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August 29, 2015 14:10
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Karrimor asks me to add a nofollow attribute to a link to their website I've included in a blog post I did. Would love to have your comment on that request, why would they ask this?
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From: XXX <XXX@sportsdirect.com> | |
To: YYY | |
Subject: Karrimor Links | |
Hello Fabien, | |
My name is XXX and I am responsible for the website www.karrimor.co.uk. | |
I am contacting you as the following link point towards the Karrimor website: | |
http://blog.penso.info/2013/06/16/packing-for-a-6-months-trip/ | |
I would first link to thank you for writing about Karrimor and we very much appreciate | |
your loyalty to our company however, due to Googles strict guidelines may I please ask | |
for you to make this link a nofollow? | |
To manually change the link, you need to add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> | |
tag in your hyperlinks. | |
Here is an example: | |
<a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/”rel=”nofollow”>Your Website</a> | |
The nofollow link will in no way affect your website, it simply tells Google not to | |
pass PageRank. | |
If you are unable to do this, may I regretfully ask for the link to be removed to | |
ensure that our website is abiding by the rules set by Google. | |
If you could please reply once you have rectified the link, that would be very | |
much respected. | |
Thank you for both your time and understanding, |
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en says there is 3 reasons to add a nofollow:
- Untrusted content
- Paid links
- Crawl prioritization
It doesn't go in any of them so I'm good I guess, but I'm trying to understand. I think @jlecour is right about the black hat SEO.
https://twitter.com/_julietelliott/status/535858744962596865 says I'm not the only one.
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That kind of message tends to indicate that they are kind of desperate. They might have done some black-hat SEO and may indeed have been slapped by Google. In that situation what they are doing (contacting back-links owners to change/remove the links) is very common.
If they didn't buy the link you've put on your website, there is no reason for you to change it.
But, if you like the brand, you could help them by adding a
rel="nofollow"
to your link, and it won't hurt you. He's right about that.I've noticed that one the link on
their website
is dead and redirects to the home page, so you could kill it.You can also change the first link to "My main bag is a Karimor" and have the link on the whole phrase, to reduce the perceived anchor link optimisation.