To follow or not to follow...?

[jkellz514]

One of my client's uses alot of links in their content. They follow style and fashion news. Many times I find the use of nofollows unnecessary, but sometimes they have articles with well over 20 oubound links...I wonder if this "drains" the authority/link juice of the page to the point where the long tail traffic wont kick in?

Should I have reason for concern, and should I use nofollow on the links? I notice many of our competitors dont really bother, but they also have alot more authority.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Jonathon,

In general, outbound links are a good thing, and there's even a small amount of evidence suggesting that good outbound links can even provide a boost to your rankings (but never conclusively proven

Worrying about outbound links generally isn't worth the effort, but there are exceptions. For example, if you're trying to rank for the keywords "red shoes" and the first link on the page has the anchor text "red shoes" linking to another page (either external or internal) then this keyword cannibalization can hurt the ability of that page to rank for it's optimized keyword.

Generosity with outbound anchor text has a lot of value. I wouldn't worry too much about "leaking" authority, expect in the cases of keyword cannibalization described above. Others in the industry may disagree, and they are certainly entitled to their opinions and may even have some valid points, but I tend to see nofollows as a pain and only use them when you can't vouch for the editorial value of the link, such as blog commenting.

My 2 cents. Best of luck with your SEO.

[TakeshiYoung]

All links cause the on-page pagerank to be diluted, regardless of whether they are followed or nofollowed.  So if you are worried about link juice evaporation, nofollowing links won't solve the problem, only removing them will.