Linking to Penalized Pages – Be Careful!

Linking to a penalized website can really hurt your own website. This is why it’s very important to know who you’re linking to when not using the ‘nofollow attribute’ on your external links and internal links. This is known as ‘linking to a bad neighborhood’.

You can control what’s flowing in your website, and what’s pointing out. This is why Google will penalize you for linking to bad neighborhoods. Pointing an external link to a bad site will penalize the page that is pointing the link, and possibly your whole site. Not only does this apply to external links, this also applies to internal links to bad neighborhoods.

Here’s my recent experience:

I have a mortgage site with a  ’mortgage rates’ page that needs to be updated every day with new rates. Since this is not the homepage, and only a few numbers are being changed on the page, I can imagine that Google will penalize this page. They probably believe that I’m trying to manipulate the search engine by constantly changing the info on the page.

Since this is a mortgage rate page it’s very important to my users. The first thing they want to see are the mortgage rates. So I have to include a link all over my website to make sure it’s accessible, and to catch their attention when reading my content. Previously, I was ranking high for a lot of pages on a mortgage site, and noticed that these pages did NOT have a link back to the rate page. I went ahead, and changed the content of the page by just adding a link to the mortgage rate page.

Within 7-10 days all the pages dropped by 10-11 pages on Google. They were all on page 1, and now ended up on page 10 or page 11. I was trying to figure out why this happened since this was the only thing I changed on the website within that time period. I knew that Google had penalized my rate page before, and sometimes would deindex it. So I wondered if my recent change to the rate page had an effect on the rankings.

I went back a few days later, and did 2 things to test things out. I had about 10 pages with the internal link pointing to the rate page. I added nofollow to 5 pages that contained the rate link, and remove the rate link from the other 5. Within a few days all 10 pages were back on page 1 for their respective keyterms.

One of the common misconceptions is that Google will penalize a WHOLE site if one page is not within their guidelines. This makes sense, but we also must see that Google may penalized just that 1 page instead of the whole site. This is why it’s very important to pay attention to ALL the pages on your site. If you’re interlinking to that penalized page then the whole site can suffer as well! 

Just like the common cold it’s not hard to determine if an individual page is being penalized.

Here are the symptoms:

1. Individual page or site drops a few pages in rankings, and stays there. Some penalties may even be as small as 10 spots. If you were #1 then moved to page 2, then you may want to check your site if your position stays on page 2.

2. Green pagerank bar turns grey. If a page on your site has a Pagerank 0-10, then turns grey, you may want to pay attention to why it turned grey.

Pay attention to the use of ‘nofollow link attribute’ for external links AND internal links. Also, pay attention to the symptoms above or your whole site can suffer if you’re interlinking. I would recommend finding out first why the page is penalized, and trying to fix it before doing any major changes.

Read more of Robert Enriquez SEO tips on his SEO Blog

Putting No Follow on Home Button

I been receiving a lot of responses from whenever I mention that a website should have a ‘nofollow’ on the home button.

There other links that should carry this attribute, and I wrote more about that on my No Follow Attribute post.

There are some who may disagree with this post, but read the whole post then decide.

Everytime you do something in coding you have to ask “Is this for the robots or humans?”

Obviously placing a No Follow tag or attribute will be for the robots not for humans.

So is the Home button that is found on almost every website for the robots or the humans? The answer is both.

Websites should have two navigations for users. One for the humans, and one for the robots.

If the navigation is bad for the humans, then your users will not find the content they need. They will BOUNCE, and be less likely to come back.

If the navigation is bad for the robots, then your page will suffer in the SERPs. They will also BOUNCE, and be less likely to come back.

So when we look at websites, we have to look at it the way a human would, and how a robot will view it.

The Home button may look like an ordinary button to a human, but a robot views it as a link WITH an Anchor text.

This link is on every page of your website, AND you’re telling the robot that your homepage has the anchor text of ‘Home’.

That’s a bad idea because our home page should be name after a keyword like SEO Blog. (check my footer)

This is the SAME principle of removing the word Home from the Meta Tag Title. When you first broadcasted your site you would’ve remembered that the name of the page was called Home or Default. You quickly removed it, and placed a keyword in its place. You did this for the robots, and not for the humans. Nothing really changed except the robots can properly identify your page(s).

So should you change your Home button name with a keyword? That’s not a good idea because you want your users to be able to find the homepage.

So now you’re asking these two questions
So what should you do after placing the nofollow attribute on the Home button?
How will the robots find my Home page?

Easy. Place a link to your home page on your footer that actually contains a keyword that identifies your homepage.
The footer appears on every page in your website….just like the home button.

I have seen a lot of people utilize the footer in this way but forget to add the nofollow on the Home button.
That’s 1 link with a keyword, and another link (home button) with the wrong keyword. That’s a waste of juice!

Here’s how to change it in WP
Go to the Header file, and go to this line, and insert the nofollow
rel=”nofollow” href=”?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?”Home

No Follow Attribute

Using the No Follow Attribute is essential when trying to direct spiders or juice flow in your webpages. It’s very important to use the HTML code rel=”nofollow” on the majority of your outbound links, and even internal links. If this attribute is not used properly, then your pages will leak its authority juice to unwanted pages.

Blogs are built with a great SEO structure, but they lack the nofollow attribute on the majority of its internal links. One major example of this is when placing tags on a blog post. If you click on the tags, you will notice that it will take you to a different page.

You probably worked hard writing the blog post, and probably had a lot of backlinks pointing to it. You probably searched it on Google to see if it has been indexed, but you notice that your tag page appears. The problem is that you’re flowing that backlink juice to your tag pages, instead of keeping it on the actual post page.

Most of us are notorious for using at least 4-5 tags on a blog post. That means your blog post is leaking to at least 5 different pages! If you continue to use the same tag in every blog post then that tag page will become the dominant page of all those posts.

Tags were not created to be searchable on a search engine. Tags were created to be searched WITHIN the blog using the blog’s search function. Archives & Categories were also created for users to be able to find information on your webpage. Archives, Categories, and Tag pages were not made to be indexed in the search engines. They will only create duplicate content. There will be 4 pages of the same information. (Your blog post, tag page, archive, and category page)

All of your pages should point to your home page which is the most important page in your website. If you have 10 blog posts, and they’re all using the same tag, then that tag page will now become the authority of the 10 posts. Should you stop using tag pages? No.

Use this code to help you place a nofollow attribute on categories and tag pages.
On wordpress go to wp-includes\category-template.php, open it up in notepad, and find this line
$rel = ( is_object($wp_rewrite) && $wp_rewrite->using_permalinks() ) ? ‘rel=”category tag”‘ : ‘rel=”category”‘;

change rel=”category tag to “nofollow” so it appears like ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ : ‘rel=”category”‘;

Also find $rel = ( is_object($wp_rewrite) && $wp_rewrite->using_permalinks() ) ? ‘ rel=”tag”

add nofollow to tag so it appears like this rel=”tag nofollow”‘

I have tried many different plugins, and they all failed to place the “no follow attribute” on the tags. Make sure to place it on the tag cloud.

Here are other links that is helping you LOSE juice from your pages or should have a nofollow attribute because of the anchor text being used.

Home button – the word ‘Home’ is an actual anchor text that points to your home page. Your webpage is not about ‘Home’ so I would recommend putting a nofollow on it.

Contact us/About Us/Privacy Information/TOS/Maps – these links on your page should have a nofollow attribute. These pages should not carry any weight, and do not contain actual content that may pertain to the website’s message. Website visitors come to read your content not the privacy information or TOS.

Read More/Learn More – This is another example of ‘anchor text’ being used. Usually the title of the post is being showed with anchor text/hyperlink, and a 2nd link will be redundant. It also doesn’t make sense to give juice to a page with the anchor text “Read More” or “Learn More”.

Comments – It’s important to turn off the feature under Settings/Discussion and unclicking “Break comments into pages with…” Otherwise Google will also index these comments as a separate page from the blog post. It’s important to put nofollow attributes on any links that are coming from the comments. Otherwise you will lose link juice! Make sure to put a nofollow on the Comments Feed.

Gravatar – another sneaky outbound link that needs a nofollow tag on it! No wonder this website has a SEO pagerank of 7!

Login/Logout/WP-Admin/Author pages – All of these links should have a nofollow attribute. You should also download the ‘Robots Meta’ plugin so that you can also put a ‘noindex’ on these pages.

Blogroll links – these links should have no follow attributes as well unless you actually want to pass juice to another website.

Social bookmarking buttons – make sure these buttons have nofollow attributes or you will have all that juice flowing away from your pages!