Question Regarding Inbound Links

[propertyhunter]

Hi,

I have someone who asked me for some advice on his website and I want to make sure I don't give him the wrong advice.

Basically he runs a mortgage company and is linked to from a popular estate agent. Now he has over 11,000 links coming from this agent because his link appears on each listing. Someone said that the link should be made nofollow which i understand, but it has been like this for over a year and he is ranking highly for a search term that he cannot afford to lose. Should he just leave it as is or should he change it from dofollow to nofollow.

Looking at open site explorer it says he only has 25 inbound links but lists the thousands, but If i remember rightly it only counts links from the same domain once.

Hopefully someone can help me with this as I want to make sure what I tell his is correct.

Thanks

Paul

[TomRayner]

Personally, I would nofollow.

It's just being proactive - there's a pretty good chance with that amount of links (all the same anchor text as well, I presume? Could be a problem even if branded) that he may get flagged by Google for a penguin penalty.  If it was this and only this that trigged the penalty, then it might be a quick and easy fix - but you cannot be sure.

What you can be sure of is that if you make these nofollow, you're much more unlikely to get pinged by the Penguin.  So, in a choice of nofollowing now and maybe taking a slight rankings hit, or riding it out and maybe getting pinged in the future and getting a big rankings hit for an indeterminable amount of time, I'd go with the option that I could control.

There could be a compromise - if he can get the links on each listing removed, but can be listed a single time on the homepage as a partner, or on a partners page, if done in a natural way then this could still pass on the majority (if not all) of the link strength, while being a lot more safer in Google's eyes.

[propertyhunter]

Thanks so much for the advice, that is really helpful and makes a lot of sense.

Thanks

[TomRayner]

You're very welcome Paul!  It's a very important question and had we not seen Penguin, my answer may have been different.  It just shows how much that update changed the SEO landscape.