Follow or Nofollow outbound links to resourceful, related site?
-
As I am going through and redeveloping a website, I am trying to add some external links to resourceful information regarding this page. Should I put a nofollow or follow attribute on these?
I am only putting 1-5 links per page to associations and other organizations that would be beneficial to the visitor. I am worried about the number of outbound links causing me to get penalized.
Ideas?
-
spot on, no-follow does leak link juice, it just that it is not awarded to the linked-to page.
the only use for it is when you dont vouch for the linked-to page.
No-follow for a limited time did not leak link juice, but this made it hard to get links because everyone was trying to hoard link juice, many still believe no-follow does not leak link juice and are still reluctant to give a follow link. -
always follow those links. SEs like to see you linking out to relevant important sites. Also, you never know when one of those sites might take notice.
-
Most of the time.. if its worth linking out to, its worth leaving followed. No-follow really doesnt help you save any juice these days it just tells google you don't trust the site you are linking out to. I would say if you dont trust a site you are linking out to... maybe just don't link to it at all (unless its for a blog post were you are poking fun at the site in question and the link is for reference purposes)
-
Thanks for the reply!
I agree with both points. I think I am just more or less worried that what I am doing would cause search engines to penalize me due to the amount of outbound links from the domain. Maybe I am just thinking to much into it.
I doubt that any of these sites would ever backlink to this specific site, but we can always dream!
-
Thanks for the reply.
Should I actually put the rel="follow" attribute into my <a>tags or leave it off, since default settings should follow that link?</a>
-
Agree with the other two replies - as long as the link goes to a respectible and useful resource, I would leave it as "follow". My reasoning being:
1) People have linked to useful sites since the beginning of the web - It's the more "natural" thing to do. Google tends to like "natural".
2) There's always the chance the site owner will notice the link on my site and link back to me.
-
Personally, I use the "follow" attribute on links to useful resources as it can make a page more relevant if you are linking to authority sites on a particular topic. I can't see why you would be penalized, unless you are linking to off topic spammy sites.
-
When I'm linking out from a page to resourceful information regarding that particular page I always let the link free (without a no follow attribute) so google will follow it and see that the content is somehow valuable for the user. I think if you det the no follow attribute it won't help you as far as SEO, it will only help the user that sees and uses the link.
As for dilution, even if the link is no follow the link juice is still split and counts both do follow and no follow links within that particular page.
Anyway, that's just me.
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
-
No-follow Links - Do they work for SEO?
Seems like some of the big sides only give no-follow links now are they still useful for building link authority? Do you have any experience? Thanks
Link Building | | seoman101 -
What is a healthy ratio of keywords being used as anchor text in external links to our site?
Hi, One keyword is being used as anchor text in way more external links to our site than any others and I'm getting a lot of mixed advice whether or not to do anything about it. The agency we previously used had managed to remove about 1500 links (out of 6000) however our rank for that search term is still very poor. **We have 4500 external links with the anchor text "ABC" and the next highest amount of external link anchor text is the term "XYZ" which has about 400 links. That is over 10 to 1. What is a healthy ratio of anchor text between different search terms to aim for? ** Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Link Building | | Syed_Raza0 -
External Followed Links in the Competitive Domain Analysis Report
In the Competitive Domain Analysis report, why does the number of my external followed links vary over time. Some weeks its high some weeks it's low. Doesn't seem to be a pattern.
Link Building | | PGD20110 -
Link Analysis shows no external sites linking to me?
Hi All, I hope you can help. Link Analysis shows no external sites linking to me? but I know for a fact there are. Why is this? I have submitted my site to a few local directories and can see my site is on their site but when I run a Link Analysis it shows that I have no links. Does anyone know why this is? Many thanks, Aidan My site is http://www.theethicalsilkco.com/
Link Building | | aidanlawlor0 -
Local service site link building
I have a local service site http://winecountrycarpet.com/ and I have been link building as much as possible for my landing pages (which aren't local to my city, but are within 20 miles). I would like to keep my link building as above board and white hat as possible (so i do a lot of forum sigs and links in do follow forum in my industry) I do not seem to be seeing any results though. My pages are on the first page for their targeted keywords, but I think this has more to do with onsite SEO and non competitive keywords. I am wondering if anyone can recommend any strategies that I might find more effective. I have thought about leaving blog comments on do follow blog's but it just seems so spammy its hard to imagine it working. I am open to any ideas.
Link Building | | ayetti0 -
Are my new resource sites worthless?
I have ended up with several hundred sites which I purchased off the seo company I use as they went belly up. I purchased them as I had spent a small fortune buying links for the years and I thought that if they went under all my links would be lost. When they transferred the sites into my accounts in go daddy the owners names changed to one owner! Therefore google either know that I own them or at the very least know that only a few people own them as I had four go daddy accounts. Previously they were all registered to different people. The registrar details have since been changed to various owners but I guess the damage is done. I have gone from pos3 pg1 to pos3 pg2. I ranked highly for lots of terms and they have all dropped. I don’t want to be using black hat techniques and my intention was to continue to build content on these sites with a view to adding links to other relevant sites in the future. Not all of them link to me and they do link to lots of other sites that the seo company did work for To be honest my only concern short term was not to loose the links. Now I feel the links are considered worthless by google and I don’t know if I should keep the sites or throw them away! I think all the sites need redesigning and updating and this is what I intended to do. However now that google have seen that they once were owned by one person have they become worthless?
Link Building | | draeseo0 -
Linking to Adsense heavy sites?
Hi SEOmoz community! Hopefully a pretty straight forward question here... Does anyone know if linking to "Adsense heavy" websites can have a negative impact on your rankings? Or a positive impact even? Thes sites in particular are owned by a business aquintance, so they come from a trusted source even though the sites themselves look quite "spammy". Also they all have pagerank of 1 or 2 and there's about 100 of the sites that we would link to. Does anyone have any thoughts? Regards, Ash 🙂
Link Building | | AshSEO20110 -
Twitter followers and link campaigns
Hi All, This may be a silly question but I like to ask the obvious 🙂 If i had acround 3,000 twitter followers and wanted to embark on a link campaign, would it be wise to simply tweet out to all and essentially say, please link to my site XXXX or would it be better to select individual followers and email them directly? I was wondering if its just a 'win win' with tweeting followers or whether poor links from some users might cause more harm than good. Thanks all
Link Building | | wedmonds0