If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?

[Rich_Coffman]

OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post.

Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website.

Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal?

Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Just a little more info from Google here as well on how Pagerank Sculpting no longer works...

http://www.thesempost.com/google-pagerank-sculpting-still-doesnt-work/

[KeriMorgret]

I'm with inbound.org, and second what ThompsonPaul says. This email was about not indexing profiles that are incomplete and have thin content, and doesn't have anything to do with outbound links.

My take on links I make out from my own website:

• Nofollow affiliate links
• Nofollow links I don't trust -- but I generally won't link to things I don't trust, or would just make it so there's a space in the URL or it otherwise doesn't link
• Leave most every link followed. It's my site, I'm going to link out to sites I trust. If I have comments, those will be nofollow, as I'm not the author and not endorsing where the comments are linking.

Good info from Matt Cutts here about how nofollow hasn't been used to 'conserve' link equity in some time. https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

[Rich_Coffman]

thank you good sir.

[ThompsonPaul]

As I mention in my other comment, Sandi, no-following links doesn't preserve "SEO juice" at all. That hasn't been the case in many years.

And what Inbound is doing is completely different. They are No-Indexing entire pages that had so little content on them that they had no value, were wasting the site's crawl budget and looked like thin/duplicate content to the search engines. Nothing to do with the links on them at all. (This is actually a best practice for any site, but especially directory-type sites.)

P.

[ThompsonPaul]

No-following links has ABSOLUTELY ZERO EFFECT on preserving "link juice" of a page, Rich. This used to be the case six years ago when no-follow for links was first introduced, but it was being abused so badly that search engines changed this behaviour. (This used to be referred to as PageRank sculpting)

Further to Andy's and Dmytro's comments - Google is clear there are only three circumstances when no-follow should be used:

1. you have a commercial relationship with the page you're linking too (paid links, but also many guest post scenarios for example)
2. you didn't create the link and therefore can't trust it (e.g. user comments or other user generated content)
3. you are linking to an unreliable site (to demonstrate a bad example,for instance)
4. (and a bonus fourth) links to administrative-type pages that wouldn't be of any use to a search visitor like a privacy/terms of service or login page).

There's also been considerable discussion that Google in particular considers no-following of all external links a sign of unnatural manipulation that could damage page authority.

So... conceptually a good idea at one time, but no longer valid and potentially harmful.

Hope that helps?

Paul

[Rich_Coffman]

Thanks Andy!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Rich,

Don't nofollow for the sake of it. If a link is paid for, then yes, you should nofollow this, but that is probably one of the very few occasions i would suggest you do it.

Perhaps if you have written a blog post and then were asked to inject a link into it, then I would be tempted to nofollow that, but I wouldn't do it to try and retain link juice - that isn't really a tactic these days.

Google wants to see you link to sites externally, as long as it is called for - this will help show your authority as well.

-Andy

[solvid]

Hi,

I don't necessarily agree that too many outbound links can harm your own SEO. In fact, Matt Cutts has tons of outbound links on his blog, so as long as links are relevant from a user perspective there shouldn't be any issues.

Back to the follow/nofollow, if you are linking out to trusted and relevant sources, I don't see any reason to nofollow the links. On the other hand, if you have user generated content, I would nofollow external links, because you won't always know where are they linking out.

Hope this helps!

Dmytro