No More Free Links From LinkedIn?

March 8th, 2007 · 7 Comments

UPDATE CHRIS S. FROM LINKEDIN REPLIED THE LINKS ON THE PUBLIC PROFILE ARE NOT REDIRECTED. THE REDIRECTS ONLY HAPPEN WHEN VIEWING A PROFILE INTERNALLY AS A MEMBER. THANKS CHRIS

Up until recently anyone with a LinkedIn profile had an ability to create a few “free” anchor text rich links back to any websites of your choosing. If I am not mistaken these used to be “clean” links meaning they were not redirected or nofollow’ed. I am not sure when this change occured at LinkedIn but I noticed today that all the links from within the profiles seem to be redirected through a PHP redirect script. This script generates a 302 redirect, rendering the links somewhat worthless for SEO purposes.

Guess I’ll take that one out of my bag o tricks

PS Let me know if these links were always redirected, but I am pretty sure they were not

PPS If my LinkedIn widget didn’t link directly to my profile, I would be adding a nofollow right now. In fact I still might …

7 responses so far ↓

Simon Heseltine // Mar 8th 2007 at 5:00 pm

I’m with you, I don’t believe they were previously redirected.
mike // Mar 8th 2007 at 5:47 pm

I wonder if you have a paid account if they are still redirected? Anybody with a paid account care to reply?
Chris S. // Mar 8th 2007 at 8:02 pm

Mike,

The links on your internal LinkedIn profile (i.e., the one only viewable by other LinkedIn users) have always been redirects. The ones on your public profile (www.linkedin.com/in/miketheinternetguy, viewable by anyone including search engines) don’t use redirects.

Chris
mike // Mar 8th 2007 at 8:12 pm

awesome,
Thanks for the reply Chris
Debra // Mar 8th 2007 at 9:46 pm

I’ll jot here what I emailed you Mike in case it helps someone else.

I’ve never known LinkedIn to have clean URL’s in the paid or free profile in the past. But since this has come up I don’t know if they’ve recently changed that for the paid areas. I’m going to post a note in the linkedin group I belong to and see if I can find out. However….

As Chris said, you can alter your public profile URL to include keywords and that will show on your pages and be “clean”, your URL is an example of that. However, the trick to getting it indexed is to link to it from a “regular” site, which you’ve done at the bottom of this blog where it says “view my profile”. When people search for miketheinternetguy they’ll see the linkedin profile URL in the serps. But again - it has to be linked from an outside source.

That’s about as much linkedin love you’ll see. hey Mike, did you have another profile at one time?? http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/Mike/Belasco
mike // Mar 8th 2007 at 10:16 pm

Thanks Debra,
True it does have to be linked from an outside source. IYou could always put your LinkedIn badge on your myspace page or some other site out there, to avoid reciprocating from the site you are trying to benefit.
mike // Mar 8th 2007 at 11:09 pm

Also Myblog log will link out to your LinkedIn Profile as well as other profiles so there is another way to get it indexed without too much trouble!

Mike The Internet Guy’s Blog