Rel-nofollow for price comparison site?
-
I run a price comparison site, so we have TONS of outbound links. Should my outbound links be marked with 'rel=nofollow'?
-
Many of the big affiliate and price comparison websites route links through an internal folder first. This allows them to record the conversion, set a cookie, etc... It also makes all of those outbound links look like internal links. Usually it looks somethingl ike this:
Web Page hyperlink for "Visit OnlineStore.com" is actually a link to YourDomain.com/partners?merchant=OnlineStore. From there it will redirect (what kind doesn't really matter here) to OnlineStore.com along with any affiliate code you have added to the URL for their tracking purposes, if necessary. Typically /partners is blocked in the Robots.txt file so the search engine can't even follow it to see that it's an external link.
-
I would want to keep my follow links to a bare minimum, very trusted sites. The rest make them nofollow, without having to worry about problems in making the change!
-
Ben,
Not necessarily, the outbound links in the case of your site are to help your visitors, and I don't really see a reason to nofollow them. That said, I'm assuming your asking this because of disbursement of link equity, and in that case I still wouldn't mark the links as nofollow. Instead, I would suggest changing the site structure or the outbound links themselves so that there's not so much on one page.
Changing links to nofollow on a case by case basis isn't really scalable, and if it's a big problem, there's probably other issues that need to be resolved first.
Hopefully that helps!
-
Hello,
In my opinion you should put rel=nofollow on all external/affiliate links (and prey not be penalized by Google Animals)
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
-
Increasing pageviews on a social networking site
Our social networking site, Yookos, has a target of 25 million pageviews by yearend 2013. This is part of my responsibilities. As with all social platforms, user authentication is required before one can access the content. What can i do to improve the pageviews exponentially?
On-Page Optimization | | seoworx1231 -
Keyword usage in eCommerce Sites - Danger of keyword stuffing?
Hi all, I'm having a little difficulty deciding the best approach for selecting my product titles as I've encountered a few issues. I understand how important it is to try and use the keyword in your product titles, but about the category page that lists all of these products? One of category pages, for example, has 16 products on it. Each has the product title followed by the keyword. I have also used the keyword in the category title, URL, breadcrumbs and two or 3 times (because it was natural) in a paragraph that describes the category etc. Due to the little amount of text on the page, and the sheer amount of times that the keyword is being used, it looks like I am keyword stuffing (By Moz On Page Report Card). I think it came to 23 uses of the same keyword altogether. This is the pretty much teh same throughout every category page on my site, and think I was penalised by Google for this reason. I'm a relatively new site and have done everything by the book as far as I know, so everything is pointing at this to be the cause of the drop/disappearance in ranking. How do I rectify this problem? It's important for the products to have the keyword in, right? As this is one of the SEO practices that is given more weight when considering rankings. I have thought a potential way around this, which is to split the keyword between an exact match, and a variant of the keyword in the titles - only very slightly though. So my product titles would look like 'Product A Exact Match Keyword', 'Product B Variant on Keyword' etc. Could this work? Can anybody advise on the best thing I could try? I have attached an image to give you an idea of the layout of my category pages - Apologies in advance about my embarrassingly rubbish photoshop skills! I wasn't able to upload directly, so I have attached a link. Thanks for reading, John 4iIkmSx
On-Page Optimization | | John_Francis0 -
[HTML Gurus] Is the only nofollow = rel="nofollow"?
From my knowledge only way an HTML link is nofollow is using rel="nofollow". I was wondering if you have a link , is there anything you can put OTHER than rel="nofollow" within the <a></a>tags that make a link nofollow?
On-Page Optimization | | William.Lau0 -
Disappearing Rel=Canonical Code
Hi, I've been getting a lot of rel=canonical warnings from seomoz. I went into the original pages and pasted in plain text the following code: link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/blog/my-awesome-blog-post"< (the > are reversed). After a few crawls I couldn't see any effect from posting the code. When I went and checked again, it didn't stay in the wysiwyg editor. It disappeared! We are using Drupal 6. Could someone tell me what code I should be pasting? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | OTSEO0 -
Moving a site from .cfm to Wordpress - How to keep the authority?
Hi guys, My client has a site built with Cold Fusion (web pages end in .cfm) and we're moving them over to Wordpress (for many reasons), keeping the same menu structure and navigation. Their previous SEO company was pretty awful, however, they did manage to establish some decent authority/backlinks for the website and its 20 or so pages. My questions: I assume I'll want to do 301 redirects for each page, possibly by editing the .htaccess file? Any advice on this? Anything else I need to consider in this move? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | alpen0 -
Index.php + external site added to end of URL
Good day, I have a domain http://www.ecofriendlylink.com. I am trying to resolve the Crawl Diagnostic errors on it. I have several Duplicate Page Content errors. Example 1: (The domain happynewyou is not mine, some Comments from them have been placed on my site. Ecoshop.php is a page on my site). URL: http://www.ecofriendlylink.com Duplicate Page Content: http://www.ecofriendlylink.com/www./happynewyou.com/ecoshop.php Referrer: None. Example 2: URL: http://ecofriendlylink.com/index.php Duplicate Page Content: http://www.ecofriendlylink.com/index.php http://www.ecofriendlylink.com/www./happynewyou.com/index.php Referrer: http://ecofriendlylink.com/ Example 3: is a different problem, but still a Dup Page Error. URL: http://ecofriendlylink.com/water.php Duplicate Page Content: http://www.ecofriendlylink.com/water.php Referrer: http://ecofriendlylink.com/ water.php is a page on my main domain. The www version and the non-www version, if this a problem and something I need to overcome? So please can you advise what I need to do to get rid of this strange external domain name + index.php (as per examples 1 + 2), and explain what I'm doing wrong with Ex 3. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | drkevinhogan0 -
What is this site all about?
Can anyone here tell me what this site is all about?... I really need to know, i have a blog.
On-Page Optimization | | Wales33030 -
Checking for content duplication against content on your own site.
We are currently trying to rewrite our product descriptions and I'm afraid some of the salespeople that are writing the descriptions are plagiarizing one-another's writing. Is there a content duplication checker that will allow you to check a piece of writing against a specific site rather than all of the web?
On-Page Optimization | | MichealGooden0