No-follow links on advertising pages
-
Hi
I run a job board that enables employers to post job vacancies and information about their organisations. These are 'paid for' pages (advertising) on our site.
These link out to their own websites. My question is, would it be better for these links out to their sites to be no-follow?
From my site's perspective, I cannot necessarily dictate the quality of their websites (although the majority are leading firms) as I would in article and feature content, where we do happily link out and refer to other quality sites with information that gives readers further information.
I know that many large job boards do this where they run listings of feeds from other sites, but should we also do this at the page level where the link out is effectively paid for.
What would be the pros and cons if I do or if I don't use no-follow?
I hope this makes sense and look forward to some replies.
Many thanks
-
Great to get this feedback. It gives me food for thought. That there are differing views actually makes me feel a bit easier about things as it shows that it isn't necessarily clear cut.
The advertising content is clearly segmented, so potentially I could test it out on a defined area.
-
It is a little tricky, but I think a link from a paid listing is still a paid link, if you want to push the letter of the law. Since you're not worried about the outbound link-juice, I agree with Keith that you're safer just to nofollow.
-
I am new to the community here too, and I love it!
I would still be careful, whether they are paying for the link or the ad, Google can decide and you could be screwed.
Also, if you can't vouch for the page it is linking to, I wouldn't make it a followed link. Being careful who you link to is important, at the same time I think it is important to link out to high quality sites with relevant content.
To me, if you are questioning it, your gut is already telling you the answer. Besides, the advertisers are there for the job ads, not followed links right?
-
What you raise, is what has been my concern.
We are in a competitive market fighting it out with a lot of sites with similar focus and similar offering, so cross-domain duplicate/near-duplicate content ends up being the main focus for how we optimise this area of our content.
This no-follow thing has just been in the back of my mind as something I should look into just in case we are giving out a negative signal in someway.
And in our case, it is not the link that is paid for. They are paying to post a job vacancy - the link is mechanism for applying or finding out more.
So how does a search engine detect what is paid for and what is not?
This is my first SEOmoz question, so I am really excited to have two people respond so quickly... how wonderful the community here!
-
If you don't no-follow the links, isn't it just paid links which is against TOS? Seems like a big chance you would be taking in getting penalized to me.
-
For you I see no problem leaving the links without nofollow. I hope I could help.
Best Regards,
Naghirniac
-
Thanks for replying so quickly. I will have a read through/watch the WBFs in the links you suggest.
To confirm, I am not worried about passing on link juice to other sites. I just noticed that other sites of a similar ilk take this approach and wondered about the advantages and disadvantages.
From a client perspective, we track the visits to their sites via their links using our own reporting set up, so they know how well we do in terms of meeting their advertising needs.
-
Thanks for replying so quickly. I will have a read through/watch the WBFs in the links you suggest.
To confirm, I am not worried about passing on link juice to other sites. I just noticed that other sites of a similar ilk take this approach and wondered about the advantages and disadvantages.
From a client perspective, we track the visits to their sites via their links using our own reporting set up, so they know how well we do in terms of meeting their advertising needs.
-
This is a very important point, because google change a lot how they threat the nofollow links, and some people stay with old premisses.
The nofollow links lose the benefit of the link juice. In my opinion, for you website, there is no problem to use links without the nofollow.
You should read these posts to help you out:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/nofollow-is-dying-the-impact-of-microblogging-and-nofollow-on-seo
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-dangers-of-nofollow
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-how-do-we-plug-the-nofollow-leak
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
-
"Noindex, follow" for thin pages?
Hey there Mozzers, I have a question regarding Thin pages. Unfortunately, we have Thin pages, almost empty to be honest. I have the idea to ask the dev team to do "noindex, follow" on these pages. What do you think? Has someone faced this situation before? Will appreciate your input!
Technical SEO | | Europarl_SEO_Team0 -
#Page Jump link sharing
Hi I'm managing an in-house link building campaign in order to help in our key search term 'Location Holidays'. We were historically number 1 for this term until a recent re-design in May where our web design agency butchered our SEO. All of the main issued fixed, we're now fluctuating between 3rd & 4th on a daily basis. I'm putting together a social share comp to promote through the press in order to boost our backlink profile. We're nesting the competition within the body of the page we want to improve the rankings for. I will be including a #page jump link to quickly access it as it will be further down the page. My question is that if we get press to link to http://holidaycompany.com/destination/#comp will http://holidaycompany.com/destination/ receive the link juice or will http://holidaycompany.com/destination/#comp be looked upon as a whole new page? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | MattHolidays0 -
Better to Remove Toxic/Low Quality Links Before Building New High Quality Links?
Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. The SEO firm believes it imperative to remove links from the toxic domains. Should I remove toxic links before building new one? Or should we first work on building new links before removing the toxic ones? My site only has 442 subdomains with links pointing to it. I am concerned that there may be a drop in ranking if links from the toxic domains are removed before new quality ones are in place. For a bit of background my site has a MOZ Domain authority of 27, a Moz page authority of 38. It receives about 4,000 unique visitors per month through organic search. About 150 subdomains that link to my site have a Majestic SEO citation flow of zero and a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero. They are pretty low quality. However I don't know if I am better off removing them first or building new quality links before I disavow more than a third of the links to the site. Any ideas? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Many Pages Being Combined Into One Long Page
Hi All, In talking with my internal developers, UX, and design team there has been a big push to move from a "tabbed" page structure (where as each tab is it's own page) to combining everything into one long page. It looks great from a user experience standpoint, but I'm concerned that we'll decrease in rankings for the tabbed pages that will be going away, even with a 301 in place. I initially recommending#! or pushstate for each "page section" on the long form content. However there are technical limitations with this in our CMS. The next idea I had was to still leave those pages out there and to link to them in the source code, but this approach may get shot down as well. Has anyone else had to solve for this issue? If so, how did you do it?
Technical SEO | | AllyBank1 -
Confused on footer links (Which are best practices for footer links on other websites?)
Hello folks, We are eCommerce web design and Development Company and we give do follow links of our website to every projects which we have done with specific keywords. So now the concern is we are seeing huge amount of back-links are being generated from single root domain for particular keyword in webmaster tools. So what should be the best way to practice this? Should we give no follow attribute to it or can use our company logo with link? LtMjHER.png
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Page titles in browser not matching WP page title
I have an issue with a few page titles not matching the title I have In WordPress. I have 2 pages, blog & creative gallery, that show the homepage title, which is causing duplicate title errors. This has been going on for 5 weeks, so its not an a crawl issue. Any ideas what could cause this? To clarify, I have the page title set in WP, and I checked "Disable PSP title format on this page/post:"...but this page is still showing the homepage title. Is there an additional title setting for a page in WP?
Technical SEO | | Branden_S0 -
Container Page/Content Page Duplicate Content
My client has a container page on their website, they are using SiteFinity, so it is called a "group page", in which individual pages appear and can be scrolled through. When link are followed, they first lead to the group page URL, in which the first content page is shown. However, when navigating through the content pages, the URL changes. When navigating BACK to the first content page, the URL is that for the content page, but it appears to indexers as a duplicate of the group page, that is, the URL that appeared when first linking to the group page. The client updates this on the regular, so I need to find a solution that will allow them to add more pages, the new one always becoming the top page, without requiring extra coding. For instance, I had considered integrating REL=NEXT and REL=PREV, but they aren't going to keep that up to date.
Technical SEO | | SpokeHQ1 -
Adding parameters in URLs and linking to a page
Hi, Here's a fairly technical question: We would like to implement badge feature where linking websites using a badge would use urls such as: domain.com/page?state=texas&city=houston domain.com/page?state=neveda&city=lasvegas Important note: the parameter will change the information and layout of the page: domain.com/page Would those 2 urls above along with their extra parameters be considered the same page as domain.com/page by google's crawler? We're considering adding the parameter "state" and "city" to Google WMT url parameter tool to tel them who to handle those parameters. Any feedback or comments is appreciated! Thanks in advance. Martin
Technical SEO | | MartinH0