TO NOFOLLOW OR NOT
-
Hey Everyone...
Just got a quick question I haven't really ever found a straight answer to. I have a sports blog. Part of the blog is writing my own articles and the other part is putting together posts that have a collection of links to other good articles. An example post link is below.
http://frogfanreport.com/tcu-news/frog-fan-tcu-news-links-1612/
The question is whether I should be setting these posts as NOFOLLOW?
During football season I have a link collection post daily but during the off-season i may post every couple of days.
zach
-
Nofollow sites that you don't trust. Some people will also nofollow links to direct competitors, which is understandable. Nofollow can and arguably should be used for user-generated content that you can't monitor regularly, such as blog comments, etc.
Don't use it for quality content that your readers would find valuable. Alan is correct that nofollowing links will not give more "link juice" to your own site, so you have little to gain.
-
No argument. I don't disagree. I said that putting nofollow on a resource page would help pass less page rank and probably help your rankings initially. But a great resource page that people will want to link to because it is useful always has the ability to rank no matter if it contains follow or nofollow links. As I said in my first response, I prefer to always give follows on my links because I feel if I think they're good enough to link to then they deserve the credit. Apologies if I didn't make that more clear in my first response.
-
Hi Chase, a page with nothing more than outgoing links to high quality sites, all with cohesive relevance, will rank and rank well. I use this type of "resource page" all the time. An example here: http://golf-newz.com/world-golf-stats
That page has ranked for months with nothing more than outgoing links (the links you see at the bottom). Only recently I added the stats drop downs and frankly, they actually negatively affected my ranking. The page was ranking better with nothing more than outgoing links.
I don't mean to start an argument but, well chosen outbound links, with tight relevance work and I have found them to work in numerous industries.
I do see people saying that they don't but, they do.
-
Only no follow if you think that pages your linking to are of very low quality and may damage your reputation. No follows will not save you any link juice, they just don’t give it to the linked page.
You may want to add a description for each links, that will help your rankings, rather than a no-follow -
n my opinion, your page was more of resource page that you needed to rank highly then I would say it would be smart to put nofollows on the page. But, I don't typically subscribe to this. My feeling is that if you feel a site is worth linking to, then the right thing to do is give them the credit they deserve. But, with pages like yours where they are basically just links with no content, you'll not be ranking anyways for them -- these pages seem to be more for returning visitors who are interested in what you consistently have to say. I'd give follow links on your pages, especially since they seem to be to high quality sites like ESPN.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
"nofollow" vs. "no follow"
Does anyone know if it is problematic to have a space between the "no" and the "follow"? I just discovered our CMS has been inserting a space and am trying to understand if it the reason why something that we were trying to keep from being indexed has become indexed.
Technical SEO | | LivDetrick0 -
Should internal links in my table of contents be tagged as nofollow?
Hi All, I have the LuckyWP Table of Contents plugin installed. I recently noticed that you can tag your internal links with and nofollow. I understand that it's always a good idea to link internally and to pass link juice to my own content. But with detailed posts that have over 20 headings, I'm thinking that internal linking for headings may actually hurt me because it takes my links well above 100. Any ideas what the best practises are in this scenario? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | nomad_blogger0 -
Best Nofollow Practice Facing +500 instances of affiliate links
Hi. I have a set of affiliate links on my website. That's 50 unique links in total. They are placed in a separate folder /go/, and are all nofollowed. My website has 100 pages. When doing a site audit I get a report with 50 affiliate links pr. page x100. That's a huge report. Is this really necessary? I can ofc. choose to ignore the automated reports, but I can't help but to think that there must be an easier way to keep track of it? Like, if Link 1-50 is located in /go/, they should automatically be nofollowed, regardless of where they are located on the root/sub domain. Bonus question: The format of the link is https://exampledomain.com/go/brandname I am wondering if I should add that "/" at the end of it. If yes, why? If no, why?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Louis0 -
Should event write-ups be nofollow?
Hi guys, tl:dr - Should articles discussing a company's event (offline content) be nofollow? My company hosts a number of events across the year, during which we invite a selection of bloggers, journalists and interested parties from across the UK. During these events we show them the "behind the scenes" of our company as well as the manufacturing process and give them an amazing experience surrounded by our products. We never (ever) ask for write-ups or links, and leave the day entirely open every time. If people ask about articles or links, we always say it's entirely up to them if they wish to talk about their experiences. So, my question is: should any follow-up articles (for example reviews of the day, which bloggers will want to talk about) be nofollow? They're not reviewing any products, nor have they been paid or incentivised to talk about their experience. One could argue the event itself is incentive, however if this is the case then surely providing content is equally incentivising... The only difference is that the content we're providing is offline? Would be good to get people's thoughts on this!
Technical SEO | | JAR8970 -
Should I add 'nofollow' to site wide internal links?
I am trying to improve the internal linking structure on my site and ensure that the most important pages have the most internal links pointing to them (which I believe is the best strategy from Google's perspective!). I have a number of internal links in the page footer going to pages such as 'Terms and Conditions', 'Testimonials', 'About Us' etc. These pages, therefore, have a very large number of links going to them compared with the most important pages on my site. Should I add 'nofollow' to these links?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
How do I add "noindex" or "nofollow" to a link in Wordpress
It's been a while since I've SEOed a Wordpress site. How do I add "nofollow" or "noindex" to specific links? I highlight the anchor text in the text editor, I click the "link" button. I could have sworn that there used to be an option in the dialogue box that pops up.
Technical SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Why are the bots still picking up so many links on our page despite us adding nofollow?
We have been working to reduce our on-page links issue. On a particular type of page the problem arose because we automatically link out to relevant content. When we added nofollows to this content it resolved the issue for some but not all and we can't figure out why is was not successful for every one. Can you see any issues? Example of a page where nofollow did not work for... http://www.andor.com/learning-academy/4-5d-microscopy-an-overview-of-andor's-solutions-for-4-5d-microscopy
Technical SEO | | tonykelly0 -
Nofollow internal links
Hi, we have problems with having too many links on page. Our website has a menu with 3 level sub-navigation drop down for categories which we want to maintain, for easy-navigation for the users. http://www.redwrappings.com.au/ After reading this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru, and some other articles, we came up with a solution. We can easily reduce the number of links per page by putting 'nofollow' on our categories links menu dropdown and create a separate 'landing page' that contains links to these categories (and allow 'follow' links for robots). Is it wise to do this? Or any better, easy solution that you can suggest? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Essentia1