Do spam text links count for negative seo?

[watilo]

I run a high-PR (or whatever we're calling it now) website builder. When you sign up, your URL is a subdomain of the main site (like yourname.foo.com). My site is lucky enough to be on the spammers radar, so they frequently create sites to get more back links.

A while back, I caught onto this and neutralized their links (even though they had nofollow tags) by only displaying them as plain text instead of anchor tags. Spammers continue to sign up and create sites, even though their links are now text.

My question: Are these text links still affecting my SEO negatively? Or do they know something I don't?

[Igor.Go]

Crawlers see every subdomain as a separate website, so spam.foo.com won't affect foo.com

[Andy.Drinkwater]

My question: Are these text links still affecting my SEO negatively?

It is highly unlikely that the text is going to impact anything - if you think about it, it wouldn't make sense for them to apply a penalty to a main site if something on a sub-domain was created by someone else and that is outside of your control. It's unlikely that the live links would impact your main site either, but it's good that you devalue these when you see them.

-Andy

[varun1800]

Hi Watilo,

As per Google guidelines, no-follow tags do not pass any link juice or link value. So any link with the no-follow tag will not have any impact on your root domain as well as subdomains.

[GastonRiera]

Hi,

No, those links won't affect the root domain. Just marking them as nofollow is enough, leaving them as plain text is even extremist. There will be no harm.

Cheers.
GR.