Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
301 Redirect for multiple links
I just relaunched my website and changed a permalink structure for several pages where only a subdirectory name changed. What 301 Redirect code do I use to redirect the following? I have dozens of these where I need to change just the directory name from "urban-living" to "urban", and want it to catch the following all in one redirect command. Here is an example of the structure that needs to change. Old
Technical SEO | | shawnbeaird
domain.com/urban-living (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe (single page w/ content)
domain.com/urban-living/tempe/the-vale (single page w/ content) New
domain.com/urban
domain.com/urban/tempe
domain.com/urban/tempe/the-vale0 -
Self Referencing Links - Good or Bad?
As an agency we get quite a few of our clients come to us saying "Ooo, this company just contacted me saying they've run an SEO report on my site and we need to improve on these following things" We had one come through the other day that had reported on something we had not seen in any others before. They called them self-referencing links and marked it as a point of action should be taken. They had stated that 100% of the pages on our clients website had self-referencing links. The definition of self-referencing is when there is a link on a page that is linking to the page you are currently on. So for example you're on the home page and there is a link in the nav bar at the top that says "Home" with a link to the home page, the page you are already currently on. Is it bad practice? And if so can we do anything about it as it would seem strange from a UI point of view not to have a consistent navigation. I have not heard anything about this before but I wanted to get confirmation before going back to our client and explaining. Thanks Mozzers!
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
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 -
Should 301-ed links be removed from sitemap?
In an effort to do some housekeeping on our site we are wanting to change the URL format for a couple thousand links on our site. Those links will all been 301 redirected to corresponding links in the new URL format. For example, old URL format: /tag/flowers as well as search/flowerswill be 301-ed to, new URL format: /content/flowers**Question:**Since the old links also exist in our sitemap, should we add the new links to our sitemap in addition to the old links, or replace the old links with new ones in our sitemap? Just want to make sure we don’t lose the ranking we currently have for the old links.Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shawn811 -
How can I block incoming links from a bad web site ?
Hello all, We got a new client recently who had a warning from Google Webmasters tools for manual soft penalty. I did a lot of search and I found out one particular site that sounds roughly 100k links to one page and has been potentialy a high risk site. I wish to block those links from coming in to my site but their webmaster is nowhere to be seen and I do not want to use the disavow tool. Is there a way I can use code to our htaccess file or any other method? Would appreciate anyone's immediate response. Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | artdivision0 -
Ok to internally link to pages with NOINDEX?
I manage a directory site with hundreds of thousands of indexed pages. I want to remove a significant number of these pages from the index using NOINDEX and have 2 questions about this: 1. Is NOINDEX the most effective way to remove large numbers of pages from Google's index? 2. The IA of our site means that we will have thousands of internal links pointing to these noindexed pages if we make this change. Is it a problem to link to pages with a noindex directive on them? Thanks in advance for all responses.
Technical SEO | | OMGPyrmont0 -
Dofollow and Nofollow links
What is the difference between dofollow and nofollow links? I know that some sites/blogs only let you post nofollow links. In such a case how do I know if a comment I posted on a certain site will be a nofollow or dofollow? How about big traffic sites such as Huff Post. Do they only allow nofollow links?
Technical SEO | | greenfoxone0 -
Website credits for designers - good or bad
Hi My core service is web design and development. I often place a credit on my clients websites pointing them back to my web design or web development pages. Is this a wise practice with penguin and panda updates? Would this also pull my ranking down?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0