Best practice for listings with outbound links

[simon_realbuzz]

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)

[EGOL]

These links sound relevant and extremely wholesome.

Great websites link to other great websites all of the time.

[eyepaq]

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.

[eyepaq]

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.