University website outbound links issue
-
Hi - I'm working on a university website and have found a load of (1) outbound links to companies that have commercial tie ups to the university and, beyond that, loads of (2) outbound links to companies set up by alumni and (3) outbound links to commercial clients of the university.
Your opinions on whether I should nofollow these, or not, would be welcome. At the moment I'm tempted to nofollow (1) yet leave (2) and (3) - quite simply because the (1) backlinks may have been negotiated as part of a package (nobody can actually remember at the university!), yet (2) and (3) were freely given by the university.
Your thoughts would be welcome!
-
Totally agree with Dirk. If the links offer value to the visitor and if grouped are tightly and obviously associated with the theme of the page then they should always be left as is. If there is a hint of paid for they should be no-follow, but in essence having no-follow means you don't trust the page/site so why have it there in the first place (unless there is some commercial interest in having it there).
-
Hi,
In Ideal case we should avoid to give dofollow outbound backlinks but Rand Fishkin himself suggest we should give few outbound links to authority website but those few links should be dofollow & if you use nofollow that means you are telling Google you don't trust the sites!.
In case 2 & 3 you should use nofollow to prevent flowing link equity to other sites.
Thanks
-
Hi Luke,
To me, it doesn't seem really abnormal that a university would have tons of links going to associated companies, alumni companies,.. etc. I think the basic question is - do these links look "natural" when you check them, or are they rather commercial. If they make sense on the page, or add value, I would leave them. If not, make them nofollow.
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
If I use links intag instead of "ahref" tag can Google read links inside div tag?
Hi All, Need a suggestion on it. For buttons, I am using links in tag instead of "ahref". Do you know that can Google read links inside "div" tag? Does it pass rank juice? It will be great if you can provide any reference if possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pujan.bikroy0 -
How would you build links to this page?
Hi i have ecommerce store and currently we are looking to build links to category pages like: http://www.theiconic.com.au/womens-clothing-dresses-party-dresses/ What are some natural ways to build links to a page like this? Our SEO agency has done guest posting and forums but these are not natural link building methods and against Google policy. Any suggestions on how to build natural links to these pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak651 -
Internal Linking
Hi I've been looking over my pages and it says for this page for example http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/1-6kw-halogen-heater I have too many links, I think it was about 178. These links are from the menu and bottom of the page - how much of an issue is this for internal linking structure? I wouldn't want to remove the menus or change them too much. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Disavow Links & Paid Link Removal (discussion)
Hey everyone, We've been talking about this issue a bit over the last week in our office, I wanted to extend the idea out to the Moz community and see if anyone has some additional perspective on the issue. Let me break-down the scenario: We're in the process of cleaning-up the link profile for a new client, which contains many low quality SEO-directory links placed by a previous vendor. Recently, we made a connection to a webmaster who controls a huge directory network. This person found 100+ links to our client's site on their network and wants $5/link to have them removed. Client was not hit with a manual penalty, this clean-up could be considered proactive, but an algorithmic 'penalty' is suspected based on historical keyword rankings. **The Issue: **We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick. When talking about scaling this tactic, we run into some ridiculously high numbers when you talk about providing this service to multiple clients. **The Silver Lining: **Disavow Links file. I'm curious what the effectiveness of creating this around the 100+ directory links could be, especially since the client hasn't been slapped with a manual penalty. The Debate: Is putting a disavow file together a better alternative to paying for crappy links to be removed? Are we actually solving the bad link problem by disavowing or just patching it? Would choosing not to pay ridiculous fees and submitting a disavow file for these links be considered a "good faith effort" in Google's eyes (especially considering there has been no manual penalty assessed)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
Disavow Links Notification
No manual actions on our sites, just Penguin related. I put in a disavow for one site in October and Webmaster Tools kept a message up for some time saying the disavow links file for that site had been updated. I put in a disavow for another site of ours last week and I've had no such message. I checked and the file is there. Was this an intentional change on Google's part? Just want to make sure something's not messed up here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Link Building with a Scholarship
One of my clients is using a scholarship to build links. We have a nofollow PR campaign getting ready to start and are doing some social marketing for the scholarship page on the site. We are also trying to get backlinks from highschools and colleges that link to scholarship opportunities. So far this has been a slow process. Does anybody have any advice for speeding any of this up? Has somebody ever done a campaign like this before? Is there some kind of database with financial aid contact info for a lot of schools? I contact a lot of schools and always tend to get put on the backburner.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Advice on Link Building?
I know webmasters shouldn't focus on link building but unfortunately there are some types of content that doesn't get shared as much as other. And for content to go viral, it ain't that easy and it's almost impossible in some smaller niches where you don't have the volume to go "viral". That said I know about the common link building techniques. I know I can submit guest posts but when you're competing with websites that have over 10,000 backlinks, there is no way I'm going to get close to this with guest posting and commenting on other blogs. One way I found for getting backlinks is to publish interviews. Most of the time, people/businesses you interview like to link to this type of content. Publishing value-added content about other businesses' products or services may get some backlinks in return but not that often. So other than that, can some of you share some "out-of-the-box" link building strategies? Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
My site links have gone from a mega site links to several small links under my SERP results in Google. Any ideas why?
A site I have currently had the mega site links on the SERP results. Recently they have updated the mega links to the smaller 4 inline links under my SERP result. Any idea what happened or how do I correct this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | POSSIBLE0
