3 Major News Websites Now Nofollow External Links
It seems as though Google can now rest easy when it comes to the link schemes and manipulation happening in the online industry. Major News and Business websites such as Forbes and Inc have started to incorporate the nofollow attribute to their article’s external links. This could make the SEO industry take a turn for the better by slowly getting rid of link schemes, and making the competition for the first page ranking a fair fight.
As most of us know, some of the unethical SEOs offer their services to webmasters by buying and selling links – which is a direct violation of Google’s guidelines – with the promise of having their pages linked to other influential, high DA websites as long as they can pay the amount asked.
Google has already stated a few months ago that they usually ignore these kinds of links in high DA websites, but it never was a means to stop all the people that sell links for hefty prices. This is what they said:
Source: https://twitter.com/methode/status/872839776600170496
Nofollow Attribute
The first instance of influential, high DA website incorporating a nofollow attribute to external links was actually noticed by Matthew Barby, Global Head of Growth and SEO at Hubspot.
Source: https://twitter.com/matthewbarby/status/902579227345739776
His tweet caused a lot of commotion, and other well-known names confirmed this as well. One of which is Marie Haynes of Marie Haynes Consulting Inc.
Source: https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/status/902614696892784641
What I’m unsure of is if the nofollow attribute is applied to all their articles or just the guest contributor articles.
Source: https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/status/902615558578995200
Key Takeaway
This means a lot to the fairness in the competition for the first-page ranking. The main point of this post is that it’s about time for influential, high DA websites to make a move against being taken advantage of by unethical SEOs/link builders.
Of course, it is important for all OUR link building campaigns or our SEO campaigns, in general, to have links coming from high DA websites, but if we are going to get it through underhanded means, then we might as well not do it at all.
So, if you just happen to have bought links, then you might have just wasted your hard-earned money, or maybe you were just wasting it ever since you opted to buy links in the first place.
