Are Malformed Links Any Good?

When I got interviewed last year by the Telegraph for this piece featuring my Easter eggs site I was over-the-moon. Who wouldn't be? Then I was gutted to find out that they cocked up my link. After contacted them several times they still haven't changed it. But I was still happy that I got the exposure.

But looking back, almost a year later, what have I got from it? Well I'd not really put two and two together until this morning.

Even with Easter a distant memory whilst people tried to enjoy the summer, get ready to go back to school, think about Christmas then actually enjoy it, I kept getting a good number of direct visitors.


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Before the article I was getting about 10 direct visits a day out of season, and after it was about 120. Very strange.

I looked a the nature of the traffic and they were from a diverse array of cities - obviously with a London bias and there wasn't anyone pinging the bugger out of the site looking at the network locations too.

Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that people would click on the link, see they've encoded the link wrong and then rectify - just as I did? Seeing as I've done no email marketing for the domain since last Easter I think that's fairly reasonable.

The only nagging thing in my mind was the large growth in direct traffic before the date, but looking at the previous month, it happened there too.

But what about link juice? Does Google et al follow mall-formed links? I'd probably say that they do when they're caused by just adding non-alphanumeric characters to the domain extension when their can be no other domain extension it could be.

Another thought was that if MajesticSEO can find them, then so can Google - they did, found it, however because the domain was the anchor text too. I'm positive Google would pass on some weight from it.

Also I did have a nice growth in links after that date too. I did no link-building/acquisition after Easter last year so did I get links from people that read the article - it'd be difficult to tell. But this chart is nice:


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So, from experience. Here's some advice. Work hard to get links from quality sources, if they do screw them up then try and get them changed (obviously), but if you can't then take any benefit from them you can. There's always the traffic - and that's the main thing right ;-)