What's a "clean crawlable link"? It's one that is not blocked with Robots NoIndex meta tag, JavaScript redirect, blocked with robots.txt or a NoFollow tag.

If you in the business of SEO and still involved with begging for links, article submissions or other high labor, low impact tactics, then you'll want to make sure the links you actually do get are good.

Here are a few things to check for:

1. To check the robots meta tag, look at the page source code. If there is no robots tag, that's good.

If it looks like this,
meta name = "robots" content = "index, follow"
that's good.

If it looks like this:
OR

that's not good.

2. To see if there is a JavaScript redirect, put your cursor over the link and look at the url that appears in the status bar at the bottom of your browser. If it shows you the correct link url, then in most cases, it's ok.

3. To see if robots.txt is blocking, then visit the article site. For example:
URL http://www.articleblast.com/robots.txt
Will show:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /editor/
Disallow: /help/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /mambots/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /installation/

What the "disallow" instruction does above is to tell search engine spiders not to crawl the designated directories. If articles are located in one of these directories, then the links within those articles to our client sites are no good.

4. To see if there is a no follow tag, right click on the link URL and a window pops up. See if there is an attribute called:

rel = nofollow.
If that's there, it's no good.

If it's not there at all or has another value besides "nofollow" then it's ok.

You only have to do this once in most cases on any page of a article hosting site. The reason sites will do any of these 4 things is to hoard their site's PageRank. There is a belief that linking out to other web sites, leaks PageRank from the link source.

Labels: clean links, link building