Why these links need their own look
Most of the links on a site were put there by someone who works on it. Comments, reviews, forum posts and guest articles are different. A stranger decides what they say and where they point, and some of them will point at pharmacy, casino or loan sites because that is why the comment was written.
Link Signals reads each page in your sitemap, collects the links to other sites and judges where they lead. It does not tell you who wrote a link, but it does show where it is, where it goes and how it is marked, which is what you need to deal with it.
What a scan finds
| Where the link comes from | What to look for in the report | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A comment or review | Out-of-context links to pharma, gambling, loan or adult sites, often with a Followed label. | Delete the comment, and mark comment links as ugc or nofollow in your platform’s settings so that future ones pass no credit. |
| A hidden link in a comment | A Hidden badge, meaning the link is concealed from visitors by inline styles. | Delete the comment and check how it was allowed through. See hidden links. |
| A guest post | A followed link to a site that is off-topic for your page, or to a new or lapsed domain. | Read it, edit it, or ask the author to. If a link was paid for, mark it sponsored. |
| A link in a forum signature | The same destination on many pages. | Remove it at the source, or mark the signature links ugc. |
Out of context: “Spring pruning” links to loan content
/blog/spring-pruning · Anchor text “great article, visit here”The anchor text is the clue here. A comment that reads “great article, visit here” is not a reader’s reaction. A link that is still Followed is passing credit to its destination, which is what spam commenters want.
How to work through it
- Scan the siteLoad your sitemap and run a scan. Pages with many comments are among the most likely to carry unwanted links, and they must be in the sitemap to be read.
- Open the Findings tabThe Passing credit tab shows flagged links that search engines still follow. Look at the anchor text and the Found on page for each.
- Read the detail panelIt gives the reason for the finding, the evidence, and a What to do note, which includes which rel marker to add where that helps.
- Remove the link at its sourceDelete or edit the comment, review or post. Hiding the page does not remove the link.
- Fix the causeCheck your comment settings so that links from visitors are marked
ugcornofollow, and consider moderating the first comment from a new visitor. See which rel should a link have. - Re-checkUse Re-check on the report to confirm that the links you removed are gone.
Guest posts and paid links
A guest post is a link you agreed to publish, so it falls on you to decide how it is marked. If the author paid, or you were given something for the placement, rel="sponsored" is the marker Google asks for. If you are not sure you vouch for the destination, nofollow is the cautious choice. A normal followed link says you trust the site.
Keeping watch
Comments arrive all the time, so a single scan is out of date within days. Monitoring re-reads the site on a schedule and sends an alert when a link is newly flagged. There is one thing to know: monitoring decides which pages to read again from the dates in the sitemap. A new comment does not always change a page’s date, in which case the page is picked up in the rotating slice or the monthly pass instead. Check your sitemap dates shows how to tell what yours does.
A harmless link you have checked, such as a regular contributor’s website, can be ignored so it stops counting. If it later turns bad, the ignore lapses and you are told.
What a scan will not catch
- Comments loaded from another service. If a comment system writes its content using a script loaded from another file, those links are not in the page and are not read.
- Pages outside the sitemap. A page without a sitemap entry, or one that your plugin excludes, is not scanned.
- Links hidden by a stylesheet class. Only hiding by inline styles is detected. See accuracy and limits.
- Comments that have not been approved. A comment that is not shown on the page is not in the page.
Mistakes to avoid
- Deleting a spam comment but leaving the setting. Without ugc or nofollow on comment links, the next one will pass credit.
- Marking nofollow and leaving a harmful link in place. The marker changes what search engines do. Readers who click still arrive.
- Treating every keyword match as spam. A comment about a casino on an article about casinos is not the same as one on a gardening page. Read the reason first.
Questions
Does Link Signals check who wrote a comment?
No. It reads the links on the page and judges where they lead and how they are marked.
Should every external link in a comment be nofollow?
That is what Google asks sites to do for links added by visitors, and ugc is the marker made for it. It is a decision for you, not something Link Signals changes.
Will it find links in comments that are held for moderation?
No. Only what is on the page when it is read.
How do I deal with a lot of them?
Work through the Passing credit tab in rounds and re-check after each. A single re-check looks at up to 60 links, starting with the most urgent.
How this counts in your LinkSignal
Comment and guest-post links that are hidden or injected are counted in the hidden, cloaked and script-injected links row of your site’s external LinkSignal, and risky ones that are visible fall under out of context links or links that need review. The LinkSignal overview lists every row. LinkSignal is Link Signals’ own metric, worked out only from what this tool finds, and it is not connected to any search engine or third-party score.
Scan your sitemap and see which outbound links are followed.
