Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does Yelp pass link juice?
-
This is probably a profoundly obvious question, but I can't seem to find an explicit answer on the internet, so I'll ask it here:
Yelp's links out to local business websites are not nofollow'd, but they go through a javascript-based redirect. My understanding is that javascript redirected links do not pass link juice, so a link from a yelp profile will not directly impact my page authority; however, it looks like yelp does use nofollow judiciously for internal links, so I don't understand why they would allow follow for these "useless" outbound links.
Do yelp's javascript-redirected links pass link juice?
-
Just curious - where do you see the JS redirects? I'm seeing server-side redirects, but the interesting thing is that the return a 200 (not a 301 or 302), which could suggest they pass link-juice.
My gut sense is that Miriam's right - they probably mask direct link-juice but are still very valuable as a citation, especially for local search.
-
Hello Tyler!
What an interesting question! Not one I've seen asked before and I don't have an authoritative answer for you. I did find a couple of mentions of this out on the web.
Here's one from http://www.tastyplacement.com/6-best-free-local-business-directories-for-backlinks-customers-hits
4. Yelp.com. Yelp is popular (a fair number of visitors) and its pages rank well in the search engines. So, a listing here might earn you some supplemental results in a Google search. It’s review-based, and there are a lot of “interactive” features you’ll want to skip if you just want to list your business. Valuable and free. One limitation: Yelp does not give dofollow (a link that passes valuable pagerank to the target site) backlinks.
And a discussion at Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/jburq/acquiring_citations_from_directories_yelp_hotfrog/
I tend to think of the value of sites like Yelp as being in their quality as a citation and their ability to host conversation (hopefully positive) about your business. I am going to ask one of our super SEOs to step in and give you an opinion on this. It's a very good question!
Miriam
-
Oficially, no it does not pass link juice, BUT google is smart enough so you will gain smth from this link. + you can get some good traffic. It's always good to have your business listed on sites like yelp.
-
Not a clue. I'd guess they're nofollowing the internal links to better architect what internal pages are ranking, but maybe they intended profile links to pass juice, and implementation wasn't what they'd thought it be.
-
Thanks for the answer! Can you think of any reason why yelp doesn't nofollow these links? They seem to nofollow a lot of links within their own site, so it seems strange that these links are not nofollow'd.
-
I'm 99.9% positive the answer is no, they do not pass link juice. JS-redirected links are all hinky like that.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
Technical SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
How to set up internal linking with subcategories?
I'm building a new website and am setting up internal link structure with subcategories and hoping to do so with best Seo practices in mind. When linking to a subcategory's main page, would I make the internal link www.xxx.com/fishing/ or www.xxx.com/fishing/index.html or does it matter? I'm just trying to avoid duplicate content I guess, if Google saw each page as a separate page. Any other cautions when using subdirectories in my navigation?
Technical SEO | | wplodge0 -
Http to https - is a '302 object moved' redirect losing me link juice?
Hi guys, I'm looking at a new site that's completely under https - when I look at the http variant it redirects to the https site with "302 object moved" within the code. I got this by loading the http and https variants into webmaster tools as separate sites, and then doing a 'fetch as google' across both. There is some traffic coming through the http option, and as people start linking to the new site I'm worried they'll link to the http variant, and the 302 redirect to the https site losing me ranking juice from that link. Is this a correct scenario, and if so, should I prioritise moving the 302 to a 301? Cheers, Jez
Technical SEO | | jez0000 -
301 vs 302 & Link Juice
Has any one come across any recent cases of a 302 link passing more link juice than before?
Technical SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
Links from Instructables.com?
This is a silly newbie question. But will posting on www.instructables.com with some valuable content and url link back to my site help with "linking"? Or do they put a no-follow on all links on their site? Thanks for answering! Ron
Technical SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Do canonical tags pass all of the link juice onto the URL they point to?
I have an ecommerce website where the category pages have various sorting and paging options which add a suffix to the URLs. My site is setup so the root category URL, domain.com/category-name, has a canonical tag pointing to domain.com/category-name/page1/price however all links, both interner & external, point to the former (i.e. domain.com/category-name). I would like to know whether all of the link juice is being passed onto the canonical tag URL? Otherwise should I change the canonical tag to point the other way? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tjhossy0 -
Link Volume - calculate what you need?
Hi everyone, an interesting question here. How do you determien what link volume you should try and get into your website? What analysis do you do to determine the number of links you feel is right to go into a back-link profiel every month? obviously there is no magic number but its an interesting question to know what others do. Obviously you don't want to build too many or too little. If you have been penalised for bad links in the past and are now back on track - how do you calculate the volume? Do you take links dropping out into consideration?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
How to find links to 404 pages?
I know that I used to be able to do this, but I can't seem to remember. One of the sites I am working on has had a lot of pages moving around lately. I am sure some links got lost in the fray that I would like to recover, what is the easiest way to see links going to a domain that are pointing to 404 pages?
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0
