Implementing nofollow tag affect ranking

[Web-Engage]

if a blog that is performing well on the first page at an average position of 4 for an informative term. The blog contains a lot of outbound links, adding nofollow tag to all of them affect the current ranking? There are few other same cases.

Here is the link - monk.webengage.com

The was a lot of other optimization done on the page but the ranking did not improve at all. Is the issue with my domain authority or is it due to higher backlink to other competitive domains.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi webengageseo,

Do you have any results to report from the changes you made? We would love an update!

Christy

[mememax]

Happy to have been of help, please do let us know how the test goes

[Web-Engage]

Thanks for clarifying this, will test with one page and review the results.

[Web-Engage]

Thanks for letting me know, will try this nofollow activity with one page and see if the ranking go down.

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi There,

I see outbound links leaking juice away from the page. There are benefits from outbound linking to a trusted source as Rand explained in the last Whiteboard Friday. You are strengthening the trust of the page by linking to highly regarded and high DA or PA resources. For example to a newspaper article about a subject, a .gov on a patent website, Wiki, or some equally regarded page.

If the outbound link is just to other websites or blog then I would be careful linking to them with a follow link. I certainly wouldn't do it to expect a link back as this kind of reciprocal linking went out with the ark.

If it was my website I would check the outbound page - if it's a trusted source then leave it. If there are a bunch of other links then nofollow them. You will certainly not be penalised by having the nofollow link on your page but the page may well be enhanced by limiting the dofollows to run so so pages.

Regards

Nigel

[mememax]

I think that having outbound links is a key part of an healthy site (unless your accepting a guest post for each post you create). I think there are also some good assets from linking outside of your site:

• you may get links in return as using those outbound links as part of an ego bait campaign
• people you're linking to may want to give visibility to that mention so they may share that article on their social media and other channels they control
• there are some articles about outbound link cogitation which works similarly to internal backlink cogitation but instead of considering inbound links it consider outbound. In other words, sites linking to same sites are somewhat similar

As you can see there are different approaches, but natural outbound links are a natural part of the we, which is the "web" because of its networking system. Cyrus, covered the topic in a previous whiteboard https://moz.com/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo-whiteboard-friday you may get some nice insights from there

There are many things you may do before considering adding the nofollow tag, maybe you can apply other optimizations to improve your rankings. Anyway, if you think there is some good opportunity, you can always test it. Instead of testing the entire site at once why don't you just modify a couple of pages and see if there is a significant ranking change? Data is far superior than any opinion I can give you