Any reason to nofollow outbound links to social platforms?
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This one is stumping me - a site I'm working on has decided to nofollow all of their outbound links to LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
I can't find a reason for doing that...I think it's from the old and mistaken suspicion that this would deliver link equity away from the site. Everything I've read says that there's no downside to dofollow outbound links as long as they are to legit sites and on the up-and-up (e.g., not overly link-trading with another site, for instance).
Thoughts?
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@username67 thx so much!
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@gpainter thank you! this is my thinking too.
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I always give do Follow outbound backlink as one of my friends who has a lot of experience in SEO, he said in every post one dofollow outbound link must persent. But he did not tell about social platform outbound links, but the question is that why we give an external link to any social platform instead of a Generic website.
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Hey @timdickey you're right that it's a bit of an old school tactic of trying to hoard 'link juice' though really there is no finite amount of it so you've nothing to lose from making them following.
I would argue that by making them no follow you're almost saying that you don't 'trust' those links aka. you don't trust your own social media, getting them into a follow link is only passing on trust to your own (social) signals which can't be too bad eh?!Outbound link can really help with the relevance of a topic so as you figured out, outbound links are not bad and shouldn't be treated as if they are. Best of luck!
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