When News Publishers Nofollow Links To You, When You're The Source

Sep 10, 2015 - 8:12 am 16 by

Chalkboard9 Google 640

It is incredibly common for larger news publications to do three of the following things:

(1) Mention your site, without a link, as the source of the information they are citing.

(2) Link to your site, using a nofollow, as the source of the information they are citing.

(3) Not mention or link to your site, and take credit for discovering the information they are citing.

This is all very common, probably the third option is the most common amongst large news publications.

But for one thing, this is not Google's problem. It is an outreach problem, where you need to speak to the author and try to get them to do right by you. This happens all the time to me on the two sites I write at. Honestly, I don't do the outreach and it no longer bothers me when it happens. It use to, but now it does not.

A tweet by Dan Howdle asked Google's John Mueller what he thought of it:

What's Google's stance on news providers uniformly using nofollow links to cite the source of their story?

It just seems… mean.

John's response? That it is "ultimately their decision," and nothing really Google should or can do on the matter. He wrote on Twitter:

Maybe or maybe it looks bad citing smaller publications and they want to take more credit?

Do you think Google should figure out this non-citation citations and give credit where credit is due?

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Follow

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: November 29, 2024

Nov 29, 2024 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Black Friday Google Core Update, Personalized Google, Google Ads, Google Local & Bing Webmaster Tools With Yahoo Search

Nov 29, 2024 - 8:01 am
Google

Google Sitelinks Search Box Now Really Gone

Nov 29, 2024 - 7:51 am
Google Maps

Google Maps Adds Report Business Conduct To Report Review Manipulation

Nov 29, 2024 - 7:41 am
Google Maps

Google Business Profiles Guidelines Updated: Storefronts Required For Minimum Age Products

Nov 29, 2024 - 7:31 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google On Giving Prior Notice To Search Penalties

Nov 29, 2024 - 7:21 am
Previous Story: Google AdSense Sticky Ads: Anchor, Overlay & Vignette Ads