Should we Nofollow Social Links?
-
I've been asked the question of whether if we should nofollow all of our social links, would this be a wise thing to do?
I'm not exactly getting a clear answer from search results and thought you guys would be best to ask
Thanks in advance.
-
Many social media pages link to businesses; for example, on LinkedIn, someone might link to your company's blog post; this is perfectly fine; it can help more people to discover your business's content marketing and products that you sell, so your website gets more shoppers on it.
We use Facebook to promote our garden office company within Bristol, England to help promote our summerhouses on Facebook, its helped us to sell many more of our products.
-
Google doesn't utilize or recommend using the rel="me" attribute, wouldn't ask anyone to try it out.
-
@swifttr Google does not use "rel me" microformats
-
Instead of using rel="nofollow" you should use rel="me" if you're linking to your own social media pages. This allows you to explicitly tell Google that you're not just linking to those pages, but you actually control them.
By placing ‘rel=me’ attributes on all your links to your social media profiles (from your own website), it will help search engines like Google understand and have confidence that your social profiles are actually your brand.
Source: [https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/52877/should-i-use-rel-nofollow-for-social-media-links](link url) -
I think all social media links should be nofollowed!
Do you think that your social media profile will benefit if you link to it with dofollow? No! Who will benefit from it? The social media platforms and your competitors! You and your website won't get any benefit from it, rather them!
In Google you will always want your website to be first, not your social media pages.
Anyone who want to find your social media pages will find it anyway.
You nofollow all external links except social media pages? Why do you give any credit to them? Then people wonder why Facebook rules the internet... -
Hey Matty @domain-matty that's a great test but I think in your scenario the social links are in the footer of the site passing the majority of the massive link juice.
If the same links are do-follow directly through some blog anchor text and posts from your site, it will have very little to no effect on the external link juice passed from your site to your social page.
-
@tir17 Google is not actually as smart as some may think in this respect. I tested the concept out on my own site. I had social links built into my site template and not as an addon or a plugin. When I did a link audit for the first time I found my site was passing off thousands of dofollow links off to social media sites and I was truly alarmed. I very rarely allow my site to pass off any of my domain authority so over 95% of my external links I had marked as nofollow. I have a DA40 site with some really good niche link pointing at me however, I was perplexed to find in testing if I actually gave a site a keyword targeted link it has very little effect. So I then nofollowed the thousands of external dofollow links my site was passing off to social media. It was then after a about a period of two weeks the sites I tested with keyword tagreted dofollow links actually jumped. An actual sign my link juice was in fact highly diluted.
-
@jh_offlimits as you can see here and from your own research, it's unlikely that you'll get a clear answer to this question. As with many SEO related questions, the answer usually starts with "Well it depends..."
It mostly depends on what your reasons are for doing it. Take a look at this article for more info about follow vs nofollow.
Another factor that might be worth considering is if the social links are the only external links on a given page or a site. Adding nofollow to them may not be the best idea...
"Nofollowed links are also part of a natural link profile and a site with no nofollowed links looks odd." source = https://www.searchenginejournal.com/when-to-use-nofollow-on-links/
...you could always link out to somewhere else with a "dofollow" to balance things out.
See this old thread for more thoughts about that.
Also think about the anchor text of those links and how/if that may affect things.
-
Google is smart enough to work these things out. That is a good point. However, remember the more dofollow links your site hands out. The less power each external dofollow link will give.
Best to nofollow your all your social links. And save the dofollow links for the sites you choose to pass your link juice to.
Lets talk a little bit more about this subject and give an example.
Here we have two identical websites with an identical backlink profile
Site 1 DA50
Site 2 DA50 SitesSite 1 is giving out 1000 dofollow links
Site2 is giving out 10 dofollow linksIf your website was to get a link from either of these sites. You will get more ranking power from site 2 because they are passing off less links.
Another example.
Site 1 DA50
Site 2 DA90Site 1 (DA50) is passing off 50 dofollow links
Site 2 (DA90) is passing off 10,000 dofollow linksWhich site would give you more ranking power?
Answer. Site 1 (DA50)
-
Hey,
I would suggest if you're linking to your own social links to you own accounts or property pages, you do not have to mark them as no-follow. Google is smart enough to figure out your site or brand presence on social media, you can even check the same in the knowledge graph.
If you're planning to link to other social accounts or channels outside of your property, for example to an author's social media channel page or account, who is not in your organization, such links should definitely be no-follow.
-
The problem here is link dilution. The more dofollow links your site gives out. The less powerful your site becomes.
So if you have 100 posts on your site with 4 different dofollow social links on each post. Your site is passing off a passive amount of your own authority and diluting the power of the links that you choose pass authority. Also, when your site is giving off heaps of dofollow links. It does not have as much ranking power. Its best to nofollow all social links on your website if you wish to preserve your own domain authority, SERP and link equity
-
I agree with Andreas explanation of Google rules on using nofollow /
-
Hi,
In my opinion that is not negative for the SEO of your website because you are linking to sites with more authority than your website. That's positive, besides being able to increase your social traffic, those are positive signals for Google. When you go to link to sites that do not want to transmit your authority or that you just do not see them safe to the user experience you can use the nofollow tag.
I hope it helps
Regards
-
Thats a really good question and I can only tell you my own point of view. Even in SEO-world in done and not done. I just think like this:
According to Google, use nofollow for
- not trustworthy pages you link to
- paid links
- crawl prioritization
So one and two is not the case (hopefully I can trust your socials).
To Point three, some webmasters really want to safe "PR" or "DA" with not passing it to pages using nofollow. This is not working, the PR is just send to nirvana. You can't save it, it is divided by links - no matter if the are followed or not. So the only reason in point 3 is - you don't want Search Engines to notfollow and notindex your socials (last is done if you nofollow them or not) - so my Point of View:I just use nofollow in cases Google says I should (you can btw read it here https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en). Socials is not one of these cases, so I use Follow .
Add: Comments and User-Generated-Content is also a good Idea of using nofollow - dont know if Google mentions that on the given Page)
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
-
Should I nofollow/noindex the outgoing links in a news aggregator website?
We have a news aggregator site that has 2 types of pages: First Type:
Technical SEO | | undaranfahujakia
Category pages like economic, sports or political news and we intend to do SEO on these category pages to get organic traffic. These pages have pagination and show the latest and most viewed news on the corresponding category. Second Type:
News headlines from other sites are displayed on the category pages. The user will be directed to that news page on the main site by clicking on a link. These links are outgoing links and we redirect them by JavaScript (not 301).
In fact these are our websites articles that just have titles (linked to destination) and meta descriptions (reads from news RSS). Question:
Should we have to nofollow/noindex the second type of links? In fact, since the crawl budget of websites is limited, isn't it better to spend this budget on the pages we have invested in (first type)?0 -
Helping finding a link
Hi So Ive done a crawl of the site using screaming frog. There are a few old category and sub category pages which don't exist any more but somehow the crawler is finding them. An example is below: http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Home-Appliances/cat/Health-&-Beauty/subcat/Male-Grooming Just wondering if anybody had any ideas about how I could go and find these urls and remove them off the site. Any ideas would be really appreciated. Thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Optimizing internal links or over-optimizing?
For a while I hated the look of the internal links page of Google Web Master Tools account for a certain site. With a total of 120+K pages, the top internal link was the one pointing to "FAQ". With around 1M links. That was due to the fact, on every single page, both the header and the footer where presenting 5 links to the most popular questions. The traffic of those FAQ pages is non-existent, the anchor text is not SEO interesting, and theoretically 1M useless internal links is detrimental for page juice flow. So I removed them. Replacing the anchor with javascript to keep the functionality. I actually left only 1 “pure” link to the FAQ page in the footer (site wide). And overnight, the internal links page of that GWT account disappeared. Blank, no links. Now... Mhhh... I feel like... Ops! Yes I am getting paranoid at the idea the sudden disappearance of 1M internal links was not appreciated by google bot. Anyone had similar experience? Could this be seen by google bot as over-optimizing and be penalized? Did I possibly triggered a manual review of the website removing 1M internal links? I remember Matt Cutts saying adding or removing 1M pages (pages) would trigger a flag at google spam team and lead to a manual review, but 1M internal links? Any idea?
Technical SEO | | max.favilli0 -
Unnatural Links on Forum Posts
Google responds to my reconsideration request. They give me like 2 links of the many unnatural links which are actually people mentioning our website in their conversation. How can that be unnatural, legitimate people discussing about our website services? Even if it's unnatural, how can I possibly remove a backlink from a forum post?
Technical SEO | | Droidman860 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hello. My Seomoz report this week tells me that I have about 500 pages with Too Many On-Page Links One of the examples is this one: https://www.theprinterdepo.com/hp-9000mfp-refurbished-printer (104 links) If you check, all our products have a RELATED products section and in some of them the related products can be UP to 40 Products. I wonder how can I solve this. I thought that putting nofollow on the links of the related products might fix all of these warnings? Putting NOFOLLOW does not affect SEO?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Redirection help to retrieve broken links
Hi, my hosting company after they updated my joomla website lost thousands of pages of content, i am now searching for all broken links and re doing the content to get my links back, but i am having a problem understanding how to redirect these links. For example, i have now managed to retrieve this page http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/have-your-say/liberal-dem-leader-says-he-will-be-the-next-prime-minister-what-do-you-think but the old url for this page was http://www.in2town.co.uk/Have-Your-Say/Liberal-Dem-Leader-says-He-Will-be-The-Next-Prime-Minister-What-Do-You-Think/menu-id-4953 i do not have the unfriendly url for this page, so what i am trying to find out is, how to tell google that the above page is now http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/have-your-say/liberal-dem-leader-says-he-will-be-the-next-prime-minister-what-do-you-think in my joomla site. if anyone could please explain how to do this with joomla 1.5 then you will make me very happy as then i will be able to retrieve some of my lost links
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How do you find bad links to your site?
My website has around 900 incoming links and I have a Google 50 penalty that is sitewide. I have been doing research and from what I can see is that the 50 penalty is usually associated with scetchy links. The penalty started last year. I had about 40 related domains to my main site and each had a simple one page site with a link to the main site. (I know I screwed up) I cleaned up all of those links by removing them. The single page site still exist, but they have no links and several of them still rank very well. I also had an outside SEO person that bought a few links. I came clean with Google and told them everything. I gave them all of my sites and that the SEO person had bought links. I gave them full disclosure and removed everything. I have one site that I can't get the link removed from. I have contacted them numerous times to remove the link and I get no response. I am curious if anyone has had a simular experience and how they corrected the situation. Another issue is that my site is "thin" because its an ecommerce affiliate site and full of affiliate links. I work in the costume market. I'm also afraid that I have other bad links pointing to my site. Dooes anyone know of a tool to identify bad links that Google may be penalizing me for at this time. Here is Google's latest denial of my reconsideration request. Dear site owner or webmaster of XXXXXXXXX.com. We received a request from a site owner to reconsider XXXXXXXX.com for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from XXXXXXXXXX.com may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality
Technical SEO | | tadden0 -
Sitemap with links and images together
Hi there, my e-commerce platform (Magento with "Mageworx SEO Enterprise" plugin) is generating an sitemap.xml that mix text (links) and images, and the result is something like that: <url><loc>http://www.e-lustre.com.br/abajur/abajur-keops</loc>
Technical SEO | | e-Lustre
<lastmod>2011-04-10</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
image:imageimage:lochttp://www.e-lustre.com.br/catalog/product/image/size/250x250/e/-/e- lustre_mantra_0030_grande.jpg</image:loc></image:image></url> WebmasterTools accepts it, but recognize it as an image sitemap. Have you seen that kind of sitemap, and most important, do you think that's a problem ? Full file: http://www.e-lustre.com.br/sitemap.xml0