Nofollow all outgoing links?
-
If nofollow keeps link juice from leaking from a site, why not use nofollow on all external links? What would be the benefit of an external link that does not use nofollow? Best, Christopher
-
all links.
1st is best and descreses as you go along
The position of the link also counts. SEOMoz did some tests on this, (i think it was SEOMoz) footer does not give much juice, sides a bit better, head and body were the best.
-
Regarding the first link on the page carrying the most weight, are you referring to external links, or both internal and external links? Does Google know how to separate all the links in the menu from the rest of the page?
Best,
Christopher -
You should always link out in my opinion and SEOMoz’s also as it states in the on-page report.
Matt cutt has said that it can be beneficial to link to relevant sites, but there is also another reason.
The Google page rank algo, does not award page rank to what is called hanging pages, that is a page on your website that has a link to it but does not link back when it is calculating pagerank for your site. If your whole site does not link back, to the internet then maybe it is seen as a hanging website in the bigger picture.
I assume that linking out give you some sort of juice for relevance and authority of the linked-to page, this may be better than the juice you lose.Another idea is to make sure you have plenty of links to your own site on the page also, so that you are only giving away a small slice. you may notice that article sites do this, they have maybe 200 links to their own site, and one to yours. Also the first link in a page carries the most weight
-
If nofollow keeps link juice from leaking from a site, why not use nofollow on all external links?
An excellent question Christopher. The responses which come to mind are:
1. Some external pages are under your control and you will directly benefit from link juice flowing to them. Your social account pages (facebook, twitter, etc.), company profile pages (linkedin, etc.) or other author pages.
2. Some external links are to partner sites who may not appreciate a nofollow link or could take offense as nofollow links are generally to untrusted sites.
3. There is always the "do onto others as you would have done to you" idea. Along these links you can generate goodwill.
4. Sometimes it is required. You may be presenting an image, video or excerpt from another site. In order to use the content a followed link could be required.
5. It's often the right thing to do. If a site is worthy of mentioning, they are often worthy of being linked to as well.
I imagine a percentage of people read reasons # 1 - 5 and are still of the mindset to nofollow most external links. Well reason #6 will probably convince most of those site owners otherwise.
6. All else aside, you should be clear you are not "saving" link juice for your site by nofollowing external links. The way link juice flows on a page is the value will flow to every link on the page whether it is followed or not. The difference is, the juice to a followed link flows through to the target, where the link juice to a nofollowed link simply "evaporates".
Using a simple example lets say your page has 100 links and all of which are followed. Each link will receive 1% of the page's PR value (I don't wish to complicate this example with a dampening factor, let's keep to simple math).
Using the same example of a page with 100 links but this time let's assume 10 of the links are nofollowed. Each of the 90 followed links would still receive 1% of the page's link juice. Many people assume 100/90 followed links = 1.1 so each link would receive 1.1% and that is not the case. One good aspect of this method is it prevents most site owners from simply nofollowing all external links in the manner you are asking about.
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
-
Too Many on page links on my homepage question?
Question, on moz analytics, for my homepage, I've gotten the " Too many on page links" notification every crawl. I've always ignored it because i didnt think it affected ranking or anything really. The on page links on the bottom of our homepage are landing pages. Most users reach those pages by searching those specific pages on google. We just decided to put them on the bottom of our page for unknown reasons. My question is, should i remove the landing pages on the bottom of our homepage? WIll it improve search rankings for my homepage? if i do remove them, should i put the landing pages on another page besides the homepage? Does google index my website better without the on page links on my homepage? My website is- prestigeluxuryrentals.com
On-Page Optimization | | prestigeluxuryrentals.com0 -
Rel="canonical" link should they be to or from an "SEO friendly" url
Thanks for taking the time to review this. So for our example, lets use the following SEO friendly link: http://hiu.calibermediagroup.com/undergraduate-on-campus/academics/colleges/pacific-christian-college-of-ministry-and-biblical-studies/BA-biblical-studies We'll call this link the SEO VERSION The title of the college is" Pacific Christian College of Minstry and Biblical Studies" The title of the program is "BA Biblical Studies" The QUERY version of the link to this page would be something like: http://hiu.calibermediagroup.com/undergraduate-on-campus/academics/colleges/index.php?collegeid=22&programid=34 Keep in mind that the meta title, description, and keyword tags for the page are all administerable The SEO VERSION is automatically created from the title of the college, and the title of the program. Each one of these titles can be overidden with a URL slug individually. For instance, the admin could make the link: http://hiu.calibermediagroup.com/undergraduate-on-campus/academics/colleges/pacific-christian-college-of-ministry/biblical-studies by changing the slug for the college to "pacific-christian-college-of-ministry" and the slug for the program to "biblical-studies". Let's call this version the SLUG VERSION So now we have multiple ways to get to the same content. The question on the table is what is best practice for the rel="canonical" link to keep from getting dinged for duplicate content. Let's say that our SEO VERSION is the canonical link for 1 year. Then the choice was made to optimize the links thru the slugs creating the SLUG VERSION. My assumption is that we would keep the SEO VERSION as the canonical link. But then let's say 6 months later that the title of the program is changed in the admin. Now the SEO VERSION has changed and so has the canonical link. Do we lose the link juice garnered over the last 18 months? It would seem to me, that if we use the QUERY version as the canonical link, then any optimizations or changes affect everything except the canonical link, thus keeping the previous link juice earned. But is having an ugly URL as the canonical link detrimental to SEO? Please advise.
On-Page Optimization | | robertdonnell0 -
Competitor's 'hidden' links harming my site?
Hi everyone, I'm new to both Moz & seo, and am attempting to tackle our site's issues after being hit by panda / penguin, so would be grateful for any advice offered. I bought a website 3 years ago after the previous company that ran it went into administration. Having bought the website, it became apparent that the employees of the previous company had copied the entire site content, and relaunched it with a new look / brand. Over the last 3 years they've rewritten much of the content, but there remains a lot of links from their site back to ours which have had the anchor text stripped out, and point to images on our site which have since been removed, example below... <a href="http://www.MyCompany.com/catalog/images/filename.pdf" target="<a class="attribute-value">_blank</a>"><strong>strong>a> What I'm trying to understand is whether the 404 errors being returned by the broken links, and the presence of 'hidden' links on their site, is likely to reflect badly on our site or theirs? I'm not interested in outing anyone here, and I realise the standard recommendation for these kinds of situations is to write to the company telling them to remove the offending content, but if at all possible I'd prefer to fix our site by improving content & links etc, rather than 'force' them to take action and inadvertently improve their own site's content / rankings. As I say, all advice gratefully received 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | Sandy_M0 -
Internal Link Title and Anchor Text Question
So, I am kind of a newbie with all of this stuff, so please bear with me! If you have a chance to look into the domain it's www.noip.com I have checked the internal followed and 301 links. It seems like it is pulling in all of our navigation a funky way. all of those link have no data for the title and the anchor text is Home, Contact Us, Forgot Password?, ETC. Is this correct? I have tried to look into the way other websites are doing it and it seems wrong. I tried to talk to my developer, but he is not so sure. Do we simply need to make more copy on our site that has internal links within the copy with anchor text that is for keywords that I would like to be ranking for? Like Managed DNS? and then that page goes to the managed DNS page? Or what? Sorry if i am not being totally clear. Any help and advice is 110% welcomed!!! Natalie
On-Page Optimization | | vwnatalie0 -
What is the rule of thumb for adding links to your blog posts?
I have started keeping detailed records of all my blog postings. Is it ok to link to my own url? I make sure to link to another blog posting in each post, and link to sources as well. Thanks in advance for the advice!
On-Page Optimization | | rivercityransom0 -
Does link text "more information" have more weight than a normal link?
Does the anchor text "more information" hold any additional weight than any other anchor text? My suspicion is no, but just wanted to confirm.
On-Page Optimization | | nicole.healthline0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
I recently took on a website design client and ran his website through a battery of tests using Pro to take a look at the crawl errors. One that seems to stump me is the error "Too many On-Page links" concerning his blog. (http://franksdesigns.com/wp/blog) This is the first time I've seen this error and am rather confused. The report says there are 104 links on this page. However, I'm having trouble grasping this concept or finding the 104 links. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thank you for your support!
On-Page Optimization | | WebLadder0 -
Nofollowed internal links from the home page
Hi, I'm conducting an on-page review for someone and have noticed something I've not seen before. Some of the major internal links from the home page are marked as no follow. For example: <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="</a>/customer-services" rel="nofollow">Customer Services This is on the top navigation bar and the content in this and all other sections are marked as no-follow but they should all be crawled. Is this an error or am I missing something? Any ideas guys? Thanks Bush
On-Page Optimization | | Bush_JSM1