too many backlinks from a single domain

This situation is one of the things nofollow was designed for, bought ads.

I have never heard of too many nofollow links on a page or site being a bad thing in the eyes of search engines.

If you do not want to go that route, you could do what a lot of affiliate marketers do to make their links look cleaner. Affiliate links usually have a ugly looking URL, so they create a new URL that redirects to that. You could use the same concept.

So all of your ads for Joe Attorney would point to a URL like www. yoursite.com/JoeAttorney. That URL then would have a 301 redirect (or even just a meta refresh redirect) directly to the clients site.

Then it is just one page linking to them, and you do not need to worry about their SEOs flipping out.

So, you just load the same ad, all the time? Over and over?

You actually cry out for an ad serving script. Why you are against that is beyond me.

It's how it's done. Everything is built in, from stats to placement, and everything in
between.

I can't imagine how you are are managing ads on what you claim is 100,000+ pages
without one, let alone managing content.

As far as nofollow, the WF is filled with millions of such links.

Oh and BTW, there's no way your site has been indexed in google since 1995.

That statement alone makes me wonder, as always...

Paul

Nofollow all the links and you will have eliminated 99% of your worries.

Google was founded in 1998

It is looking like spam if too many backlinks are coming from a single domain. It is good to use various sites for creating backlinks.

Thank you for the responses.

First, for the nitpickers, please forgive my inaccuracy. The domain was created in 1995. The site has been indexed forever. Google bots have had a constant presence for as long as I can remember. But that's really irrelevant to the issue anyway.

With regards to ad scripts, I don't want or need any third party ads on my site. I don't even place google ads there. As for exact content of an ad, the actual content varies a bit depending on what code the person is reading, what keywords or search terms have been used, what topics have been viewed and what location they have selected or are viewing from. There is no third-party ad script anywhere that could do what I need. Sorry.

Regardless of the ad content, over thousands of pages of law and/or search results, the link to the lawyers website remains constant. Hence the potential for large numbers of back links.

With regards to the spam comment, I understand the perception although I don't agree with it. If an attorney's website was being penalized for having "spammy" links then I would think that the source of all those "spammy" links would be even more penalized. My own personal opinion is Google is smarter than that. The links are numerous because my content is voluminous (law is pretty much never ending). This content is, however, also unique.

While I understand a webmasters initial perception upon seeing the large number of links, I have yet to see anyone prove to me that it really hurts them. The offset is that it drives traffic to their website - highly targeted traffic, in fact.

Interestingly, I recently had a BIG SEO firm take over from a client that lost his account. At first, they yelled and screamed that all my backlinks were to blame for the site's drop in rankings. The attorney countered that he got business and didn't want to drop the affiliation. Lo and behold, after a couple of months with the new webmaster, their rankings were back even though they still had more than 50,000 backlinks from us. This scenario has repeated itself several times with different clients.

We experimented with pointing all the ads to a profile page and having a single outbound link to the attorney's website there. This builds page rank for the internal profile page but diminishes the actual click thru rate to the website a little. Since that is my primary goal I'm looking for other fixes.

The nofollow attribute and it's impact have been hard for me to pin down. I have read many differing opinions on it's potential for unwanted side effects, especially if there were to be millions of such links on a single domain. I've worked too hard to put my site where it needs to be to take any serious risk without careful consideration. The sheer scale of the site means that even a small change can have drastic effects.

The site is unique in it's SEO in that no single set of keywords can really be targeted. When people search the law, especially laymen, the terms they use are all over the place depending on the legal issue in question.

But I digress. I would like more input on the nofollow attribute, especially if used en masse. I would also like someone to prove to me that having a ton of backlinks from an authoritative site is really ALWAYS penalized. I concurr that it might raise a red flag for Google to look at. But my own study suggests that Google is smart enough to understand the domain where the links originate. I might argue that in my case the opposite is true. If Google has determined that the site is a valid legal site, I would think that links from that site, provided they are from unique page content, and from proper valid anchor text that points to related material, are not only ok, but probably a plus. I would argue that I might, in fact, be an exception to a general rule.

That in no way solves my delima, however, because in sales, perception rules the day and my experience has taught me that every webmaster thinks they know everything (even tho in truth, it's all just pretty much educated guesses at a constantly moving target). I need really good knowledge/information to be able to address a client's webmaster/SEO about the issue when it arises, however. And, most of all, I want to be on top of any potential for REAL issues.

Happy Holidays!

To many backlinks from a single domain is not a good seo practice. Try to get backlinks from different domains.

Wow long question ;-) But requires a short answer as Mike rightly pointed out.. Use NOFOLLOW links!

Just to add - I would actually track the links first before redirecting to the advertiser using a self hosted solution (my preference - but there are also many commercial providers)... e.g.

Advert -->Tracker link-->Redirect to Advertiser site

That way you can collate better stats and analysis of your ads and provide further value to your ad customers with providing granular reports on performance e.g. which posts/pages are performing best, IP location of clicks etc...

I may be missing the point here, but...

...aren't paid dofollow links against Google guidelines?

If you ask me - you and your clients are at a greater risk of being penalized in the future - if you keep passing link juice onto them through those paid links (but I don't know if that's something your clients expect to get from those "ads" as well).

Now, you can keep arguing how those seemingly editorial/contextual links can never hurt anyone - and I'm not saying that they can - but even if you're 100% right (at least at the current stage of the Google algorithm evolution), you're still only "lucky" to keep avoid the paid/dofollow penalty - while on the other hand, no such risk exists with paid/nofollow links...

That being said, I'm a SEO rookie - with no actual large-site experience...so yea, good luck with whatever you decide to do...or don't do.

Make ALL the links nofollow... If this is not acceptable by your customers, make ONLY one link dofollow (for example in the content). You need to know some PHP (if your website is written in PHP) and remove rel="nofollow" if the ACTUAL article page is opened. For example if the article is visualised in a TAG page (you should add rel="nofollow")... Not really sure if you will manage to understand me, but to be 99.99% safe go with nofollow links!

Don't do that, it just hurt your site rank.

The issue you have is Google considers any paid link Google can spider and count in the PageRank calculation (not nofollow) as gaming their search engine. As others have stated the easy solution is nofollow, it's one of the reasons why Google adopted nofollow, so those like you selling ads can still sell ads without impacting Google search results.

Googlebot does follow (spiders through them) nofollow links, but it doesn't count them in the ranking algo other than deleting the PageRank that would have flowed through the link (you loose some link benefit/PR). So Google knows the nofollow link exists and the bot will spider through the links to spider the other site, but it won't have an SEO benefit to your customers site.

There are no limits to the number of nofollow links you can add, if you want to sell 100 sitewide nofollow ads, Google will ignore them other than you'll loose the equivalent PageRank that 100 links are worth.

You run a huge risk selling ads that are not nofollow or hidden some otherway, if Google penalizes your site for selling dofollow links no external links will pass PageRank/SEO value. Are your clients receiving unnatural link warnings, if so you might already be hit with a penalty: won't impact your rankings, but will mean your site doesn't pass SEO benefit on via outbound links.

Since you use a tracking script, can it be adapted to link to a page like:

domain.com/go/laywersite1
domain.com/go/laywersite2

Where the URLs 301 (or 302) redirect to your customers sites?

If you can organise this setup you'll then have an easy way to block Google from spidering the client links, setup a noindex rule in your .htaccess file to block everything under /go/ or noindex the pages one at a time if you want some to pass SEO value. SEO wise there's not much difference between a text link and a 301 redirect.

I use this for affiliate links, send them through a PHP script and noindex the virtual directory. I take it one step further by using a javascript link to the domain.com/go/laywersite1 URLs so Google doesn't 'see' them (don't waste PR on the nofollow links), though it does mean a small percentage of visitors see just the anchor text and not the link (the technique I use converts a span tag with specific CSS code into a clickable link using javascript).

Another solution is use iFrames. I have two iFrames on SEO Tutorial for example, one is the social media profile links hovering on the right side of the site and the other is within the author biography box. The former iFrame is loaded sitewide, the latter only on WordPress posts and pages.

The iFrames 'link' to two files that contain the social media profile links, means there's only two dofollow links from my site to each of my social media profiles and they are from webpages I don't directly link to. iFrames wouldn't be suitable for contextual text links, but would work for banner ads added to a sidebar or footer area.

David

Site wide links on it's own will not have a negative effect on a money page. I'm talking legit sites, not some spamfest free for all.

@SEO-DAVE

With regards to google warnings: No-one has received any messages from Google. My site ranks fine as do many of my clients. The ads have been around for a long time. I do NOT sell links. I have no control whatsoever on how many impressions a client's ad ultimately has or from how many pages. I send targeted leads to clients through the placement of context sensitive value added content.

So you're saying that such practice could hurt my clients and NOT me? That seems backwards...

As a general rule, I prefer to use minimal javascript since there is NO way to know of client side errors. However....

With regards to redirects... that may be the another alternative although implementation might be a bit tricky in this particular case. I'm studying that.

For now, all links point to the attorney's profile page which builds internal pr. Then there is only a single outbound link to the lawyer's website from there. I looked closely at various other legal directories, all of which have thousands of outbound links with virtually NO real content (name and address, nothing of grammatical construct) and I didn't see any use of nofollow so far on those.

That said, after re-reading all of Matt Cutts articles and the Google guidelines, nofollow seems like one way to go.

None of this addresses my concern about backlinks however. It seems that everyone is assuming that since nofollow blocks flow thru page rank that it also prevents the generation of a backlink for the target website. I haven't yet found anything definitively stating that tho.

So, again, this is all very interesting (and valid concern) but not really addressing my initial question which was dealing with the effect of multiple backlinks from a single domain and how to control what Google backlinks. How safe is it to assume that Google would absolutely NOT create a backlink from a nofollow? Seems like a reasonable assumption to me. It certainly can't create a backlink from a link it can't see.

This is vague language. All paid ads have links to a target. This is not the same thing (at least in my mind) of "selling links".

If a page has content that discusses a legal matter like "divorce", and on that same page there is an outbound link with proper anchor text linking to another authoritative article on the same subject, is that a bad link? If that isn't a good link (at least from a users standpoint) I don't know what is.

However, that language would suggest that such links are only ok if there is no commercial value in them? But what about all the Google place and + ads? So the only "paid" ads of any value are ads sold by Google?

I can understand Google's position stating that a large number of advertisement links could unnaturally shape search results tho.

Is it me or is a lot of this the basics of SEO?

The fact your questioning makes me think you already know its not a great idea...lol I would be no following links and I love the 301 idea from mike..... very clever that

I've not seen your site so don't know the setup.

I've assumed it's something like banner ads or text links in footers/sidebars. Basically obvious ads.

If this is your setup and the links are dofollow: that means lacks a rel="nofollow" attribute, not on a page with a nofollow robots meta tag, not on a page blocked from Googlebot via .htaccess file rules, not hidden in some otherway (javascript for example).... Google would consider that as unacceptable and stop passing PageRank from your site.

Based on my and many others experience the Google penalty is not automated, you have to be caught by a manual reviewer. From the sounds of things you've been lucky and have not been caught yet (maybe your sold links aren't obvious, contextual for example), that could still be the case 5 years from now or next month your clients and you see unnatural link warning in Webmaster Tools. All it takes is for you to sell a link to a known link buyer (a number of big brands buy links) and a manual review of your site spells disaster.

This is not SEO speculation, I and many others have experienced this.

Google have stated nofollow links are not counted as backlinks, what more info do you need on this?

There's only one 100% safe way (Google wise) to sell links/ads from a site and that's make sure the ads/links do not pass PageRank. If you run the risk and sell dofollow links, make it less obvious, avoid sitewide, avoid unrelated links, vet any sites you sell link to for quality... Use your commonsense.

David