Should I nofollow certain outbound links?
-
Hi,
All of our outbound links are currently follow.I've read that the only case where nofollow should be used, according to Google, is for paid links, crawl prioritization & untrustworthy sites.The kinds of websites we are linking to from our blog include:- Websites with great content & high authority that is relevant to the topic we've written about that would enhance the user experience- Partners/companies we have a strong relationship with who also have decent authority- Social media profiles of industry people not within our organisation - Websites with definitions/wikipedia/soundcloud/published statistics/news sites and other large well known sites. I am wondering if we should put the nofollow attribute on the last 2 points (social media profiles of people we've referenced, websites with definitions/wikipedia/soundcloud/published statistics/news sites and other large well known sites.)Or do you think it's totally fine that all our links are follow provided the websites are legitimate, trustworthy and have some authority?Thanks in advance!
-
I have the simplest way to think about this. If the link is pointing out to the website you trust and you think your audience will find it useful, keep it followed. However, if the links are not trustworthy, atleast put a no-follow the link.
Other then that there are Googe guidelines as you mentioned in your question. I think no following social media and wiki-pages is up to you as it will not make much of a difference in my opinion.
-
Hi ,
Yes you are right.
I'm sharing a comment from legitimate source on the same
"Due to Wikipedia's model, its a necessity for them to have nofolow external links. It dissuades spam which is a massive problem with their model where anyone can edit and contribute. To answer your question, which is already answered here in the article, no, you do not need to nofollow your outgoing links if they are natural referring links. If you are selling links for traffic then nofollow is the norm. Thinking about "keeping" link juice is in the history books and we really need to stop thinking like its still 2002. Link out when useful to your readers without fear."
You can read more about this here @ https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/long-term-outgoing-link-experiment/
hope this helps.
Thanks
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
-
Hello, I've heard that the outbound links I provide in my content should have a high degree of relevancy to the topic I'm writing about or they aren't really worth including. Is this true?
Hello, I've heard that relevancy of the content between the source page and the target page of outbound links in my content matters greatly. The outbound links I provide in my content should have a high degree of relevancy to the topic I'm writing about, or they aren't really worth including. Example: Don't just link to the homepage of an organization mentioned in the article, link to a page on their site that is related to the topic you are writing about. Is this true? Would including less relevant links negatively impact SEO in any way?
On-Page Optimization | | DJBKBU0 -
Automated checking for broken links within content pieces
Hi, I am wondering if anyone can send me in the right direction on a system suggestion. We have currently grown out amount of content pieces on our website and our manual checking if the links in the content pieces are still 200 status is becoming extremely time consuming. Does anyone have a recommendation of a system that will crawl your pages and check both the internal and external links within the content for a status code (404,200,etc)? Preferably something server side so it can just run on a schedule but really anything would be fine. I have tried things like Screaming frog, etc and it just doesn't seem to be the right tool.
On-Page Optimization | | GoAbroadKP0 -
Outgoing Links Best Practice
Hi, It is my understanding that it is good practice to add relevant out going links to my content pages. I do not intend to over do it and the out going links I intend to add would be useful for the reader. My question is do I need to add noindex/nofollow tags to these links? Does it make any difference either way or can I just leave them as index/follow links? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | UnderMe0 -
Nofollow within your site, is it ever a good idea?
I started a new job running a companies E-commerce site. I have been going thought the site, backlinks etc to see what the current status is. I have noticed that they have "no followed some categorises on the (huge) mega menu, but also they have no followed every product form categories. Now personally I would have no follows on the login/register/checkout page, and maybe some external links, but my understanding has always been that by using no follow on internal links you just throwing away google juice. I'm thinking was someone at some stage trying to do some misguided link sculpting with no follow, or I'm I missing something Note: the company does not have brands per say for the product pages and so are not landing pages (the categories are landing pages)
On-Page Optimization | | PaddyDisplays0 -
Optimise duplicate products or canonical link
We exist in a niche market with a good % of products that sell well at specific times of the year. Lets say for example a red cup can be sold as a christmas red cup and a valentine red cup or just a red cup. Would we be best to optimize each specific product specifically for those seasons/events on different pages or keep google pointed to just one page using a canonical link.
On-Page Optimization | | LadyApollo0 -
Tag clouds: good for internal linking and increase of keyword relevant pages?
As Matt Cutts explained, tag clouds are OK if you're not engaged in keyword stuffing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPX_ZmhLqg) - i.e. if you're not putting in 500 tags. I'm currently creating tags for an online-bookseller; just like Amazon this e-commerce-site has potentially a couple of million books. Tag clouds will be added to each book detail page in order to enrich each of these pages with relevant keywords both for search engines and users (get a quick overview over the main topics of the book; navigate the site and find other books associated with each tag). Each of these book-specific tag clouds will hold up to 50 tags max, typically rather in the range of up to 10-20. From an SEO perspective, my question is twofold: 1. Does the site benefit from these tag clouds by improving the internal linking structure? 2. Does the site benefit from creating lots of additional tag-specific-pages (up to 200k different tags) or can these pages become a problem, as they don't contain a lot of rich content as such but rather lists of books associated with each tag? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | semantopic0 -
Max # of recommended links per page?
I've heard it said that Google may choose to stop following links after the first 100 on a page. The landing/category pages for my site's product catalog have earned quite a respectable PR and positioning in search results, and I'm currently paginating their product listings (about 200 products in a category) so that only a couple dozen products are shown on the first page, with links to "next page" and "previous page" being accomplished via query string (i.e. "?page=3"). An alternative option I have is to link to 100% of the contained products within the category's landing page (which would increase my on-page link count to ~300) and use CSS/Javascript to allow the user to simulate browsing between pages on the client side. My goal is to see as many of my product pages indexed as possible. Is this done better using my current scheme (where Googlebot would have to navigate to, say, Landing Page -> Page 6 -> Deeply Buried Product Page) or in the alternative method above, where all the links are in a single page? Since my landing pages are currently treated pretty well by search engines, would that "trust" cause them to follow more links than might normally be done? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | cadenzajon0 -
Too many on page links
Our home page (and 1400 of our other pages) have well over 100 links, going beyond the recommend amount. Our competitors have less on page links (to other pages on their site) and way more link popularity so we are trying to figure out the best solution for this without hurting our sites conversions and usbaility.
On-Page Optimization | | iAnalyst.com0