No follow link

[op01]

Hi There,

We pay for our site (www.residentialland.com) to appear on a popular property site:

http://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/

When I use Open Site Explorer, it is our top link, but it has 'no follow' above it.

So I had a look at the source code on the homesandproperty website and I cant see any nofollow code that would effect our link. I also used this tool which confirmed it isnt classed as a no follow link: http://www.seorankings.com/tools/nofollow-link-checker

Can anyone else tell me if our paid for link on homesandproperty is a no follow, or if it is 'search engine friendly' so to speak?

We pay for links across their site, so we want to get the full benefit.

Any help would be appreciated,

Thanks,

Rob

[blacey]

As far as I can see the homepage link is followed, there is no rel="" attribute on the link and the only JavaScript is the onclick="" to open it in a new window.

I've looked through their javascript files in the header and footer and I cannot see any JavaScript that is adding no-follow to the link so I think its safe to say that the link in in-fact followed.

In terms of it being a "search engine friendly" link, I would say that it is, however using JavaScript to load the link in a new window seems a bit overkill. They could have used a rel="external follow" and added Javascript to add 'taget="_blank" to all links with a rel attribute of external.

[op01]

Thanks for that Ben, any idea why the link is seen as a no follow by Open Site Explorer then? Seems strange...

[blacey]

That is a mystery and something I personally cannot advise on. It may be that the tool is showing incorrect data?

I know for a fact that the SEO Moz dashboard (where it shows errors, warnings etc) can be incorrect in what it shows. I've had tools that have shown 404 links (that I verified and they were broken) but SEO Moz failed to report them.

Whether this is because the error was fixed before the weekly crawl was done, I don't know but I never rely solely on one tool alone and this has helped find and fix a number of errors in the past.

[blacey]

You might want to have an Excel (or shared Google Doc) documenting incoming/inbound links, whether they are followed or no-followed (using manual verification) then showing the domain authority of the linking root domain and the anchor text used on that link.

I use a similar technique when performing manual link building. In Excel I can sort / filter the table to show how many backlinks I have used for specific anchor text and that allows me to see if I'm using a particular phrase too much or too little.

I know this isn't specifically answering your question but I hope this helps in making your SEO efforts a bit easier

[anthonydnelson]

Hi Rob-

This doesn't answer your question, but it goes along with the topic. Google recommends that all paid links are nofollowed. If the link wasn't nofollowed, you would be going against their best practices and perhaps put your site at risk of penalty. (unlikely to happen unless you have multiple bad/paid links)

Perhaps it is best to leave it as a nofollow, and just use the link on the popular site for branding and referral traffic.

[Nick_Sayers]

At the time it was indexed it may have been a nofollow link? It is hard to say since our index is so massive. If it shows up as a nofollow link in the next index you may want to reach out to them to verify though.