but you don’t have to jump through the hoops. Several plugins (eg: All In One...Nofollow and internal redirects: sites that accept links - but don’t link out fairly
There seem to be increasing numbers of sites who suck up weblinks, but don’t link back out in a ‘proper’ way - ie in a way that helps the site linked to do better in google.
Instead, they use funny internal redirects, stick ‘no follow’ on external links, or just don’t bother making them hyperlinks.
Offenders
I’ve started a list of offenders. Add any others you know of - don’t worry, Wordpress will add nofollow to them all …
- Wikipedia - all links, even the attributed sources of its facts, are given the nofollow tag.
- BBC - redirects via some funny internal redirect.
- Myspace - redirects all new links added vis MSPlinks.
- UK newspaper sites - even when they include web addresses in their stories, they don’t bother to make them hyperlinks.
- Youtube - the link in your profile is ‘nofollow’ed.
- Newsvine - Someone writes an interesting news story, people vote it to the top of the list … but rel=nofollow means no link benefit to the site that wrote it. But newsvine gets all the keywords from its summary …
- Spock.com - So, I’ll spend time telling you which sites are relevant to me for your person search engine. Then you’ll create a profile page for me, to help you do better for my name as a search term. Then you’ll nofollow all the links to sites about me. Nope.
on May 19th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Interesting post. I saw your response on MattCutts. I’ll probably check back for offenders. It would make sense that some of the larger boys are in offense. They don’t really have a need for links as much as other companies.
on May 19th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Nice collection. There are probably many more.
on May 20th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Hi,
At least with the sites you have listed a webmaster should know that if they link to the site they won’t get an open link back. What is worse, much worse is folks who exchange links and then remove the backlink.
One of our competitors use a low cost SEO company to get links, I suspect they are paid per link but the site owner is so dumb they don’t check who they are giving links to and whether they continue to get one back. As a result they have one way links in their link exchange using the exact anchor text that they are targeting to direct competitors.
on May 20th, 2008 at 10:47 am
HissingSid: True. But sites like wikipedia rely on other people’s work as sources for their information. The original source gets no link benefit - and Wikipedia appears at the top of the search results for many terms, because it’s an easy place for webmasters to link to (many of whom don’t know what nofollow is if they’re just running a blog).
I just noticed this site - for people who support turning nofollow off on blogs, and finding a better way to fight spam: http://www.bumpzee.com/no-nofollow/.
I submitted by business to the freeindex recently. Spent ages filling it in, and then discovered they only link to you if you link to them with a huge logo! So that’s half an hour I’ll never get back.
on June 2nd, 2008 at 5:18 am
Thanks for the comment on my blog
Yes, I still nofollow comment links on Blog Creativity, but the reason for that is that a large number of commenters are undeserving - one or two comments and they’re off to someone else’s site for links. I’m thinking of setting a larger number of comments, say 8, before the commenter gets dofollow links.
Ironically, you’ve not linked to any of the site that you mentioned above (BBC, Wikipedia etc.)
. I’d have linked to them but with a nofollow - a better choice than no links.
on June 11th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
I don’t understand what you mean about sites ‘accepting’ links and not handing them out? Were you hoping these sites wouldn’t accept incoming links, that they would be rejected? Does anyone think the BBC should send out “cease and desist” letters to any person who creates a link to one of their stories…??
Somebody left a comment “At least with the sites you have listed a webmaster should know that if they link to the site they won’t get an open link back.” which begs almost the same question. Does anybody in SEO land honestly believe that all you have to do is place a link to the BBC and they’ll return the favor? Does anybody in SEO land know what the BBC is? They’re not some useless web directory…
There’s more to life than hyperlinks. If you don’t believe that, you’re going to be frustrated trying to get them out of people who do believe it.
on June 20th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Sumesh: when I’ve installed the nofollow plugin I’ll get round to doing that …
Forrest: perhaps I didn’t phrase it that well. I was just trying to highlight sites that suck up inbound links and deliberately avoid linking out properly. Although there are some sites that don’t accept links - or at least there were in 2002: http://www.dontlink.com/
on August 12th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
[...] Some sort of SEO trick to avoid linking out to other sites, as per my previous [...]