Will this link count?

philiporchard · Apr 18, 2011

Hi,

A business has linked to us from their website:

mascotsuk dot com

(it's a very small icon on the right hand side, halfway down on the home page)

Will this link actually add any juice - seems an odd way of linking.

Thanks, Phil

Ashton · Apr 18, 2011

Woah that site is keyword stuffed, made of flash and generally pretty nasty, the link is embedded in the flash and will probably pass juice. I am no SEO guru though

peter_w · Apr 19, 2011

The cached text version of the site (http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...suk.com/+site:www.mascotsuk.com&hl=en&strip=1) would suggest not, but we know Google do read SWF/Flash files and index links.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=72746

"Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files (for example, links to other pages on your site) and follow those links."

The text cache version of the site does show other links, however, just not the Bedford link... which obviously isn't a positive sign.

philiporchard · Apr 19, 2011

Thanks for getting back to me.

Interesting that Google can follow flash - fingers crossed it may pass on some juice!

bensd · Apr 19, 2011

Is the link not in the cache because it is new and google hasn't indexed the site since the link went up?

retired_member13 · Apr 19, 2011

As far as I'm aware Google can read Flash links but they pass no pagerank (ie no link "juice"). They and Javascript links are often used to "sculp" pagerank within sites for this reason.

Saying that, even nofollows or the equiv will help you to build up a link profile so although it's of limited direct benefit it's still a nice to have in the end. Incidentally, the jury is still out as to whether nofollow links are actually beneficial, some say yes, some say no, but I'd have thought that a link from somewhere like a high profile but nofollow Wikipedia page would still have to help.

peter_w · Apr 19, 2011

Slightly OT but nofollow links make up any "natural" footprint, and therefore are definitely worthwhile - even if they don't (arguably) directly pass PageRank juice.