Best practice for listings with outbound links
-
My site contains a number of listings for charities that offer various sporting activities for people to get involved in order to raise money. As part of the listing we provide an outbound link for the user to find out more info about each of the charities and their activities.
Currently these listings are blocked in the robots.txt for fear that we may be viewed as a 'link farm or spam site' (as there are hundreds of charities listed on the scrolling page) but these links out are genuine and provide benefits and are a useful resource for the user and not paid links.
What I'd like to do is make these listings fully crawlable and indexable to increase our search traffic to these listing, but I'm not sure whether this would have a negative impact on our Pagerank with Google potentially viewing all these outbound links as 'bad' or 'paid links',
Would removing the listing pages from our robots.txt and making all the outbound links 'nofollow' be the way forward to allow us to properly index the listings without being penalised as some kind of link farm or spam site? (N.B. I have no interest in passing link juice to the external charity websites)
-
These links sound relevant and extremely wholesome.
Great websites link to other great websites all of the time.
-
To keep it short
If you have any doubts about it and if the only reason is to get your pages into the index then just add nofollow to those links and it will be safe from the points / concerns you've raised. Safe all around.
On the another hand, if those links are really bringing additional value to the pages, to your visitors for those pages the number is irrelevant - you can have as many as you want and nothing will happen.
More then that, outgoing real valuable links will also bring some value in your on page optimisation score for those pages. Linking out is not a bad thing as long as it make sense and everything is genuine.
One hing that is really important is where you link out - if your links are pointing to "bad" sites (whatever bad will mean: spammy usually) then and only then you might have a problem.
if the links are on the same vertical, niche you can proudly link with no issues and the number ris not relevant.
And again, if you have any doubts about all or some of the links just no follow them and you will be safe.
-
To keep it short:
If you have any doubts about it and if the only reason is to get your pages into the index then just add nofollow to those links and it will be safe from the points / concerns you've raised. Safe all around.
On the another hand, if those links are really bringing additional value to the pages, to your visitors for those pages the number is irrelevant - you can have as many as you want and nothing will happen.
More then that, outgoing real valuable links will also bring some value in your on page optimisation score for those pages. Linking out is not a bad thing as long as it make sense and everything is genuine.
One hing that is really important is where you link out - if your links are pointing to "bad" sites (whatever bad will mean: spammy usually) then and only then you might have a problem.
if the links are on the same vertical, niche you can proudly link with no issues and the number ris not relevant.
And again, if you have any doubts about all or some of the links just no follow them and you will be safe.
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
-
Best SEO Practices for Displaying FAQs throughout site?
I've got an FAQ plugin (Ultimate FAQ) for a Wordpress site with tons of content (like 30 questions each with a page full, multi-paragraphs, of answers with good info -- stuff Google LOVES.) Right now, I have a main FAQ page that has 3 categories and about 10 questions under each category and each question is collapsed by default. You click an arrow to expand it to reveal the answer.I then have a single category's questions also displayed at the bottom of an appropriate related page. So the questions appear in two places on the site, always collapsed by default.Each question has a permalink that links to an individual page with only that question and answer.I know Google discounts (doesn't ignore) content that is hidden by default and requires a click (via js function) to reveal it.So what I'm wondering is if the way I have it setup is optimal for SEO? How is Google going to handle the questions being in essentially three places: it's own standalone page, in a list on a category page, and in a list on a page showing all questions for all categories. Should I make the questions not collapsed by default (which will make the master FAQ page SUPER long!)Does Google not mind the duplicate content within the site?What's the best strategy?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoJaz0 -
Best practice to redirect http to https
I have an SSL certificate on our domain but at times some search results still list the HTTP version. Clicking on this then warns the user about security and they leave. To avoid this I am using this in the htaccess file to redirect all HTTP visits to the https version. RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavpeds
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://domain.com/$1 [R,L] Is this ok? I notice on Moz toolbar it give a 302 temporary redirect I am thinking this isn't good and needs to be a 301 maybe? What is the best practice in this situation?1 -
If linking to contextual sites is beneficial for SE rankings, what impact does the re=“nofollow” attribute have when applied to these outbound contextual links?
Communities, opinion-formers, even Google representatives, seem to offer a consensus that linking to quality, relevant sites is good practice and therefore beneficial for SEO. Does this still apply when the outbound links are "nofollow"? Is there any good research on this out there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielpressley0 -
First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?
Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true? And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page. Thank you, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Best Practices for Moving a Sub-Domain to a Sub-Folder
One of my clients is moving their subdomain to a subfolder on their main domain. (ie. blog.example.com to example.com/blog) I just wanted to get everyone's thoughts on some best practices for things we should be doing/looking for when making this move.? ie WMT, .htaccess, 301s etc? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarinPirkey0 -
Does Yahoo Directory Listing Pass Authority with PA:0 and 0 links from 0 Root Domains?
So we already have our brand listed in Yahoo Directory for a few years but today I noticed it is not listed in OSE and the pages we're listed on in Yahoo Dir are PA:0 / DA: 100 with 0 links from 0 Root Domains! (or with a PA:1) Does this mean no juice is being passed at all for this listing? Does it mean it is not even spidered by Google then as how can it be found if no inlinks? Does any authority still get passed from Yahoos domain with DA100 despite pages being PA0? I ask because I'm considering adding another company to Yahoo Dir to get some authority rather than traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
Do links from twitter count in SEOMoz's Toolbar link count?
I am using the Chrome extension and looking at a SERP, when a page is said to have 2000 incoming links, does that include tweets with a link back to this page? What about retweets. Are those counted separately or as one? And what about independent tweets that have exactly the same content (tweet text + link)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davhad0 -
Link equity of ifram
If I link an iframe to pull its content - does that count as inbound link for the iframed content? Am I passing linklove to that page? I am on x.com and have an iframe pull content from z.com. Does this give linklove from x to z.com? (I am NOT asking if the z context is indexed in x, although I am weary to follow the most frequent statement that they do not. Google states that they will try to pull the content from the iframe, but don't guarantee it.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andreas.wpv0