Unpaid Followed Links & Canonical Links from Syndicated Content

[BlairKuhnen]

I have a user of our syndicated content linking to our detailed source content.  The content is being used across a set of related sites and driving good quality traffic.  The issue is how they link and what it looks like.

We have tens of thousands of new links showing up from more than a dozen domains, hundreds of sub-domains, but all coming from the same IP.  The growth rate is exponential.  The implementation was supposed to have canonical tags so Google could properly interpret the owner and not have duplicate syndicated content potentially outranking the source.

The canonical are links are missing and the links to us are followed.  While the links are not paid for, it looks bad to me.  I have asked the vendor to no-follow the links and implement the agreed upon canonical tag.  We have no warnings from Google, but I want to head that off and do the right thing.

Is this the right approach?  What would do and what would you you do while waiting on the site owner to make the fixes to reduce the possibility of penguin/google concerns?

Blair

[MarieHaynes]

In my opinion, it's all about intent.  If you had content syndicated so that you could gain links, then I would be worried and would want to nofollow.  But, if it is something that happened outside of your control, I wouldn't be concerned, especially if these are links that are driving you traffic.

Google is usually pretty good at figuring out whether something is a tactic meant to manipulate the search results or not.

[JaneCopland]

For such a massive duplication and linking from the same IP, I would definitely follow the canonical / nofollow route - do you know how long it will take the user to implement these? In the meantime, there isn't terribly much you can do - you definitely do not want to do anything like disavowing the links (you should only do that if you receive unnatural link warnings or have been hit by a penalty or negative SEO attack). The quicker the tagging can be done, the better in this case. Although Google should understand and disregard, I did have a new client penalised back in 2010 because they were sharing a financial widget across a range of Australian newspaper websites that were all owned by the same company and thus all on the same IP. We got the penalty removed with reconsideration requests but were about to implement a network-wide nofollow on these little widgets before we submitted the request.