Link in my blog to external pages - no follow?
-
Hi everyone.
I'm quite new to SEO (started 6 months ago, but I'm very lucky to work the company that is willing to pay while I'm learning).
I also create some content for the website - I write wood flooring industry blog.
Following some advise from few SEO experts around the world whom I follow I have decided to write 1-2 off topic blogs/month but I have found the way of writing off topic but in reality bringing together wood flooring industry and let's say fashion industry.
My question is - if I want to link to one or two pages (let's say bug fashion brands) shall I use no-follow link?
I do not want to harm my website or theirs. Can those type of posts be the part of building my position within my industry and in general, building authority of my website? Of course appart from getting links TO my website.
Tom
-
There are only three reasons to no-follow a link, Tom.
- The link is untrusted - e.g. User-generated content like blog comments or forums
- The link is being paid for or is otherwise part of a business arrangement (this is a little broader - can include large-scale guest-posting and press releases)
- In specific cases to help manage crawl budget for a site (note: NOT to be used to try to manage flow of "linkjuice" internally through a site)
Anything other than these uses could actually cause overuse of no-follow to make your own site look spammy/questionable.
Here's a really good overview post from Raven Tools blog on exactly the question you're asking about what constitutes effective, safe use of outbound links.
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
Hi Tom,
Question, are the sites you linking to relevant to the post or your industry? How are you bringing wood flooring industry and let's say fashion industry together in the post. If you are explaining how wood flooring and how it's affected by the fashion industry or something related, then there is no harm using follow links and it makes sense to link to the fashion site.
However, if the sites you are linking to are irrelevant to the post, i would not link to it in the first place. You should only link to other sites/pages only if it helps your readers understand more about the subject or anything relevant.
Hope this helps.
Thank you!
-
You can safely have follow link to other websites in your blog posts. However, as a general rule, the anchor text links should be on the brand names of the companies you are linking to. These links should not be reciprocal or paid links.
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
-
How to safely syndicate blog posts in LinkedIn Company page
We currently post our new blog post on our company profile (in Linkedin) immediately after publishing on our company blog. Is this running the risk of duplicate content? My colleague pastes the new posts URL into (I've given an example using my own site - ironically about Panda)! Does this run the risk of creating duplicate content? I've tried searching for indexed pages in Google for past posts and only find the originals (no URLs for the LinkedIn domain). I've got a bit confused about the whole subject having read Neil Patel's excellent article on "...syndicating content without screwing up you seo"! Thank you 🙂 10FpxLP 10FpxLP
Technical SEO | | Catherine_Selectaglaze1 -
Linking Pages - 404s
Hello, I have noticed that we have recently managed to accrue a large number of 404s that are listed as Page Title/URL of Linking Page in Moz (e.g. http://www.onexamination.com/international/) but I do not know which site they are coming from, is there an easy why to find out or shall we just create redirects for them all? Thanks in advance for your help. Rose
Technical SEO | | bmjcai1 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content Crawl Diagnostics
I have Pages with Duplicate Page Content in my Crawl Diagnostics Tell Me How Can I solve it Or Suggest Me Some Helpful Tools. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nomyhot0 -
Paging Links Code - Best Way?
Currently we are using previous 1 2 3 next for our link to other inventory pages, with some variation of this javascript code javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$phMain$dlPagesTop$ctl01$lnkPageTop','') . Can search engines even index the other pages with this javascript? Is there a better way to do this?
Technical SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Generating a Sitemap for websites linked to a wordpress blog
Greetings, I'm looking for a way to generate a sitemap that will include static pages on my home directory, as well as my wordpress blog. The site that I'm trying to build this for is in a temporary folder, and can be accessed at http://www.lifewaves.com/Website 3.0 I plan on moving the contents of this folder to the root directory for lifewaves.com whenever we are go for launch. What I'm wondering is, is there a way to build a sitemap or sitemap index that will point to the static pages of my site, as well as the wordpress blog while taking advantage of the built in wordpress hierarchy? If so, what's an easy way to do this. I have generated a sitemap using Yoast, but I can't seem to find any xml files within the wordpress folder. Within the plugin is a button that I can click to access the sitemap index, but it just brings me to the homepage of my blog. Can I build a sitemap index that points to a sitemap for the static pages as well as the sitemap generated by yoast? Thank you in advance for your help!! P.S. I'm kind of a noob.
Technical SEO | | WaveMaker0 -
Are lots of links from an external site to non-existant pages on my site harmful?
Google Webmaster Tools is reporting a heck of a lot of 404s which are due to an external site linking incorrectly to my site. The site itself has scraped content from elsewhere and has created 100's of malformed URLs. Since it unlikely I will have any joy having these linked removed by the creator of the site, I'd like to know how much damage this could be doing, and if so, is there is anything I can do to minimise the impact? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140 -
External Links from own domain
Hi all, I have a very weird question about external links to our site from our own domain. According to GWMT we have 603,404,378 links from our own domain to our domain (see screen 1) We noticed when we drilled down that this is from disabled sub-domains like m.jump.co.za. In the past we used to redirect all traffic from sub-domains to our primary www domain. But it seems that for some time in the past that google had access to crawl some of our sub-domains, but in december 2010 we fixed this so that all sub-domain traffic redirects (301) to our primary domain. Example http://m.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ redirected to http://www.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ The weird part is that the number of external links kept on growing and is now sitting on a massive number. On 8 April 2011 we took a different approach and we created a landing page for m.jump.co.za and all other requests generated 404 errors. We added all the directories to the robots.txt and we also manually removed all the directories from GWMT. Now 3 weeks later, and the number of external links just keeps on growing: Here is some stats: 11-Apr-11 - 543 747 534 12-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 13-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 14-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 15-Apr-11 - 521 528 014 16-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 17-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 18-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 19-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 20-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 21-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 26-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 27-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 28-Apr-11 - 603 404 378 I am now thinking of cleaning the robots.txt and re-including all the excluded directories from GWMT and to see if google will be able to get rid of all these links. What do you think is the best solution to get rid of all these invalid pages. moz1.PNG moz2.PNG moz3.PNG
Technical SEO | | JacoRoux0