Site wide no follow links
-
Does it make sense to make all external links on my site no follow?
-
opps, I had a total misunderstanding about it, sorry about that.
-
If you nofollow a link, the PR just evaporates. Google changed this in 2008 or before, according to Matt Cutt's post at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/.
-
I could be wrong, but the way I understand it is that page rank flows from every link on a site, so nofollowing external links would be sculpting the page rank by keeping the link juice internally in the site. Like I said, I could be wrong on it, but that is how I understand it.
-
Lesley,
Page Rank sculpting was for internal links, and the original poster asked about nofollowing external links.
-
Hi Keri
No not really, I have quite a few guest blogs on our blog area. Some of the links maybe a little low quality so I thinking make them all no follow. I am definitely going to make my comments no follow.
-
Keri,
What I am referring to has actually been one of the reasons for an old algorithm change. People used to do a thing called page rank sculpting where they would no follow certain links on a page to keep some of the page's page rank. Google then changed the way that PR was passed so that if you no followed a link, the other followed links would get more link juice.
From my take on it, I would say it is trying to manipulate page rank artificially, which puts you at risk for a penalty. Look at Moz's site for example, you guys no follow forum links, which is standard. But you don't nofollow every link on the site, which would seem unnatural. The social media links at the bottom of the pages are followed, just about every link generated by a paid employee at Moz is followed. That is how it should be too.
If you browse around the web at other big places that deal with SEO, like Kiss, Raven, and other places like that, they do the same thing. I have a feeling it is because there is a risk of an unnaturally high number of nofollow links.
-
Lesley,
I haven't seen that about Google, and would love to hear more. My understanding is that if the link is paid, it should be nofollowed, not that all nofollowed links are paid. Many sites, including Moz, automatically nofollow all links in the comments, yet the links are by no means paid.
To Cocoon,
If you nofollow all outgoing links on your site, you're telling Google you don't trust any of the links that you have. Is that really what you want to do here?
-
I would personally stay away from any site wide rules like that. The hard and fast rule that I think google uses is that is a link is no followed, then it is paid. So you are giving the appearance that all of your external links are paid. Depending on how many you have this could raise a red flag about your site and content.
-
Do you not want the search engine to follow them?
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
-
Site redesign makes Moz Site Crawl go haywire
I work for an agency. Recently, one of our clients decided to do a complete site redesign without giving us notice. Shortly after this happened, Moz Site Crawl reported a massive spike of issues, including but not limited to 4xx errors. However, in the weeks that followed, it seemed these 4xx errors would disappear and then a large number of new ones would appear afterward, which makes me think they're phantom errors (and looking at the referring URLs, I suspect as much because I can't find the offending URLs). Is there any reason why this would happen? Like, something wrong with the sitemap or robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | YYSeanBrady1 -
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup1 -
Find all old links from a site to 301
We worked on this site a while ago - http://www.electric-heatingsupplies.co.uk/ Whilst we did a big 301 redirect exercise, I wanted to check that we "got" all of them. Is there a historical way I can check all the old indexed links to make sure they correlate to the new links? Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | lauratagdigital0 -
Are links in menus to external sites bad for SEO?
We're building a blog on a subdomain of the main site. The main site is on Shopify and the blog will be on wordpress. I'd like to keep the user experience as simple as possible so I'd like to make the blog look exactly like the main Shopify site. This means having a menu in the blog that duplicates the Shopify menu. So is it bad for SEO to have someone click on the 'about us' button in the blog subdomain (blog.mainsite.com) which takes you to the 'about us page' on the main shopify website (mainsite.com)?
Technical SEO | | acs1110 -
Site rebuild without HTML extension = broken links?
I have a client and his site is pure HTML. He made huge amount of link building with some hundreds of links point to example.com/target.HTML Now we decided to use WordPress with the same site structure. If we use the exact same URLs but without the HTML ending will it cause broken links? Is there any best practice for this kind of change? Many thanks for any idea!
Technical SEO | | seozoltan0 -
Ratio of linking C-blocks to Linking domains
Hi, Our linkbuilding efforts have resulted in acquiring a high number of backlinks from domains within a C-block. We all know Google issues penalties whenever someone's link profile looks unnatural. A high number of backlinks but a low number of linking C-blocks would seem to be one of reasons to get penalized. Example: we have 6,000 links from 200 linking root domains coming in from 100 C-blocks. At what point should we start to worry about being penalized/giving off an unnatural look to mr G?
Technical SEO | | waidohuy0 -
Site command
How reliable is site command? Is there any other way to check indexed pages.
Technical SEO | | gmk15670 -
How to turn WP site into Ecom site?
I have a couple of old wordpress sites that are old affiliate blogs. I currently sell products that are on amazon on these sites and sell quite a bit of volume. I have found a source and can afford the inventory to replace Amazon with my own product. So the dilema is how to turn these wordpress sites into ecommerce sites. The thing I am worried most about is that each site gets about 100-200 visitors a day for great buying keywords. I obviously don't want to lose my rankings. What are the options of turning a wordpress site into a store. I am not interested in plugins or some of the other solutions that make the store look very cheap and I would assume horribly convert. If you have inner pages ranking for keywords how does that work? Do the post pages become product pages? So to sum up I guess I am asking, what are the options that are of the higher quality that will also help me keep my rankings? Thanks
Technical SEO | | PEnterprises0