Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
-
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post.
Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website.
Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal?
Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
-
Just a little more info from Google here as well on how Pagerank Sculpting no longer works...
http://www.thesempost.com/google-pagerank-sculpting-still-doesnt-work/
-
I'm with inbound.org, and second what ThompsonPaul says. This email was about not indexing profiles that are incomplete and have thin content, and doesn't have anything to do with outbound links.
My take on links I make out from my own website:
- Nofollow affiliate links
- Nofollow links I don't trust -- but I generally won't link to things I don't trust, or would just make it so there's a space in the URL or it otherwise doesn't link
- Leave most every link followed. It's my site, I'm going to link out to sites I trust. If I have comments, those will be nofollow, as I'm not the author and not endorsing where the comments are linking.
Good info from Matt Cutts here about how nofollow hasn't been used to 'conserve' link equity in some time. https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
-
thank you good sir.
-
As I mention in my other comment, Sandi, no-following links doesn't preserve "SEO juice" at all. That hasn't been the case in many years.
And what Inbound is doing is completely different. They are No-Indexing entire pages that had so little content on them that they had no value, were wasting the site's crawl budget and looked like thin/duplicate content to the search engines. Nothing to do with the links on them at all. (This is actually a best practice for any site, but especially directory-type sites.)
P.
-
No-following links has ABSOLUTELY ZERO EFFECT on preserving "link juice" of a page, Rich. This used to be the case six years ago when no-follow for links was first introduced, but it was being abused so badly that search engines changed this behaviour. (This used to be referred to as PageRank sculpting)
Further to Andy's and Dmytro's comments - Google is clear there are only three circumstances when no-follow should be used:
- you have a commercial relationship with the page you're linking too (paid links, but also many guest post scenarios for example)
- you didn't create the link and therefore can't trust it (e.g. user comments or other user generated content)
- you are linking to an unreliable site (to demonstrate a bad example,for instance)
- (and a bonus fourth) links to administrative-type pages that wouldn't be of any use to a search visitor like a privacy/terms of service or login page).
There's also been considerable discussion that Google in particular considers no-following of all external links a sign of unnatural manipulation that could damage page authority.
So... conceptually a good idea at one time, but no longer valid and potentially harmful.
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
Thanks Andy!
-
Hi Rich,
Don't nofollow for the sake of it. If a link is paid for, then yes, you should nofollow this, but that is probably one of the very few occasions i would suggest you do it.
Perhaps if you have written a blog post and then were asked to inject a link into it, then I would be tempted to nofollow that, but I wouldn't do it to try and retain link juice - that isn't really a tactic these days.
Google wants to see you link to sites externally, as long as it is called for - this will help show your authority as well.
-Andy
-
Hi,
I don't necessarily agree that too many outbound links can harm your own SEO. In fact, Matt Cutts has tons of outbound links on his blog, so as long as links are relevant from a user perspective there shouldn't be any issues.
Back to the follow/nofollow, if you are linking out to trusted and relevant sources, I don't see any reason to nofollow the links. On the other hand, if you have user generated content, I would nofollow external links, because you won't always know where are they linking out.
Hope this helps!
Dmytro
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
-
Is there any significant benefit to creating online directory listings that only provide nofollow links to our domain?
Is there any significant benefit to creating online directory listings that only provide nofollow links to our domain? For context, whilst doing link gap analysis I've found our competitors are listed on local government directories such as getsurrey.co.uk and miltonkeynes.co.uk. Whilst these aren't seen as spam directories, it's still highly unlikely we'll receive much traffic through them. The links they provide to our domain have the nofollow tag. So I wonder whether there's any other benefit to investing the time in creating these listings? Would be interested to hear your thoughts Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Opera-Care1 -
How to rank for a location/country without having a physical address in that location/country
How do I go about it if my physical address (office) is in Country A but I want to rank my website in Country B, C and D (without having an office or physical address in the countries B, C and D)? I am aware of people setting up virtual offices in other countries/cities and adding them to Google Places/Maps with toll free phone numbers, but I don't wish to do any of that. I know Google will catch up with this one day or the other and punish me hard for trying to play games with it. Is there a way rank a website in another country without actually having a physical location there? If yes, please guide me how to go about it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0 -
Good or bad adding keywords in Pinterest description?
I added all keywords in description. Will this affect my website, Google takes this as negative way? I am not adding keywords on my own website, but adding keywords to third party website? https://www.pinterest.com/pin/304555993526970292/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
Does Disavowing Links Negate Anchor Text, or Just Negates Link Juice
I'm not so sure that disavowing links also discounts the anchor texts from those links. Because nofollow links absolutely still pass anchor text values. And disavowing links is supposed to be akin to nofollowing the links. I wonder because there's a potential client I'm working on an RFP for and they have tons of spammy directory links all using keyword rich anchor texts and they lost 98% of their traffic in Pengiun 1.0 and haven't recovered. I want to know what I'm getting into. And if I just disavow those links, I'm thinking that it won't help the anchor text ratio issues. Can anyone confirm?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
<loc>tag empty in sitemap, is this ok?</loc>
Hi - our website's sitemap is pretty huge, and I'm trying to generate it with the hreflang= information in it, because we have 11 different language sites all under the .com. I used the Media Flow generator for this purpose, but it returned a lot of entries with a blank tag. Our U.S. website by far has the most pages, so an example of what I'm getting is: Does this look correct???? Doesn't to me but I'm unsure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
How to detect a bad link and remove ?
As per google penguin, all the low quality back links are going to affect the website SERPS hugely. So, we need to find all the bad back links and then remove them one by one. What I would like to know is, what tool do you use to find all the bad back links ? And how do we know which is a bad back link or bad website, where our link should not be there ? Then what service what do you suggest for back links removal. I contacted LinkDelete.com and they quoted me 97$ for a month to remove all links in less than 3 weeks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monali123
Let me know, what you suggest.0 -
Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea
Hi Folks, Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites. Should we focus on the long tail again? One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities. e.g. Stirling
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shooting We are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map. These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns. At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to. With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive! Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get. Is there a limit to how big a site should be? edit0 -
Noindex,follow is a waste of link juice?
On my wordpress shopping cart plugin, I have three pages /account, /checkout and /terms on which I have added “noindex,follow” attribute. But I think I may be wasting link juice on these pages as they are not to be indexed anyway, so is there any point giving them any link juice? I can add “noindex,nofollow” on to the page itself. However, the actual text/anchor link to these pages on the site header will remain “follow” as I have no means of amending that right now. So this presents the following two scenarios – No juice flows from homepage to these 3 pages (GOOD) – This would be perfect then, as the pages themselves have nofollow attribute. Juice flows from homepage to these pages (BAD) - This may mean that the juice flows from homepage anchor text links to these 3 pages BUT then STOPS there as they have “nofollow” attribute on that page. This will be a bigger problem and if this is the case and I cant stop the juice from flowing in, then ill rather let it flow out to other pages. Hope you understand my question, any input is very much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck1