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
-
Broken canonical link errors
Hello, Several tools I'm using are returning errors due to "broken canonical links". However, I'm not too sure why is that. Eg.
Technical SEO | | GhillC
Page URL: domain.com/page.html?xxxx
Canonical link URL: domain.com/page.html
Returns an error. Any idea why? Am I doing it wrong? Thanks,
G1 -
Is link equity passed through redirect chains?
Hi there, When redirects are passed through multiple stages e.g. https://www.google.com 301 to http://www.bing.com 301 to http://www.yahoo.com Does http://www.yahoo.com still retain all link equity from the original referring domain, and is there a limit to the redirect chain before Google starts to not pass through link equity? Cheers
Technical SEO | | Corbec8881 -
Personalized Content Vs. Cloaking
Hi Moz Community, I have a question about personalization of content, can we serve personalized content without being penalized for serving different content to robots vs. users? If content starts in the same initial state for all users, including crawlers, is it safe to assume there should be no impact on SEO because personalization will not happen for anyone until there is some interaction? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
How can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
Technical SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
Date in permalinks. Bad?
Hello! I have a recipe website with over 1000 posts. Currently I have the month and year in the permalink that everyone is hinting off to me is bad. On the same front people tell me if I change the permalinks to just the post name it's going to significantly slow down my site. I'm torn on this one about changing. From Google's standpoint is it better to change to the post name and if so should I be fearing I'm going to run into trouble with the change? Any suggestions you have would be appreciated. Thanks!!!
Technical SEO | | Rich-DC1 -
Referencing links in Articles and Blogs
Hi I am wondering if the <sup>tag in html is picked up by google as a reference point?</sup> I.e when you put a superscript in word it puts a small number next to your sentence. Then you have a list of reference at the end of the blog/article does google recognise this?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
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 -
Link Volume - calculate what you need?
Hi everyone, an interesting question here. How do you determien what link volume you should try and get into your website? What analysis do you do to determine the number of links you feel is right to go into a back-link profiel every month? obviously there is no magic number but its an interesting question to know what others do. Obviously you don't want to build too many or too little. If you have been penalised for bad links in the past and are now back on track - how do you calculate the volume? Do you take links dropping out into consideration?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0