Linking to Digital Point harms your rankings?

by Patrick Altoft on / 15 responses

This is a theory rather than fact so please feel free to disagree in the comments.

One of the most popular posts on Blogstorm is the Beginners Guide to Linkbait but it is the only post on this site that doesn’t rank for the terms in it’s title tag. It clearly has been hit with some kind of Google penalty.

All the links in the comments are nofollow so I can’t believe they are causing the problem. The only outgoing link that could cause the issue was one to http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/geovisitors/ which is a page that also doesn’t rank for it’s own name despite having 5 million incoming links.

I’ve removed the link and will keep you updated.

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.

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Comments

Read the 15 comments below, or add your own!

February 16, 2008 at 3:39am

Besides that, the only thing I could think off is the fact that you link to gravatar.com 64 times (without nofollow).

Otherwise I think your theory will hold. Let us know what the results are! :)

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February 16, 2008 at 3:56am

All those links are nofollow or JS so they can’t be causing it (I hope). Also this issue was around before I switched to this avatar plugin.

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February 16, 2008 at 4:17am

Ah, I didn’t notice the rel=nofollow in the code :$ Will you write a post about this issue in the future, or should I bookmark this post? :P

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julien
February 16, 2008 at 8:38am

yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

how many high quality links does DP have? i mean most of them are awful, probably, but it must have SOME good links. do the bad links tip the scale in the opposite direction?

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February 16, 2008 at 8:44am

This is an interesting theory..I haven’t thought of this before..^^..well, keep us updated to what happens next..^^

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February 16, 2008 at 2:06pm

You mean signatures at Digital Point are nofollow?

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February 17, 2008 at 8:05am

Interesting as such popular forums get linked to a lot.

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February 18, 2008 at 1:33am

Digital Point is flagged by all major search engines and social media sites, including digg, SU etc. It’s not a surprise that they harm rankings :P

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February 20, 2008 at 11:12am

Linking to or posting on a forum that is someone elses can always affect your your own websites rankings in some ways.

At least that is what I have managed to ascertain.

These ways are both positive and negative

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March 1, 2008 at 7:42am

I am personally agree, my site was got many link into DP.

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June 30, 2008 at 4:30am

Came across this posting (indirectly) from your thread at DP!
Sure would love to have an update to this posting!

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October 25, 2008 at 9:38pm

I really want to know if you found out?

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January 16, 2009 at 4:01pm

Yeah so am I, any results yet?

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January 28, 2009 at 12:00am

Quite interesting about linking. See you didn’t hyperlink it :) (

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December 1, 2009 at 8:13pm

Never heard of this before. Thanks for the article.

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