Do follow links
-
Is it good(according to SEO) to give dofollow rel to external links of highly trusted websites from our content?
-
Great reply from Tom. The other way to see it (more from philosophical nature) - by definition the 'world wide web' is
'The World Wide Web (www, W3) is an information system of interlinked hypertext documents that are accessed via the Internet and built on top of the Domain Name System'. (Wikipedia)
If you site only has only incoming links, and no outgoing links - it's like a dead end street (or and end-node) and would be a bit in contradiction of what the www is (was) all about. It would also seem that you are convinced that your site has all the possible answers / solutions for a certain topic and that you are convinced that no other site could be of interest for your visitors.
No hard facts or figures to support this theory, just my gut feeling. If you have a number of good external references that have added value content for your visitors I would certainly link to them.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Hi Ravi
In short, you should be looking to link out to external, authority resources if you think it would be beneficial for the user. Make that your main focus when doing so.
Having said that, let's look at the SEO theory behind this. Some SEO's argue that linking out to authority websites from your content can help your own SEO. The theory they site is that if you link to authority articles/websites within your industry from your own content/website, then your own website will be associated with that industry and subsequent authority. This is the lexical co-occurrence theory. The genius that is Bill Slawski goes over this topic in great depth here.
So is it really a case of linking to authority sites to be associated with them? To be honest, I doubt it. I don't think that part of the algorithm could be gamed so easily. Is it likely to have a negative effect on your SEO. Again, I'd say that's very unlikely.
If you subscribe to that theory, I don't think you'd have anything to lose - although you are sending a potential lead away from your website (plus diluting your link equity of the page a bit with an external link). There certainly is not enough evidence or case studies to support the claim, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it wouldn't work. In my own personal opinion, however, I don't think this will have any sort of noticeable impact on your SEO.
My $0.02. Hope this helps.
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
-
Google Parsing jQuery Links as Real Links
While trying to diagnose a recent Google penalty I found out that links were being parsed by Google even though they were made using jQuery. I had the linkify plugin on my site and configured it to convert URLs to links on all of my pages. Today I found links to other sites of mine from sites that should not have been linking to them and found that the links came from pages whose links were generated via jQuery. This makes me wonder, how do I know if Google is counting javascript generated links? Is it possible that my native ad widgets are creating links that Google might count? Since I don't own any of the sites that advertise via the widgets I don't know how to tell if they are getting link juice or not. It used to be that Google didn't parse javascript, so you could add as many links to your site via javascript as you wanted without being seen by Google as linking to those sites. Does anyone know of a jQuery plugin that does turn URLs into clickable links that Google won't parse as real links?
On-Page Optimization | | STDCarriers0 -
Alt text / internal linking
Hi everyone A question about best practice when linking from pictures on our homepage - hirespace.com We have an option of using divs with background images (nicer in terms of design) but it means that we can't use anchor text or alt text to show Google what these internal links are about. The other option is to use images which do not allow us as much flexibility in terms of CSS but would allow us to use alt text. There is also an opinion that we should have separate text links at the bottom of the homepage to get the anchor page in. What is best practice in this situation - is alt text worth sacrificing some CSS flexibility for? How important is anchor/alt text for internal linking? Thanks guys.
On-Page Optimization | | HireSpace0 -
No index, or no index no follow?
Wondering if I could garner some views on this issue please. I'm about to add an affiliate store to a website I own, the site has a couple of pages of unique content (blogs, articles, advice etc on home improvement - all written by my team). Obviously, the affiliate store will not be unique content, it will be made using the datafeeds from cj.com et al, and so I don't want to get any duplicate content type penalties from Google for this store. Should I add a no index to the pages and allow the bots to still crawl them, or should I add no index and no follow? Ideally I would like to get the affiliate store category pages indexed as they will be a mixture of lots of different merchants and be fairly unique. Can Google still mark the site down for duplicate content if it can crawl it, even if it is noindex? Thanks, Carl
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Which pages on my site should I back link to
The majority of the back links I have been creating link directly to our home page and to the store page. Is this the best approach or should I be trying to spread the links throughout our site to include product categories and subcategories etc?
On-Page Optimization | | Hardley0 -
Limiting On Page Links
Right now, we have about 160 or so links on the home page. It's been recommended that we keep it to under 100, though that's not as big of a deal as it once was. Is it helpful to make a bunch of those links "nofollow" in order to preserve link juice? Is it going to make a difference, or be at all helpful? I assume it won't be harmful, especially as a bunch of them are to the same page but on different sections of the page. Would live your advice and thoughts! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | DeliaAssociates0 -
product links
If you sell a range of products say 3 at the most, all on their own pages, is it ok to link to the other products within the range from each page? I have tried this and it eventually leads back to the same page is this a good, bad or doesn't really matter thing? Also is the anchor text still important?
On-Page Optimization | | LadyApollo0 -
Too many links on page has a state directory how do i lessen this?
I dont mean how do i take away links on the page but i know right off i am going to have at least 50 right off the bat and with my footer and menu bar and such im up over the limit of 100. My seo guy took care of it on my one site and dont know how Site with issue is www.Preexistingconditioninsuranceplan.com/pcip-states one that was fixed that doesnt appear to be too many on seomoz was http://criticalillnesspolicies.com/insurance-coverage/united-states/ if anyone can inform or decypher the code please let me know
On-Page Optimization | | lance010 -
Links to subfolders
Hi everyone, I would like to know your opinion on this. Do you feel like optimizing, especially pointing links to a subfolder, e.g. www.domain.com/en/ (english language), should be the same as doing that for the main URL (another language)? That said, do you think all the domain will benefit from anchors to subfolders? Thanks a lot!
On-Page Optimization | | SEOpt0