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I'm adding anchor links in my website which are referring external sites.

<a href="externalwebsite.com"  rel="nofollow">external website</a>

This makes my site appear as a referring website and/or may be a Traffic source for those external sites. Some of the webmasters do not like this (they say this effects their SEO effort) and ask me to remove the link. I want to avoid this.

Any solution with Javascript ? Thanks

Buntu Linux
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    They want you to remove the links to their website entirely? Or your own webmasters are telling you to remove links to other websites? – Explosion Pills Mar 31 '13 at 04:19
  • Webmasters from other websites are asking me not to link to their website. Not my own webmasters. – Buntu Linux Mar 31 '13 at 14:07
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    This makes no sense whatsoever -- wouldn't they want *more* people to link to their website? With `nofollow` I don't even see how it would affect SEO at all. Unless you have agreed to terms of use to not link to the other websites without their permission, there is nothing they can do to stop you from linking to them (or do you just want to be nice?) – Explosion Pills Mar 31 '13 at 15:04
  • Hi Pills, with `rel="nofollow"` I'm not affecting them, but some of them ask me to remove it. They are telling it's affecting their SEO effort and I don't wan't to explain each of them that its not affecting them. – Buntu Linux Mar 31 '13 at 15:18
  • If you don't remove it what are they going to do? – Explosion Pills Mar 31 '13 at 15:20
  • It just becomes a headache for me that's all – Buntu Linux Mar 31 '13 at 15:38

1 Answers1

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You could try making an empty link with a class and the having a script run onload to create those links properly.

The below article is copied from: http://www.seomofo.com/ethics/using-javascript-to-hide-links.html

1. Remove affiliate links from your pages’ HTML code.
2. If it’s a text link embedded in page content, then just remove the <a> tags
    and leave the anchor text there (as plain text).
3. If it’s an image link, remove the <a> tags AND the <img> tag.
4. Replace the <a> tags with <span> tags, and assign a class name to them
    (e.g. <span class="affiliate">).
5. Write a JavaScript function that looks for <span> elements that contain 
    class="affiliate" and replaces them with your affiliate links. 
    (Yes, the ones you removed in Step 1).
6. Put the JavaScript function in an external .js file and block Google from \
    accessing it (using robots.txt).
7. Attach the JavaScript function to the onload event, which means users’ web 
     browsers won’t call the function until after the page is finished loading.
8. Googlebot–and users without JavaScript enabled–can’t call the JavaScript 
     function, so your affiliate links are never inserted into the page content.
9. Only users with JavaScript-enabled browsers will see your affiliate links. 
    Everything/everyone else sees plain text instead of affiliate text links, 
    and an empty space instead of affiliate image links.
qooplmao
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  • Hi Qoop, The 6 th step seems to solve the "Referring Sites" problem. And also will eliminate all the problems with Google bots. Now lets say a normal user (with a javascript enabled browser) on my site see the link then click on. Will the webmaster from the external site identify that a user has come from my site (My site been the traffic source)? I also don't want that to happen. Thanks – Buntu Linux Mar 31 '13 at 14:32
  • For an example, with javascript by calling `document.referrer` a webmaster from the linked site can find from which site the traffic came from – Buntu Linux Mar 31 '13 at 14:43
  • I think this is enough for me. I'm marking this as correct. Thanks a lot. – Buntu Linux Mar 31 '13 at 16:26
  • They would be able to see you are linking to them using the referrer but Google shouldn't see it so it may stop SEO issues. They may still complain. – qooplmao Apr 01 '13 at 14:22
  • Yes Qoop complaining is the issue. – Buntu Linux Apr 01 '13 at 14:33
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    You could try the answers in this - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8893269/what-is-the-most-reliable-way-to-hide-spoof-the-referrer-in-javascript – qooplmao Apr 01 '13 at 14:41
  • WOW, That does it! It hides the referrer! And all the code is there. I can just copy past! Thanks Qoop! – Buntu Linux Apr 01 '13 at 15:50