Should a business requestion nofollow links from businesses it has commercial relationships with?

[McTaggart]

I am working for a motor homes company that works with a network of dealers.

Having just analysed the site I notice that dealers are sending links to the site - lots of them. They are all follow links and are freely given. ADDED: There are upwards of a million new affiliate backlinks and then a load of pretty normal freely given backlinks with dealers who have commission arrangements, etc., with the company on motorhome sales.

Now this doesn't feel right to me because even if it isn't purposefully manipulative, it may appear so because of clear commercial relationships between my client company and the dealer businesses.

So I will recommend nofollow althought the site will lose a huge number of backlinks as a result. What are your thoughts on this?

[matt.nails]

Luke,

I feel like you are jumping the gun, here. Is your site ranking poorly that might suggest a penalty?

You said there are a huge amount of links. How many? What is the context/ location of the links? Do the linking sites have high spam scores?

I wouldn't rush but consider those questions before proceeding.

Matt

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Luke,

Google is smarter than ever when it comes to links, so if something is freely given and isn't advertising, I wouldn't necessarily be no-following all of these.

Have a read through Google's guidelines on what they suggest for no-following here.

How is the site actually performing? Are they ranking badly in Google? Is visibility low? Are there any manual penalties? Have the site recently undergone any big changes?

Lots of other questions to look at before rushing at links.

-Andy

[McTaggart]

The site is performing fine and many of the backlinks are freely given - just a few - however they have started some major affiliate marketing work and I see the backlinks coming in are nofollow and there are lots of them.

To give you an example - the latest company linking has sent through over 1,100,000 follow links to a few pages on the website (mainly a calculator for financing the motorhome).

These are all follow links and I'm thinking 302 or nofollow would be far safer, yet they're all live right now. I believe the client did ask for nofollow tags but they weren't implemented correctly.

One problem is the site is so reliant on these follow backlinks from affiliates for its rankings - if I just march in there and implement nofollows it will hit organic rankings.

[McTaggart]

Hi Matt - thanks for feedback - my main concern is upwards of a million affiliate backlinks that have come in recently - they are live, unfortunately.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

As a matter of course, I would tend to nofollow affiliate links, but I can't say I have ever seen a site penalised for having inbound affiliate links.

Unless there was a manual penalty or some other reason, I still wouldn't rush to nofollow them if all is working well.

-Andy

[McTaggart]

Thanks for your feedback Andy - In this instance the site has a history of penalties, so perhaps more vulnerable. It's hard to know for sure, of course.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

It is indeed. One the one hand, err on the side of caution - on the other, links are required, but with that many affiliate links, I would have though Google was ignoring them.

-Andy