Blog links - follow or nofollow?
-
I need my memory refreshed here!
Say, I've got a blog and some of the posts have links to recommended external sites and content. Should these be nofollowed?
They're not paid links or anything like that, simply things relevant to the post.
-
Agreed. It's called the web for a reason - a web of links. To my way of thinking, when I link out I am saying to Google: this is my neighborhood, and I am linking to it.
-
Gyi - the fear has subsided for the time being!
Thanks for the response
-
Thanks Keri. Well put
I've taken it on board
-
Google doesn't have the x-ray vision some of us fear.
The ONLY reason to nofollow a link, IMO, is because you have sold the link and want to be compliant with Google Webmaster Guidelines. To use nofollow in most other cases makes no sense to me.
I know it was developed to prevent blog spam - and if you don't have time to moderate comments, then nofollow might make sense. But, IMO, it's better to have a clearly stated followed, moderated blog comment policy; when readers know that substantive comments are approved and followed, it encourages participation.
-
+1 for what Keri said. Don't fear linking out. It's upsetting that so many webmasters are suffering from outbound link paranoia. In fact, many are just wholesale nofollowing their entire sites. So sad.
-
I'd put the links out there straight. I don't see anything for you to worry about at all. You're curating the links, you feel they are valuable, let Google know they are valuable and trusted links.
-
As long as you doing it the right way you will be ok. Good luck with it. Nice taliking to you.
-
Yes, that's a fair point.
My caution is because in the past, the blog didn't link out to other sites at all. Now I've just started creating posts with external links in them.
As long as this won't be detrimental in anyway, I'll carry on
-
I dont think that woukld be a problem as long they are no links to spammy sites of some kind. The thing is it is really hard for google to see if it is a paid link and they will not just give you a penalty for without looking into it.
-
I know that google's traditional stance on this is that any paid links should be nofollowed, so I just don't want google to think that these might be paid links which haven't been nofollowed... and therefore impose a penalty for this.
-
I would say make it dofollow because this way you will pass linjuice to the other site and kind of reward them for good information.
If you are asking because you are loooking for blogs to comment on i wont worry to much. The thing is if you are going to get 99% dofollow and 1% NOFOLLOW people will notsee this as natural and nobody want that.
Hope this helps
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 no-index categories of my blog?
I have blog with lots of articles & it also has lots of categories. These categories are currently indexed in the google and moz showing missing title and description for these categories. Should I place no-index tag in all the categories or leave it as it is?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhakasseo0 -
Any idea why Google Search Console stopped showing "Internal Links" and "Links to your site"
Our default eCommerce property (https://www.pure-elegance.com) used to show several dozen External Links and several thousand Internal Links on Google Search Console. As of this Friday both those links are showing "No Data Available". I checked other related properties (https://pure-elegance.com, http:pure-elegance.com and http://www.pure-elegance.com) and all of them are showing the same. Our other statistics (like Search Analytics etc.) remain unchanged. Any idea what might have caused this and how to resolve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SudipG0 -
To recover from Penguin update, shall i remove the links or disavow links?
Hi, One of our websites hit by Penguin update and I now know where the links are coming from. I have chance to remove the links from those incoming links but I am a little confused whether i should just remove the links from incoming links or disavow the links? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
SEO from links in frames?
A site was considering linking to us. Their web page is delivered entirely via frames. Humans can see the links on the page, but it's not visible in source. I'm guessing it means Google can't detect the links, and there is no SEO effect, but I wanted to confirm. Here's the site: http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Example links are the Princeton Review and Kaplan on the right sidebar. Here's the source code: view-source:http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Do those links have any SEO impact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
Should I nofollow the links in the drop-down nav menu?
Currently we have a big drop down navigation menu with a hell of a lot of links for this site: shoesinternational.co.uk SEOmoz is complaining that pretty much all pages have too many links, around the 160 link mark. Should I think about nofollowing all or certain links on the navigation
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0 -
Internal linking between categories
Is it necessary to do internal links between the same categories of a website ( Let's say Ihave a category about shoes and in the category I have a page about boots and one about sandals ( should the page boots be accessible from the page sandals and the other way round or is the back button going back to the section shoes enough ) ? If internal links between the same category ( sandals to boots ) are needed/recommended is it also a good practice to do site wide links between categories ( shoes and and bags for example ) Because by reading google recommendations "Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link" I am not sure if they are talking about breadcrumbs or text links i am kind of lost ... Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Do Follow and No Follow Attributes?
I have a blog on Trulia and Active Rain which are real estate websites. I see that they both are Do Follow. My question is how much link juice do these sites pass a long to my site when I write a blog post on these sites and create a link to my main site? I've heard somewhere that even though a link has a Do Follow attribute it passes little link juice in certain cases like a no follow attribute. Also, if a link is a No Follow link, does it still pass along some link juice or is it completely juiceless. Is there a way to see which sites pass the most link juice to my site? Thanks all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad1 -
Meta Description In Blog Feed
The SEOmoz crawl tool is giving me a lot of crawl errors because my blog feed and my blog tags do not have meta descriptions. Can you even give this type of content meta descriptions? If so how can you do it, as this content is created dynamically by Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0