Do you think too many (nofollow) outbound links is a problem?
-
Just received my first crawl report from SEOmoz for my blog.
I've rreceived a number of warnings / errors about having too many outbound links on my pages. These are simply comments from people (some pages have 300+) and the links are nofollowed.
It seems like you guys must have a reason why this warning is in place, so I would love your theories...
-
The warning for too many nofollowed links is there because these links affect your SEO.
Your page offers SEO benefits to your site. If you create a "hello world" page, that page will inherit some value from being part of your domain. It will receive further value from links to the page, social sharing of the page (tweets, etc) and so forth.
The value of the page can be passed along to other pages, both inside and outside of your site, through links. The nofollowed links devalue any followed links on your page. If you want to use your blog to pass more juice to other pages within your site, I would recommend a comment tool that not only tags the links with "nofollow" but instead breaks the links so they appear as text, not links.
To answer your question directly, YES, I think too many nofollow outbound links are a problem that should be fixed. If you don't believe these pages offer value to your site, you can ignore the warning. I think doing such is a missed opportunity.
-
That's what I thought. Was curious to see "The Moz" view on things
-
Ahh, so they are not dropping a comment as such, it is just the usual linkback from the posters name like in a wordpress blog?
I would not sweat that at all. The search engines know what a comment is and understand that is not a link as such.
The moz tools are great, as an indication things like this, but in this instance, the warning is a bit of a red herring so don't sweat it.
Marcus
-
Hey Marcus,
I run a popular marketing blog, ViperChill, and get hundreds of comments on every single post.
When people comment, they link back to their site with their name (just like regular comments).
-
Hey, it's always pretty tough to gauge these things without a link but it does seem a bit unusual for so many comments to include an outbound link. That said, I would say google is a bit more savvy at detecting areas of UGC and spotting the link condom used here but still, it seems a bit funny, like an unmoderated comment feed which could be an indication of low content.
The point of nofollow is to say that you don't trust the author or the destination of the link, so, to have 300 nofollowed links in UGC seems a little fishy.
As ever, it maybe perfectly right in this case, and I believe that for this to be a problem it would need to be combined with other signals before they would take action.
Out of interest, can you give some indication of why there are so many outbound links? Is it across all articles or just one or two where you have asked for links or some such?
Hard to give much better help or opinion without context.
Cheers
Marcus
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
-
Getting too many links on Google search results, how do I fix?
I'm a total newbie so I apologize for what I am sure is a dumb question — I recently followed Moz suggestions for increasing visibility on my site for a specific keyword by including that keyword in more verbose page descriptions for multiple pages. This worked TOO well as now that keyword is bringing up too many results in Google for these different pages on my site . . . is there a way to compile them into one result with the subpages like for instance, the attached image for a search on Apple? Do I need to change something in my robots.txt file to direct these to my main page? Basically, I am a photographer and a search for my name now brings up each of my different photo gallery pages in multiple results, it's a little over the top. Thanks for any and all help! CNPJZgb
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jason54540 -
Is it a problem if a URL has too many backslashes in its address?
The ecommerce platform of the site that I am working on generates URLs that contain ID Codes for each different product category, color variations, styles, etc. An example of a URL for a specific product includes: www.example.com/women/denim-jeans/py/c/109/np/108/p/3834.html Is it a problem for search engine crawlers if the URL address has so many backslashes in its address? Appreciate your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO_Promenade0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
How to avoid too many "On Page Links"?
Hi everyone I don't seem to be able to keep big G off my back, even though I do not engage in any black hat or excessive optimization practices. Due to another unpleasant heavy SERP "fluctuation" I am in investigation mode yet again and want to take a closer look at one of the warnings within the SEOmoz dashboard, which is "Too many on page links". Looking at my statistics this is clearly the case. I wonder how you can even avoid that at times. I have a lot of information on my homepage that links out to subpages. I get the feeling that even the links within the roll-over menus (or dropdown) are counted. Of course, in that case then you will end up with a crazy amount of on page links. What about blog-like news entries on your homepage that link to other pages as well? And not to forget the links that result from the tags underneath a post? What am I trying to get at? Well, do you feel that a bad website template may cause this issue i.e. are the links from roll-over menus counted as links on the homepage even though they are not directly visible? I am not sure how to cut down on the issue as the sidebar modules are present on every page and thus up the links count wherever you are on the site. On another note, I've seen plenty of homepages with excessive information and links going out, would they be suffering from the search engines' hammer too? How do you manage the too many on page links issue? Many thanks for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hermski0 -
Links with Parameters
The links from the home page to some internal pages on my site have been coded in the following format by my tech guys: www.abc.com/tools/page.html?hpint_id=xyz If I specify within my Google Webmaster tools that the parameter ?hpint_id should be ignored and content for the user does not change, Will Google credit me for a link from the home page or am I losing something here. Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | harmit360 -
Do nofollow links affect link profile?
I've read that it's good to keep a natural link profile. Some naked links, some links going to our company name, some with anchor text, etc. Do nofollow links affect this link profile, or is it only followed links that are taken into account?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
Too many links?
I've recently taken over a site from another agency, which has hundreds of linking root domains. These domains are of very low quality and, in my opinion, are being ignored by Google. Is it best to 'clean up' some of these links, or leave them and start building quality links? I just don't want to waste time cleaning link profiles if there's no need.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A_Q0 -
Is this splitting my authority or link juice?
Hi Using seomoz i am getting told that a 302 temporary redirect is occurring on some of my pages for instance. http://www.eco-environments.co.uk/solar-power/ Then redirects here http://www.eco-environments.co.uk/solar-power/default.phuse is this splitting my page authority because of the temporary redirect? I just want to make sure i have fully understood what's happening before i go to the company who designed and developed our site as i am convinced this is hurting my rankings. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nickhoyle10