LinkedIn Changed Your Profile Links To 302 Redirects
I received an alert this morning that a client had removed the link from their LinkedIn profile. Beyond having their profile deleted or the founder of the company abruptly abandoning ship, I couldn’t think of a reason why this would change.
It appears that LinkedIn has changed all non-personalized profile links (profiles that use the linkedin.com/pub format vs personalized pages like www.linkedin.com/in/phillyadam) into 302 redirects. A cached version of this LinkedIn page quickly showed that the links that were open previously now go through a www.linkedin.com/redirect?url= 302 redirect.
You can see examples of different Michael Nutter profiles below, none of them actually belonging to the mayor.
Michael Nutter Before Example 1
Michael Nutter After Example 1
Quickly dropping images in for the second example:
Before: (the link at the bottom is me hovering over the Company Website link in the profile):
After:
TWO big things changed here:
1. /pub profiles, which are profiles that are not personalized, now have links go through redirects.
2. Links that used the default My Company were nofollow links. Links that used the default tag Personal Website or Blog were open dofollow links with the ability to pass value to your site. Regardless if you believe absolutely zero value is passed through nofollow links, we’re 100% sure that zero value is passed because the links now go through a 302 redirect.
This could be an easy way to stop people from spamming for LinkedIn profile links at first glance, but I’m hoping there’s a reason why this somewhat big change went down.
Posted: 02.15.11
Mark Simon:
Nice catch; thanks for sharing. Glad I have a personalized linkedin page. Hopefully they don’t disallow those from being crawled in the robots.txt next.
Greg Hyer:
Thanks for the information. I would have never have realized this change by LinkedIn. I agree that this may be LinkedIn’s way of stopping the Google juice at fake LinkedIn accounts.
Steven Britton:
This is a bummer! It’s getting harder and harder to get links with good value. So much for optimizing LinkedIn accounts.
Adam:
Wow. I actually thought they did this a long time ago to stop SEO gaming. Seems like a solid move.
Adam:
Steve & Adam – LinkedIn is almost a “double check to make sure the client has the link there, then never really worry about it again.” It’s very little value that would have passed imo, but something is always better than nothing. Just random how they did it to non personalized accounts vs all. Twitter threw the nofollow on all at once 2 years ago? But that included everything. Interesting move by LinkedIn and I’d love to know if there was an incident or convo with Google that sparked it.
Alexa Samuels:
FYI, there’s a comment thread in the Kikolani blog about this topic.
http://kikolani.com/linkedin-for-bloggers-branding-authority-and-traffic.html/comment-page-1#comment-73711
I’ve included a link to this article. My previous assumptions are being challenged!
Kyle Alm:
I noticed this too recently. Great rundown of the LinkedIn page.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this move by LinkedIn is to get more people to use their business pages. I recently set up a business profile. Anyone who is needs SEO probably has a business.
It’s too bad though because LinkedIn is a top result on Google for any name. If you wanted to link your profiles and/or personal domain to your profile there isn’t any reason why those should be given a nofollow tag. It’s always going to be a few bad apples but LinkedIn should have gone with a different approach, verified accounts seems like a real no brainer. Instead of a nofollow tag they could have used a different microformat. Ultimately it’s pretty disappointing that LinkedIn would do away with the ‘link.’ Hopefully it’s not a trend.
Laki Politis:
It’s an absolute annoyance. I’ve set up my business account, my personal profile, uploaded my resume, joined groups, and fully participated as a linkedIn user, and they can’t even reward me with such a small little droplet of link juice. For my site, it would make the world of difference, for them they wouldn’t even notice.
Frustrating.
Laki.