No-follow links on advertising pages
-
Hi
I run a job board that enables employers to post job vacancies and information about their organisations. These are 'paid for' pages (advertising) on our site.
These link out to their own websites. My question is, would it be better for these links out to their sites to be no-follow?
From my site's perspective, I cannot necessarily dictate the quality of their websites (although the majority are leading firms) as I would in article and feature content, where we do happily link out and refer to other quality sites with information that gives readers further information.
I know that many large job boards do this where they run listings of feeds from other sites, but should we also do this at the page level where the link out is effectively paid for.
What would be the pros and cons if I do or if I don't use no-follow?
I hope this makes sense and look forward to some replies.
Many thanks
-
Great to get this feedback. It gives me food for thought. That there are differing views actually makes me feel a bit easier about things as it shows that it isn't necessarily clear cut.
The advertising content is clearly segmented, so potentially I could test it out on a defined area.
-
It is a little tricky, but I think a link from a paid listing is still a paid link, if you want to push the letter of the law. Since you're not worried about the outbound link-juice, I agree with Keith that you're safer just to nofollow.
-
I am new to the community here too, and I love it!
I would still be careful, whether they are paying for the link or the ad, Google can decide and you could be screwed.
Also, if you can't vouch for the page it is linking to, I wouldn't make it a followed link. Being careful who you link to is important, at the same time I think it is important to link out to high quality sites with relevant content.
To me, if you are questioning it, your gut is already telling you the answer. Besides, the advertisers are there for the job ads, not followed links right?
-
What you raise, is what has been my concern.
We are in a competitive market fighting it out with a lot of sites with similar focus and similar offering, so cross-domain duplicate/near-duplicate content ends up being the main focus for how we optimise this area of our content.
This no-follow thing has just been in the back of my mind as something I should look into just in case we are giving out a negative signal in someway.
And in our case, it is not the link that is paid for. They are paying to post a job vacancy - the link is mechanism for applying or finding out more.
So how does a search engine detect what is paid for and what is not?
This is my first SEOmoz question, so I am really excited to have two people respond so quickly... how wonderful the community here!
-
If you don't no-follow the links, isn't it just paid links which is against TOS? Seems like a big chance you would be taking in getting penalized to me.
-
For you I see no problem leaving the links without nofollow. I hope I could help.
Best Regards,
Naghirniac
-
Thanks for replying so quickly. I will have a read through/watch the WBFs in the links you suggest.
To confirm, I am not worried about passing on link juice to other sites. I just noticed that other sites of a similar ilk take this approach and wondered about the advantages and disadvantages.
From a client perspective, we track the visits to their sites via their links using our own reporting set up, so they know how well we do in terms of meeting their advertising needs.
-
Thanks for replying so quickly. I will have a read through/watch the WBFs in the links you suggest.
To confirm, I am not worried about passing on link juice to other sites. I just noticed that other sites of a similar ilk take this approach and wondered about the advantages and disadvantages.
From a client perspective, we track the visits to their sites via their links using our own reporting set up, so they know how well we do in terms of meeting their advertising needs.
-
This is a very important point, because google change a lot how they threat the nofollow links, and some people stay with old premisses.
The nofollow links lose the benefit of the link juice. In my opinion, for you website, there is no problem to use links without the nofollow.
You should read these posts to help you out:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/nofollow-is-dying-the-impact-of-microblogging-and-nofollow-on-seo
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-dangers-of-nofollow
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-how-do-we-plug-the-nofollow-leak
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
-
Sitemap: Linking horizontal pages on a sitemap that has a vertical hierarchy structure
I'm currently in the process of revamping a website and creating a sitemap for it so that all pages get indexed by search engines. The site is divided into two websites that share the same root domain. The marketing site is on example.com and the application is on go.example.com. To get to go.example.com from example.com, you need to go through one of three “action pages”. The action pages are accessed from every page on example.com where we have a CTA button on the site (that’s pretty much every page). These action pages do not link back to any other page on the site though, nor are they a necessary step to navigate to other webpages. These action pages are only viewed when a user is ready to be taken to the application site. My question is, how should these pages be set up in a vertical sitemap since these three pages have a horizontal structure? Any insight would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | RallyUp0 -
Duplicate page titles for blog snippets pages
I can't figure the answer to this issue, on my blog I have a number of pages which each show snippets and an image for each blog entry, these are called /recent-weddings/page/1 /2 /3 and so on. I'm getting duplicate page titles for these but can't find anywhere on Wordpress to set a unique title for them. So http://www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/recent-weddings/…/2/ has the same title as http://www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/recent-weddings/…/3/
Technical SEO | | simonatkinsphoto0 -
Deleteing old page and passing on link strenth?
We are a printing company and thinking over bringing our products down to 2 - 3 rather than the 10+ we currently have, the pages we will be getting rid of will be pages such as flyers, booklets etc and just concentrating on banners and stickers would you suggest 301ing the pages to the home page or picking pages for them to go to? Also could we expect a decent raise for the pages we are left with? Thanks shaun
Technical SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Google showing https:// page in search results but directing to http:// page
We're a bit confused as to why Google shows a secure page https:// URL in the results for some of our pages. This includes our homepage. But when you click through it isn't taking you to the https:// page, just the normal unsecured page. This isn't happening for all of our results, most of our deeper content results are not showing as https://. I thought this might have something to do with Google conducting searches behind secure pages now, but this problem doesn't seem to affect other sites and our competitors. Any ideas as to why this is happening and how we get around it?
Technical SEO | | amiraicaew0 -
Is it better to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Is it better for SEO to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Technical SEO | | CustomOnlineMarketing0 -
Does Google follow links in "id" tag?
Hello, For functionality purposes, I need to wrap separate blocks of content with a tag. The main question is whether Google will follow this URL, even though it is not a hyperlink on the page, just a URL used for functionality purposes. We will have 10-20 of these types of span tags with a different URL for each one, and we just want to be sure that Google will not be following these URLs that are not links. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0 -
External Links on a Front Page
Does anyone have any links to information about external links on a front page ? I am advising a client that this is not the best idea and that they could be put in a different place but can't find any proof of this.
Technical SEO | | marcelo-2753980 -
I have a site that has both http:// and https:// versions indexed, e.g. https://www.homepage.com/ and http://www.homepage.com/. How do I de-index the https// versions without losing the link juice that is going to the https://homepage.com/ pages?
I can't 301 https// to http:// since there are some form pages that need to be https:// The site has 20,000 + pages so individually 301ing each page would be a nightmare. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | fthead90