Could A Redirected Link To FB Tank SERPs?

[Pjman]

On June 26-27 my G rankings tanked. This didn't correlate with any Panda runs or minor algo. shifts that are on the record, so I am thinking some kind of penalty. I have seen little to no recovery since.

I don't play any games with in bound links.

But about 2 weeks before this I started to remove my addthis share code (because it was doing nothing for the site) and replaced it with a link straight to our facebook page.

I used a redirect to make it more friendly for the users.

Instead of:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/myfbname/157995282243

I made it:

http://www.mysite.com/facebook/

(which redirected to the above)

I made the change site wide. Has anyone ever heard of this hurting SERPs?

Any input is much appreciated.

[edited by: tedster at 8:46 pm (utc) on Feb 12, 2012]
[edit reason] make the full URLs display [/edit]

[Planet13]

Wow, that would be scary if that is what caused the problem.

Can you provide a little bit more info about the link? Was it nofollowed? Was it "obscured" by javascript in some way?

About how many different keywords tanked on June 26th through 27th?

[Savanadry]

June is a long time ago, have you removed that link to see if you recover?

I'm no SEO guru but I have known sites to tank through adding a link, I suppose it was enough to push them over some algo threshold. Usually the site recovers when the 'bad' link is removed.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

In March and again in June my site, which is a mix of roughly half informational and half affiliate pages to support the informational, took a major rankings hit to the affiliate pages. Later on all pages took a traffic loss. I recovered by reducing the number of affiliate pages by 75% and that restored traffic to previous levels on all remaining pages.

Here's my thinking on why you may be facing the same type of filtering, the links to facebook are handled the same way affiliate links are and Google flat out is at war with them lately. Adsense seems ok so long as there's not too much above the fold but affiliate links on too many pages is going to get your traffic reduced now.

Can you make the links NOT look like affiliate links? If not can you run them to facebook through different redirect pages or using various outside link shortening services? Too many links pointing to the same 3rd party website in the same way, even if through a redirect, is not appreciated by Google anymore.

[Pjman]

@Planet13

The link is a straight text link that say:

"Join Us On Facebook Now..."

It points to URL on my site that 301 redirects to our FB Fan page. I did not "nofollow" it.


@Savanadry

It just dawned on me that was the only thing that I really changed around then. All this time I have been thinking it's a Panda problem. Until I pegged down the exact day it hit and Panda wasn't run anywhere near that day.


@Sgt_Kickaxe

Thanks for sharing. My site is 100% informational. You are right that they might be seeing that FB link through a redirect as a big no-no.

[Savanadry]

Did you use a htaccess 301 redirect or a meta refresh redirect? The former is much better SEO wise, in my experience google is not keen on the meta refresh method.

Please come back and let us know if removing the link worked, it may take a little time depending on how long it takes google to crawl enough of your pages to register the difference (as the link is sitewide) - good luck.

[Pjman]

I used a 301 redirect.

I'm going to replace the link with the addthis toolbar with simple icons. Addthis was there previously for 2 years.

[lucy24]

I used a redirect to make it more friendly for the users.

Instead of:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/myfbname/157995282243

I made it:

http://www.example.com/facebook/

(which redirected to the above)

Aaack! Nevernevernever do this. Link to the URL you want people to end up on. If the real address is long and icky-looking, link to a short pretty one and then rewrite-- not redirect-- to the real form.

G### doesn't like redirects, and in this case you can't blame them. You're deliberately and knowingly sending people to an URL you have no intention of using.

The beauty of a rewrite is that even the search engines don't know you're doing it. If they meet a 301 they can say "Thanks but no thanks, been there, done that, don't like the neighborhood." But they're powerless against a rewrite.

[buckworks]

Also to consider: If you have enough likes you can get a custom vanity URL for your FB page which is more attractive than the URL they give you to start with.

[Pjman]

Thanks guys! I just removed the link across the entire site and just replaced it with a simple addthis bar (this was their previously) today.

I'll update the thread when traffic comes gushing back. Fingers crossed.

[rlange]

lucy24 wrote:
Aaack! Nevernevernever do this. Link to the URL you want people to end up on. If the real address is long and icky-looking, link to a short pretty one and then rewrite-- not redirect-- to the real form.

If I'm understanding your suggestion correctly, it's not possible in Pjman's situation without messing around with mod_proxy (assuming he's using Apache). Under normal circumstances, you can't rewrite an internal resource (/facebook/) to an external resource (http://www.facebook.com/) without it being a redirect.

Even if he configures his site to be a proxy for this single purpose, I have a feeling anyone clicking that link would run into the wonderful mismatched domain issue for Facebook's security certificate.

--
Ryan

[Planet13]

Do look into buckwork's suggestion of getting a simplified URL from facebook for your facebook page.

[netmeg]

I'm having a hard time believing that redirected link alone could tank site. Maybe push you over the edge on some threshold, but by itself?

[Pjman]

@netmeg

I'm not 100% sure that my site tanked due to the single site wide link that was redirected to FB.

I do know in the way back in the past I had a sitewide outgoing link to my associated site (subdomain) that I redirected via a cgi script. That did cause a penalty. I removed it and issued a reconsideration request. 2 Days after the reconsideration was processed magically traffic returned to normal.