategies, and it seems that some are so worried about Google’s actions that they’re taking unneeded actions of their own, and ironically, possibly hurting SEO in the process.

    Image: John Mueller, from Google+

  • Comment Spammers: These Links Are Not Helping You

    In light of Google’s Penguin update, it seems like a good time to suggest that you don’t spam blog comments. Even if you’re not technically spamming, and are leaving semi-thoughtful comments (but your ultimate goal is to get a link), it’s very likely that the blog you’re commenting on implements the nofollow attribute on comment links, which keeps the links from passing PageRank.

    Don’t forget that nofollow was introduced with blog comments in mind. Google put out a post in early 2005 called “Preventing Comment Spam,” in which it said:

    If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

    SEO consultant Carson Ward recently wrote a great article at SEOmoz about types of link spam to avoid. One of those was comment spam.

    “If I were an engineer on a team designed to combat web spam, the very first thing I would do would be to add a classifier to blog comments,” he wrote. “I would then devalue every last one. Only then would I create exceptions where blog comments would count for anything.”

    “Let’s pretend that Google counts every link equally, regardless of where it is on the page. How much do you think 1/1809th of the link juice on a low-authority page is worth to you?” he wrote, referring to a screen cap of a spam comment on a page with 1808 other comments. “Maybe I’m missing something here, because I can’t imagine spam commenting being worth anything at any price. Let’s just hope you didn’t build anchor text into those comments.”

    It may seem like common sense to many, but it’s amazing how frequently comment spam occurs, even today, even on blogs that implement nofollow on comment links.

    For the Bloggers

    Matt Cutts put out a pretty popular blog post in 2009 about PageRank sculpting. Here’s what he had to say about blog comments in that:

    Q: If I run a blog and add the nofollow attribute to links left by my commenters, doesn’t that mean less PageRank flows within my site?

    A: If you think about it, that’s the way that PageRank worked even before the nofollow attribute.

    Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?

    A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

    Some bloggers aren’t opposed to turning off comments though. We had a couple of interesting conversations with bloggers Jeremy Schoemaker and Michael Gray last year, following the Panda update. Panda was all about the quality of content on a page, and obviously blog comments can carry varying degrees of quality.

    Schoemaker told us that he called a Google engineer friend and asked about this. Schoemaker said he was told that if anything, it’s “diluting the quality score of my page” by possibly diluting overall keyword density. Another factor could be comments that go through, but are clearly spam. These send signals that the page is not being well maintained.

    Gray, who turned off his blog comments years ago, told us last year, “While I’m not living in the SEO world of 1999, things like keyword focus and density do play a role,” he adds. “If you’re doing your job as an SEO in 95% of the cases the keyword you are trying to rank for should be the most used word/phrase on your page. If you’ve gone to all the trouble to do that why would you now let and knucklehead with a keyboard and internet connection come by and screw that up with comments?”

    Google says in its help center, “If you can’t or don’t want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should nofollow those links. This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web.”

    “In particular, comment spammers may decide not to target a specific content management system or blog service if they can see that untrusted links in that service are nofollowed,” it says. “If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you could decide to automatically or manually remove the nofollow attribute on links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time.”

    As far as I can tell, nofllow hasn’t done much to detract spammers, but at least it does keep you from passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods.