University website outbound links issue
-
Hi - I'm working on a university website and have found a load of (1) outbound links to companies that have commercial tie ups to the university and, beyond that, loads of (2) outbound links to companies set up by alumni and (3) outbound links to commercial clients of the university.
Your opinions on whether I should nofollow these, or not, would be welcome. At the moment I'm tempted to nofollow (1) yet leave (2) and (3) - quite simply because the (1) backlinks may have been negotiated as part of a package (nobody can actually remember at the university!), yet (2) and (3) were freely given by the university.
Your thoughts would be welcome!
-
Totally agree with Dirk. If the links offer value to the visitor and if grouped are tightly and obviously associated with the theme of the page then they should always be left as is. If there is a hint of paid for they should be no-follow, but in essence having no-follow means you don't trust the page/site so why have it there in the first place (unless there is some commercial interest in having it there).
-
Hi,
In Ideal case we should avoid to give dofollow outbound backlinks but Rand Fishkin himself suggest we should give few outbound links to authority website but those few links should be dofollow & if you use nofollow that means you are telling Google you don't trust the sites!.
In case 2 & 3 you should use nofollow to prevent flowing link equity to other sites.
Thanks
-
Hi Luke,
To me, it doesn't seem really abnormal that a university would have tons of links going to associated companies, alumni companies,.. etc. I think the basic question is - do these links look "natural" when you check them, or are they rather commercial. If they make sense on the page, or add value, I would leave them. If not, make them nofollow.
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
Slideshare - Links within
Hi Guys I am going to be putting some powerpoint presentations up over time. I have a couple of questions regarding slideshare. If I add links to the slideshare are these crawl able by Google etc...? If I places the powepoint presentation on our website and slideshare would this be counter productive i.e duplicate content? Love to here your suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Our website is not being indexed
We have an issue with a site that we can't get to the bottom of. This site: (URL removed) is not being properly indexed. When we do a search for (URL removed) in google.com.au. The site appears as the 4th listing with the following title and description: (Title removed) A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. We have checked the site's robots.txt and can see its been now implemented correctly: (URL removed) About a week ago, we also went into Webmaster Tools and submitted a request for Google to recrawl our site. We are unsure what the issue is that is causing the site to not be properly indexed and how to resolve it. Any assistance on this topic would be most appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Crawling issue
Hello, I am working on 3 weeks old new Magento website. On GWT, under index status >advanced, I can only see 1 crawl on the 4th day of launching and I don't see any numbers for indexed or blocked status. | Total indexed | Ever crawled | Blocked by robots | Removed |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sedamiran
| 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | I can see the traffic on Google Analytic and i can see the website on SERPS when i search for some of the keywords, i can see the links appear on Google but i don't see any numbers on GWT.. As far as I check there is no 'no index' or robot block issue but Google doesn't crawl the website for some reason. Any ideas why i cannot see any numbers for indexed or crawled status on GWT? Thanks Seda | | | | |
| | | | |0 -
Website Layout and SEO
Hi All, As a brand new user to Wordpress and having read articles and forum posts I have purchased Studiopress Genesis Enterprise Theme. QuestionWordpress like any traditional bespoke site can be written to incorporate variations of columns structures.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
What is the best column strategy or page layout strategy for SEO? Thanks Mark0 -
If other websites implement our RSS feed sidewide on there website, can that hurt our own website?
Think about the switching anchors from the backlinks and the 100s of sidewide inlinks... I gues Google will understand that it's just a RSS feed right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
How to link my websites with each other - to avoid google penalities and get some value
I have good high DA PA websites hosted on same IP, added in same google analytics and GWT account. So i think google knows that owner is the same. How should we link them with each other to get some value? Put nofollow? With what anchor (Money keyword or domain name)? But whats the point? We cannot make natural link building profile with our own website nofollow links, i assume they will not count. What can you suggest? Maybe it is better not to link at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
Do nofollow links affect link profile?
I've read that it's good to keep a natural link profile. Some naked links, some links going to our company name, some with anchor text, etc. Do nofollow links affect this link profile, or is it only followed links that are taken into account?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
Website Crawl problems
I have a feeling that Google doesn't crawl my website. E.g. this blogpost - I copy a sentence from it and paste it to Google. The page that shows up in search results is www.silvamethodlife.com/page/9/ - which is just a blog page with all the articles listed, not the link to the article itself! Did anyone ever have this problem? It's definitely some technical issue. Any advice will be deeply appreciated Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexey_mindvalley0