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depends how many of these you're planning to have. In any case, the loss (which may occur) should be very fractional and not super damaging. If you lose 0.05% traffic but gain +2% conversion rate, then really you're winning overall. Sometimes good SEO involves making a decision that slightly hurts the 'purist' SEO, in order to focus on revenue and 'real business' KPIs (which matter more, which bosses care about more)

As long as you can reason the trade-off which you made and it falls in your favour (overall), then you have done a good job

Your bigger problem is that these new links may push other links further out of the user's reach and / or further down the code / page. If this happens, other links may not supply quite the same SEO authority which they did before

I certainly think your proposal is worth testing. Measure both the CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) and SEO impacts. If overall you take in more $, then the fact that SEO has a slightly bruised cheek is really just a matter of vanity. Think with your business head

IMO it's the only approach that works, but you are right risk is involved and it doesn't always work. That's marketing, though

The way to not sound annoying is to approach someone with an original, insightful and beneficial (for the editor and their audience) pitch. If you approach them with questions, you've already lost - as someone else IS in their inbox pitching much more complete ideas which they don't have to think about so much

You have to start building your network. Some will include your citiational links, others won't - or they won't do it all of the time (or they will nullify the links some clever way). In the end, if you represent a client AND a digital agency, editors and webmasters know what you are after. If they refuse to give it (or give a fair amount often enough) then don't work with them any more

The main thing to keep in mind is that, you want to make it clear you are interested in editorial opportunities and not opportunities which are advertorial in nature. You aren't trying to pay for an ad, you're trying to promote a story or a winning piece of content. You don't want to be in a sponsored slot on their site, you don't want to be in an ad-bar, you don't want no-followed links and you don't want to directly pay for the link (as that would make your content an ad)

There may be other way you can interact with the editor like helping them with a fee to review your content. In the main though, the content should sell itself without money needing to change hands. Google only want to count editorial links towards PageRank, not advertorial or sponsored links - so in the end if you have to win, the 10x content / editorial angle is the only one you got

The question is if you can handle it or not

Might be business related and not SEO related, did you consider that? If new products dropping can impact SEO - what about removed products?

If removed products are taken down completely from the site (their pages disappear) and / or they are then redirected, obviously those rankings drop significantly or disappear

Certain products are very popular, will bring more traffic to your site. Think about how SEO can inform product stocking choices, help decide what gets added or removed. If stuff is just being deactivated willy-nilly, for products which are highly popular - obviously loss will occur. Doesn't mean things are terribly optimised (though you could probably do some work there, like creating "this product is currently unavailable" pages - which still show product info, but make it clear it's out of stock and maybe give users the option of letting you know that they want it back)

It may just mean, bad decisions were made at the business level - because you were only using SEO as an output, not as an input

I get you at position #6 on Google. You are there but admittedly it's not great:

• https://d.pr/i/XS14Cn.png (screenshot)

The site is ranking, just very badly which makes me think it's NOT technical SEO related

Let's look at that first though:

• https://d.pr/i/5a7y8D.png (screenshot)

By the way you can grab that Chrome extension here, it's quite handy.  DeepCrawl is actually a very powerful SEO crawling suite (they make their own crawler, and also this handy Chrome extension); many find it superior to Screaming Frog - the main reason it's not that talked about is the pricing which is pretty steep (IMO)

To confirm, there's nothing majorly wrong with your robots.txt file either:

• https://d.pr/i/7ZuIlf.png (screenshot)

On simple and relatively trustworthy one-page scanners, the site doesn't seem to have any massive technical SEO issues (at least at the homepage level): https://seositecheckup.com/seo-audit/blowfishseo.com

So let's look at links I guess?

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/v2/subdomains/recent?target=blowfishseo.com

• https://d.pr/i/eH0GKc.png (screenshot)

That looks like it could be doing some damage. Massive spike in linking URLs May 2018, followed by a massive spike in referring domains July 2019. Doesn't look natural AT ALL

So what about anchor texts?

• https://d.pr/i/GagQUI.png (screenshot)
• https://d.pr/f/jPWNPr.csv (data)

In green you have partially branded or branded anchor texts, Google usually has no problem with these. In blue you have part keyword part geo terms, Google can have a problem with these if they begin to feel your backlink profile looks unnatural. In red you have exact-match anchor keywords, Google doesn't really like people link-building in this way any-more (most SEO firms would say EMA links are a no-no)

That spike in referring domains which we saw earlier really interests me. It seems to be concentrated... mostly between... 28th June 2019 and ... 6th August 2019

Let's take a look at new links specifically from within that time period (remember it's actually the time when Ahrefs discovered them, they may have gone live slightly earlier - but Ahrefs are pretty supreme for any kind of proper backlink research)

https://d.pr/i/Wi7p8S.png (screenshot)

https://d.pr/f/RhbuDv.csv (data)

... highlighted some stuff there that looks odd. Links from unrelated markets (languages) or locked regions (CN / Chinese firewall) and links from weird looking subdomain sites that look spam-made and mass produced

Yup, I'd say it's the backlink profile being too oldschool and full of crap, with recent spikes and anchor-text balancing problems. You unfortunately 'just' tipped the scales in a bad way and now you're suffering

Four possibilities:

1) You have been doing some bad backlink work, or had previously done so and never took the time to do a big disavow / link removals project when standards changed. Legacy is hitting you now, because of recent spiking link movements, which tipped you over the scales (has happened to many people, doesn't mean you're a terrible SEO or anything of the sort - was actually quite impressed with your on-site architecture and stuff)

2) One of your subordinates has gotten slack and done some bad backlink work (you'd need to find out who is playing you for a mug ASAP and sack them). If it's someone extremely junior show leniency I guess. But if you looked at the data I had supplied and found a bad network of shallow content links from no-name sites, and then found a paper-trail saying you had actively paid for those... I'd personally be pretty annoyed

3) Some scraper site has started scraping your posts onto their sh*tty network of sites, in the hopes of making their sites less terrible, but actually now it's hurting you as well

4) Deliberate negative-SEO intervention (we have seen a few of these lately on here, it seems to be a very 2019 thing IMO)

... hope that helps!

Popularity and off-site factors, e.g: backlinks which have a high degree of association with the key term. What other people think about you online (and how they reference you) often matters more than how you shout about yourself (through your own content, which is biased)

Rogerbot will take time to crawl links on the web. Lots of those big sites, where the links are very valuable, have thousands or hundreds of thousands of pages. One thing that I do think would be nice, if Moz Pro users could have some crawl allowance devoted to them - and could ask rogerbot to ping URLs (and update Moz's index). It would obviously have to be limited so as not to skew Moz's regular crawling operations, but it could be really helpful for some users

This is an extremely good, detailed answer

It's great that you fixed your crawl issues, but SEO is about much more than crawl issues and content

I highly advise that you watch this Moz whiteboard Friday video:

• https://moz.com/blog/does-seo-boil-down-to-site-crawlability-and-content-quality-whiteboard-friday

It was posted in 2014, but it's such a good video that I send it to potential clients all the time (even to this day). Because SEO performance is constructed of so many elements (some of which are NOT part of your own coding and website) - you can't rely on just one thing to move keyword positions

You have to look at SEO 'in the round' if you want to be successful

PageSpeed insights is cool but I find GTMetrix often gives more useful info. If you sign up for a free account you get access to a cool waterfall tab

Here's the complete waterfall for your homepage:

• https://d.pr/i/a6OUZb.png (screenshot)

In blue I highlighted some images which are over 50KB which could be compressed a little more. In red I highlighted all the calls which your site / page makes to YouTube.com. As Greg Painter specifically said, all of these calls to YT do seem to be slowing things down and causing you problems! Any chance you can embed those resources (which your page is calling for) natively on your site? It would be faster than keep calling out to YT which has to satisfy enormous amounts of traffic as it is

If a page is Meta no-indexed it is extremely, extremely unlikely that Google would list the page within their search results. If a page takes 11 seconds to load,  it is extremely, extremely unlikely that Google would list the page within their search results

I'd approach it like this:

1. Fix high priority tech issues first, such as the page being no-indexed
2. Fix the page-loading speed issues
3. Fix the low priority, more subjective tech issues like a URL being too long, page title length issues etc

In reality until 1 and 2 are fixed there's basically very little chance of the URL ranking or being served. Sometimes you just have to make a decision and get on with it, this is how I'd approach it

This is usually speaking **not the right mind set **to succeed.

When Google says (through decreasing ranking positions) that you haven't put in enough effort, usually deleting a poor attempt garners no favour in the ranking results. Think about it. Google are saying "you don't have enough quality content" and your answer is to delete content, thus having less than before. Does that seem like a genuine attempt to comply with the increasing stringency of Google's guidelines?

Deleting stuff is the easy way out. Think about it as if you wrote an essay in College and Google were the examiner. They Give you a D- for your essay and mark certain areas of your work as needing improvement. If you deleted those paragraphs, did nothing else and re-submitted the essay would you honestly expect a better grade?

Google want to see effort, unique content, value-add for end users. _Real _hard graft.

If you have high volumes of pages which are identical other than one tiny tab of information or a variable price, then maybe streamlining your architecture by removing pages is the answer. If most of the pages are unique in function (e.g: factually different products, not just parameter-based URL variants etc) then it's more a comment on the lack of invested effort and you must tackle your mindset if you want to rank.

N.B: By effort I don't mean your personal effort. I could also be alluding to the fact that budget was too low when producing content. I'm describing the site - not you personally!

Google would be intelligent enough to think around that scenario, unless the brand term was not from a brand-aligned query-space

For example, if you're "Coca Cola", well you can tell from Google's results it's a brand query-space. Google knows that 'coca cola' is a brand and will act accordingly

If however, you're trying to cheat the system by 'warping' a well known keyword into your own brand-term (say your company is called "car insurance") - then Google may be far less forgiving

First of all you are right to seek a few high quality links per month, over hundreds of article-wheel submissions or 'ten-a-penny' directory site links. But did you know, there are other things which impact the importance of a link in Google's eyes? Some of those factors are technical, some are network based and some are subjective.

1.) Link Relevance: I don't simply mean whether the page supplying the link and the page receiving the link are thematically related. Linguistic gymnastics, isn't what Google are looking for! Of course a link should be 'thematically' relevant, but relevance doesn't end there. You also have to question - "why would it be relevant for an end-user of the link supplying site, to click on that hyperlink and come to my site? Will they care about the link, will it be useful to them?". If you have done something like, slap a 'car-related' link on a car manufacturers site to your (hypothetical) car insurance company, chances are - most of the people interested in cars produced by that manufacturer already have insurance **and **they're not currently on the market. As such, although the link would be 'thematically' relevant, it would be use-case irrelevant. If you're not looking to this deeper level of hyperlink relevance, your links probably won't do much

2.) Links that Carry Real Traffic: If no one uses your link it's a good sign to Google that you have really fudged up #1 on this list. I am pretty sure that Google buy bulk, anonymised traffic data from leading ISPs (Internet Service Providers) at least in the UK / USA. They can use their crawling technology and vast index of the web, alongside data sold by ISPs to get a pretty good idea (or 'overlay') of which links carry actual, factual traffic (and which don't). If your link is deemed to be useless, it likely won't carry much weight at all - even if the site supplying the link is decent

3.) The Editorial / Advertorial Split: Only 'editorial' links from within un-biased, editorial content should carry SEO-weighting. Banner ads, text links from within sponsored (paid-for) posts (also known as advertorials) don't count (at all) if Google becomes aware of the nature of the hyperlink. As such, you need to be very careful how you deploy as you can spend hundreds and hundreds of pounds (or dollars), seeing no return in SEO or referral traffic terms whatsoever. Remember: keep your work editorial in nature. Maybe pay an editor to review a piece of content you wish to place, but pay for their time - not for a certain link placement. This can be hard to get your head around, but research the nature of editorial and advertorial links / content. Pursue editorial stuff (at least for SEO). No ifs, no buts - no trying to get clever, just do the business

4.) Technical Link Features: One way in which an advertorial link could be sign-posted is by adding "no-follow" tags to the hyperlink in the coding. It's a badly named tag, it does not stop Google (or discourage Google) from following a hyperlink to reach its destination. It does not stop users from clicking on and following a hyperlink. What it actually does is stop SEO authority from flowing through the link! To stop editors abusing this to insulate their own SEO authority in an old (and even then, unconvincing) tactic known as PageRank Sculpting, the authority is still lost from the site which links 'out'. It is just vented into cyberspace, never connecting with or landing on the site which is supposed to be receiving the link. The only point of using a no-follow tag, is to signal to Google that a link was probably paid for and thus letting them know not to transfer any SEO authority across. In return, the link-supplier will not be penalised for selling their own site's SEO authority to manipulate Google's search engine results!

5.) Shadier Technical Link Features: As well as using the no-follow tag, which is much easier to spot (and which all SEOs now know to look for!) - some link-sellers have gotten smarter. They will do stuff like, allow your link to be followed but, also put a Meta no-index tag on the post supplying the link (so Google never sees it at all). Some link suppliers also use robots.txt very creatively for the same reason, to make you think you got a great link when really Google will never see it (which protects them and their own domain authority). **WATCH **your back!

6.) Link / Content Temporal Alignment: Just so you know, if you're paying to alter pre-existing content and embed links in it, Google can spot that a mile off any you likely won't see anything for it. Google want to see you 'really do something', not just tweak old stuff and add no value to the web

The final thing I'll note here is that "Domain Authority" is a metric created by Moz which is meant to mimic the importance of Google's old PageRank metric / algorithm (which is still at work, yet has become invisible to the public!)

Google do not check what a site's Domain Authority is on Moz and then act in accordance with that. So remember that DA (along with PA / Page Authority) is an indicator only, not something which Google looks at directly or acts upon... That honour still sits with PageRank. Yes, the API calls and toolbars which told you what the (simplified) PageRank of a given URL were, are gone. No - PageRank itself, as a ranking facet - is not gone (in fact it's very much alive and at work!)

I'll look at one of your links in detail and do some analysis on it, and then I'll tell you what I would have paid for it including content creation!

Let's look at this one:

http://www.theblogfrog.com/5-options-for-renting-a-startup-office-space/ | office space for rent in Manhattan

Domain Level Moz Metrics:

Domain Authority: 58

Linking Domains (more important than total backlinks): 5,600+

Total Inbound Links: 928,700

Calculated Domain / Links Average: On 'average' each site in their backlink profile would be linking 160+ times, that's a negative signal as backlink profiles should be diverse (not hundreds and hundreds of links from the same site(s)

Ranking Keywords: 464 - with hundreds of thousands of links you'd expect way more. There's a suspicious disparity here

Domain Level Ahrefs Metrics:

Homepage URL Rating: 15 (low)

Domain Rating: 55 (similar to Moz's DA score)

Linking Domains: 5,100+

Total Inbound Links: 2,180,000+ (wow! Way too many when compared to a measly 5k linking domains - Ahrefs has a more expansive back-link index than Moz for some areas of the web... so this figure is more likely to be more accurate in this scenario)

Ranking Keywords: 2,500+ (makes more sense)

Traffic Insights from Ahrefs SEO Traffic Chart: I really wish you could see this! You can if you follow thi**s link to an image I've uploaded for you: **https://d.pr/i/CEVUgV.png - not doing too badly right? Between 1,500 and 2,000 hits from SEO per day. But is it sustainable!? This site appeared out of nowhere in January. I've already highlighted some suspicious backlink disparities, so who knows if their authority will remain high. With such a difference between their total backlinks and linking domain stats, I suspect that if I looked deeper I'd find some shady stuff in there. Stuff that would show that in 6 months, these guys could be discarding this domain. You need your links to last

Domain Level Majestic SEO Metrics:

Trust Flow: 17 (pretty low)

Citation Flow: 44

Linking Domains: 2,163 linking domains from Majestic's 'fresh' index. That's nearly half of the total found by the other two, just in the fresh segment. Possibly another signal of rampant, unsustainable growth...

SEMRush Domain Level Traffic Analysis:

Look at this image: https://d.pr/i/3P5D4S.png - it's not quite as forgiving as the SEO traffic estimates from Ahrefs, but it is narrowed to US traffic only and probably by this point, Ahrefs have a very nicely sized keyword index. Ahrefs is a bit more of a premium product, I expect their index-size reflects that. Again it shows that actually, this site is doing alright now. However, it was previously seeing much more SEO traffic (the SEMRush chart stretches back further in time). It worries me that something seemed to have previously nuked the domain and it's nowhere close to the performance levels it once had...

On-Page Link Factors

Your link shares the content with at least three other links. A couple are internal, one seems to be citing a study. Your link value will be divided a bit, but in actual fact this makes the link 'safer' and less obvious

Your link is only thematically relevant and doesn't seem that relevant for an end user to click on. Yeah the anchor text matches your site I guess, but why would I - a random Blog-Frog reader, care about it or want to click on it? There's no context, no explanation. I just wouldn't go for it

This probably means the link is not carrying any / much referral traffic (look in your GA to find out)

Your link uses EMA (Exact-Match Anchor Text, Google it). This is old-school SEO. Yes, EMA is the most powerful anchor text for altering your search rankings. Do you think Google don't know that, though? It just looks very obvious to me. Maybe use more natural anchor text. I'm not saying never include keywords, just don't limit the anchor text to 'exactly' the key-phrase you are trying to optimise for. It'll stick out like a sore thumb to Google Penguin

The link is not no-followed, that's probably good. The page which the link sits on is not Meta no-indexed (also good). Robots.txt is not being used in a shady way. Great!

I'm not ruling it out as I only have a very, very brief check but - it doesn't look as if it's been marked as sponsored. That's good! Editorial>advertorial (always remember)

Have I ever heard of this site? - no, and with these metrics I'd have expected to. That is slightly worrying

FINAL VERDICT

There are lots of small signals that this link isn't everything is says it is. There's nothing concrete though and many metrics are pretty strong. Technical features support the link, other than the use of EMA (exact-match anchor text) which may come back to bite you in the future.

I'd give this link a C+ / B. It's alright, I'd pay maybe $80 for it. It's certainly not a $250 - $1,000+ heavyweight contender

Analyse my process, apply it to all your other links. See how you feel about your own operations!

A more common issue than you might think and strongly likely to be a culprit

It may do or it may not. It may or may not impact upon duplicate content, it always impacts upon crawl allowance

I'm going to use trailing slash URLs (a more common issue and consolidation feature) in my example, but it's equally applicable for stripping .HTML or non-resource (PDF, JPG, JS etc) file extensions

Quite a lot of sites, even if they refuse to clean this up, will at least 'canonical' one URL to the other. That let's Google know that one version of the page is canonical and should receive relevant SEO traffic - it avoids content duplication related penalties or algorithmic devaluations. There are two things it doesn't help Google out with

• It doesn't tell Google not to crawl both URLs (you might say the canonical tag does that, but keep in mind Google has to have already loaded both URLs to read both canonical tags so... no)
• It doesn't consolidate SEO authority to the same degree that 301 redirects do. Say one page has some nice backlinks and the other one does too, that 'ranking benefit' won't all be consolidated onto one page. The canonical tag will make sure only one page ranks, but it won;t gain the 'optimal' benefit of the backlinks for both web-pages (301s do a better job of that, generally)

So as you can see, even if you avoid content duplication issues, there are other problems that could potentially arise. This being the case, it's best to consolidate your URL architecture at and and all levels

My preference is this logic in the htaccess (via 301s):

• Always force a trailing slash for pages (as they may have sub-pages, and can also be directories)
• EXCEPT if the active URL is a file (e.g: somesite.com/some-folder/some-image.jpg) - in which case, do not force a trailing slash (files are never folders / directories)
• But if the file extension is page-based rather than resource based (e.g: .html) then strip the extension and finish with a trailing slash

SEO is about avoiding risk. If there is conflicting information on a subject, pick the tried and tested (safe) method

Note that if you are on an MS / IIS server (rather than Linux / Apache) you may have to modify web.config instead of '.htaccess'

You would need to use 301 redirects for this:

https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205815308-Creating-URL-redirects

Note that there are many factors which can stop a 301 redirect from properly transferring SEO authority from one page to another (regardless of whether it's on a new domain or not)

This one: https://moz.com/community/q/changed-url-and-now-not-listing#reply_394821 - is quite important!

Wow that's quite a query. If I am understanding you right, you have this problem:

1. You sell bags of stones and stuff
2. They come in multiple sizes
3. The user goes to the product page, selects the size - and is then presented with a price
4. But because the price depends upon the user's interaction, because there are multiple product variants, Google doesn't understand your product pages very well - or the prices of your products
5. This is particularly true for Google shopping

I can't say I have experienced this exact issue as Google shopping is one thing that, I haven't had much to do with it - since the good old days (when it was free, and all you needed was an XML feed!)

But your basic problem is how do you mark up product 'variants' with Schema, right?

I have tried to find some resources for you on the subject:

• https://www.schemaapp.com/tips/schema-org-variable-products-productmodels-offers/ - this seems really in-depth and helpful. Suggest giving it a read
• https://schema.org/ProductModel - Product models seem like a concept you'd need to know about
• https://schema.org/isVariantOf - this seems to be a symmetrical schema, going from variant to master (also something you'd need to know about)

From a top-line check, it seems that you need to establish product models and variants. The model seems to be the master 'thing' that has children, whilst the variant seems to be one of the children (makes sense I guess)

I'd try to get as close to those materials as possible, then debug with Google's official structured data testing tool (until everything is perfectly digested...)

Google doesn't seem to have a problem with this:

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux/responsive/images

"TL;DR

• Use relative sizes for images to prevent them from accidentally overflowing the container.
• Use the picture element when you want to specify different images depending on device characteristics (a.k.a. art direction).
• Use srcset and the x descriptor in the img element to give hints to the browser about the best image to use when choosing from different densities.
• If your page only has one or two images and these are not used elsewhere on your site, consider using inline images to reduce file requests.

-

Enhance imgs with srcset for high DPI devices

The srcset attribute enhances the behavior of the imgelement, making it easy to provide multiple image files for different device characteristics. Similar to the image-set CSS function native to CSS, srcset allows the browser to choose the best image depending on the characteristics of the device, for example using a 2x image on a 2x display, and potentially in the future, a 1x image on a 2x device when on a limited bandwidth network."

This part seemed most important to me:

"On browsers that don't support srcset, the browser simply uses the default image file specified by the src_ attribute. This is why it is important to always include a 1x image that can be displayed on any device, regardless of capabilities._ "

... so basically you define your srcset as per Google's documentation, but you must be sure to include a default fallback image that could work on all browsers and devices - that's what gets used if the browser is unable to interpret your srcset (or if your srcset doesn't include anything for the specified browser)

This all comes down to the fact that, technically 302 has always been 'found', but there was no status code for a temporary redirect so Google advised people to use 302 (as no one really ever used it for its intended purpose)

Now you have 307. To this day, you can still use 302 or 307 (we're still in the transition period, where both still function identically)

A 301 will gradually transfer SEO authority from one page to another, over a few weeks / months - so that the old URL stops ranking and the new URL 'has a chance' of ranking in its place. If the new URL has highly dissimilar content (in machine-terms) then the 301 fails to transfer a portion of the authority and some is 'deleted' (vented into cyberspace)

A 302 retains the ranking benefit on the old page and nothing is transferred to the new page (period). Over time (a month or six) the 302 will decay. Slowly the authority (which has been kept on the old URL) will begin to 'die off' and you end up (in an extreme situation) with no authority left anywhere from that particular URL (it's just gone). 307s function the same way

As such, using a 302 or 307 is the correct measure, but remember - Google will be watching to check that the redirect really is temporary. If your whole company forgets about restoring the content to the original URL (for a significant period of time) then don't expect that there will be anything left when you come back

In an ideal world, you'd turn it all around inside of one month if you wanted some good juice left when you lifted the 302 / 307

Google can crawl JavaScript and its contents, but most of the time they are unlikely to do so. In order to do this, Google has to do more than just a basic source code scrape. Like everyone else seeking to scrape data from inside of generated elements, Google has to actually check the modified source-code, after all of the scripts have run (the render) rather than the base (non-modified) source code before any scripts fire

Google's mission is to index the web. There's no doubt that, non-rendered crawls (which do not contain the generated HTML output of scripts) can be done in a fraction of the time it takes to get a rendered snapshot of the page-code. On average I have found rendered crawling to take 7x to 10x longer than basic source scraping

What we have found is that Google are indeed, capable of crawling generated text and links and stuff... but they won't do this all the time, or for everyone. Those resources are more precious to Google and they crawl more sparingly in that manner

If you deployed the link in the manner which you have described, my anticipation is that Google would not notice or evaluate the link for a month or two (if you're not super popular). Eventually, they would determine the presence of the link - at which point it would be factored and / or evaluated

I suppose you could embed the script as a link to a '.js' module, and then use Robots.txt to ban Google from crawling that particular JavaScript file. If they chose to obey that directive, the link would pretty much remain hidden from them. But remember, it's only a directive!

If you wanted to be super harsh you could block Googlebot (user agent) from that JS file and do something like, 301 them to the homepage when they tried to access it (instead of allowing them to open and read the JS file). That would be pretty hardcore but would stand a higher chance of actually working

Think about this kind of stuff though. It would be pretty irregular to go to such extremes and I'm not certain what the consequences of such action(s) would be