Outbound Links
-
I have a page on upstrap-pro.com that provides weights of cameras and lenses. The user/buyer of my on-slip camera straps needs to know the weight his camera and lens to determine the proper pad size... large to small. We have put together a long list of the most popular customer cameras. The way it was done (by my daughter) was to also provide a via a link to dpreview.com which is an excellent site for camera information including specifications etc. My personal feeling about this is mixed. I can do it by having it open dpreview.com in a new tab but then the user/customer could still get distracted and go down the rabbit hole. On the other hand dpreview is such a good site that if they are new to photography and don't know about it, they should. I don't get a dime from dpreview. If fact I doubt they would ever link back to me because they do not write about camera straps.
I hear mixed things about outbound links. In this file there are quite a few outbound links to dpreview to keep it consistent. I could do a nofollow on all of them but I read that this is the easy way out. Google is jump ball and I have no clue what Cutts and his merry men are going to decide is cool or not cool.
I'd like some thoughts or options... Thanks... A small part of the file below.
Wideangle prime lens
Canon EF
22.8 oz
645 g
-
Bleed is just slang that means that portion of the PageRank is lost. If a page has multiple outgoing links, the PageRank is divided among them. If some of these links are nofollow, the portion of the PageRank associated with those links is not only not passed on, it is lost. In other words, the PageRank is divided among all outgoing links, both follow and nofollow.
-
That helped....thanks. So the short version is to use them in no follow mode and do not put them in the site map. I might do a generic header with the link to dpreview that allows the to go there if they want but not a link on every single one. Besides, there are other good sites such as Ken Rockwell.
-
This is jargon I do not understand. Bleed...dirt below?
-
Thanks.. so if I understand you this page can't be in the site map .
-
I wouldn't worry too much about losing PageRank. In the old days, SEOs used this technique known as PageRank sculpting, but a few years ago Google changed how they handle nofollow links so that you don't actually save anything by using them.
Nofollow should be used on links you don't trust or can't vouch for, and for paid or non-editorial links. Since these links don't fall into any of these buckets, there shouldn't be an issue.
As far as linking out, the real question here is what would make your visitors most happy? Sometimes a visitor that clicks away and goes down a rabbit hole is happier than one who doesn't find anything interesting on your site, so it's best to weigh all sides.
Best of luck!
-
Right, I was commenting on your use of the word bleed, which refers to the affect on the page with the link, not the page that is linked. I agree, nofollow does not transfer PageRank; it just bleeds to the dirt below. At least, that is my understanding.
Best,
Christopher -
I don't think you are correct. Google isn't the most truthful at times, but straight from the horse's mouth:
How does Google handle nofollowed links?
In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using
nofollow
causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without usingnofollow
, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handlenofollow
in slightly different ways.https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en&ref_topic=2371375
-
It is my understanding that follow and nofollow external links bleed the same page rank.
Best,
Christopher -
I would just go with the no follow if the issue is that you are concerned about bleeding page rank. I don't think it is a big issue either way though.
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
-
Regarding Internal Links
I analyse my Birthday Page "https://www.giftalove.com/birthday"with comapare link profiles and found that total Internal Link 47,234. How my internal link suddenly increse. Please provide my details about my internal links.
Technical SEO | | Packersmove0 -
Spammy nofollow links
Hello, One of our clients - a cleaning business - has a heck of a lot of spammy nofollow links pointing to their site. The majority of the links are from comments or 'pingbacks', most with the anchor text 'cheap nfl jerseys' or 'cyber monday ugg boots'. After researching the subject of spammy nofollow links, it seems there is a lot of uncertainty regarding the negative affect these could have on your SEO efforts. So I guess my question to the community is: if your site was suddenly hit by a plethora of spammy nofollow links, what would you do and why? Cheers, Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Referencing links in Articles and Blogs
Hi I am wondering if the <sup>tag in html is picked up by google as a reference point?</sup> I.e when you put a superscript in word it puts a small number next to your sentence. Then you have a list of reference at the end of the blog/article does google recognise this?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Better to Remove Toxic/Low Quality Links Before Building New High Quality Links?
Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. The SEO firm believes it imperative to remove links from the toxic domains. Should I remove toxic links before building new one? Or should we first work on building new links before removing the toxic ones? My site only has 442 subdomains with links pointing to it. I am concerned that there may be a drop in ranking if links from the toxic domains are removed before new quality ones are in place. For a bit of background my site has a MOZ Domain authority of 27, a Moz page authority of 38. It receives about 4,000 unique visitors per month through organic search. About 150 subdomains that link to my site have a Majestic SEO citation flow of zero and a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero. They are pretty low quality. However I don't know if I am better off removing them first or building new quality links before I disavow more than a third of the links to the site. Any ideas? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Penalised due to links?
Hi, Is there a way to tell if a site has been penalised for it's links? Our site dropped last Friday, and we would like to rule out links, as we plan to move the site to our main site and re-direct the links, unless Google would punish the new url due to this. Our old site does not show any warnings for the link, and neither does our Google WM account, the only thing we have to go by is a big drop in SERP. Many thanks. Quime.
Technical SEO | | Quime0 -
Anchor links percent
I really don't have a clue about how many internal anchor links are recommended for a page. I think it could be split into anchor text in the article content and also in the whole page. The article content: Only the unique content of this page The whole page: Everthing including menus, sitemap, etc. Does percent really matter? Could an excesive amount of anchor links diminish pagerank in the source page? Can google see an excesive amount of internal content links as spamming? Thanks 🙂 !!
Technical SEO | | heroselohim0 -
Too many on page links
Hello I have about 800 warnings with this. Example of one url with this problem is: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/clearance?dir=asc&order=price I was checking and I think all links are important. But I suppose that if I put a nofollow on the links on the left which are only for navigation purposes I can get rid of these warnings. Any other idea?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Should I have a 'more' button for links?
I have a website that has a page for each town. rather than listing all the towns with a link to each, I want to show only the most popular towns and have a 'more' button that shows all of them when you click it. I know that the search engine can always see the full list of links and even though the visitor can't this doesn't go against Google guidelines because there is no deception involved, the more button is quite clear. However, my colleague is concerned that this is 'making life hard' for the search engines and so the pages are less likely to be indexed. I disagree. Is he right to worry about this??
Technical SEO | | mascotmike0