Do you think too many (nofollow) outbound links is a problem?
-
Just received my first crawl report from SEOmoz for my blog.
I've rreceived a number of warnings / errors about having too many outbound links on my pages. These are simply comments from people (some pages have 300+) and the links are nofollowed.
It seems like you guys must have a reason why this warning is in place, so I would love your theories...
-
The warning for too many nofollowed links is there because these links affect your SEO.
Your page offers SEO benefits to your site. If you create a "hello world" page, that page will inherit some value from being part of your domain. It will receive further value from links to the page, social sharing of the page (tweets, etc) and so forth.
The value of the page can be passed along to other pages, both inside and outside of your site, through links. The nofollowed links devalue any followed links on your page. If you want to use your blog to pass more juice to other pages within your site, I would recommend a comment tool that not only tags the links with "nofollow" but instead breaks the links so they appear as text, not links.
To answer your question directly, YES, I think too many nofollow outbound links are a problem that should be fixed. If you don't believe these pages offer value to your site, you can ignore the warning. I think doing such is a missed opportunity.
-
That's what I thought. Was curious to see "The Moz" view on things
-
Ahh, so they are not dropping a comment as such, it is just the usual linkback from the posters name like in a wordpress blog?
I would not sweat that at all. The search engines know what a comment is and understand that is not a link as such.
The moz tools are great, as an indication things like this, but in this instance, the warning is a bit of a red herring so don't sweat it.
Marcus
-
Hey Marcus,
I run a popular marketing blog, ViperChill, and get hundreds of comments on every single post.
When people comment, they link back to their site with their name (just like regular comments).
-
Hey, it's always pretty tough to gauge these things without a link but it does seem a bit unusual for so many comments to include an outbound link. That said, I would say google is a bit more savvy at detecting areas of UGC and spotting the link condom used here but still, it seems a bit funny, like an unmoderated comment feed which could be an indication of low content.
The point of nofollow is to say that you don't trust the author or the destination of the link, so, to have 300 nofollowed links in UGC seems a little fishy.
As ever, it maybe perfectly right in this case, and I believe that for this to be a problem it would need to be combined with other signals before they would take action.
Out of interest, can you give some indication of why there are so many outbound links? Is it across all articles or just one or two where you have asked for links or some such?
Hard to give much better help or opinion without context.
Cheers
Marcus
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
-
Questions About Link Detox
Greetings: In April of 2014 an SEO firm ran a link removal campaign (identified spammy links and uploaded a disavow). The overall campaign was ineffective and MOZ domain rank has fallen to 24 from about 30 in the last year and traffic is 20% lower. I purchased a basic package for Link Detox and ran a report today (see enclosed) to see if toxic links could be contributing to our mediocre rankings. As a novice I have a few questions for you regarding this the use of Link Detox: -We scored a domain wide detox risk of 1,723. The site has referring root domains with 7113 links to our site. 121 links were classified as high audit priority. 56 as medium audit priority. 221 links were previously disavowed and we uploaded a spreadsheet containing the names of the previously disavowed links. We had LinkDetox include an analysis of no-follow links as they recommend this. Is our score really bad? If we remove the questionable links should we see some benefit in ranking? -Some of the links we disavowed last year are still linking to our site. Is it worthwhile to include those links again in our new disavow file? -Prior to filing a disavow we will request that Webmaster remove offending links. LinkDetox offers a package called Superhero for $469.00 that automates the process. Does this package effectively help with the entire process of writing and tracking the removal requests? Do you know of any other good alternatives? -A feature called "Boost" is included in the LinkDetox Super Hero package. It is suppose to expedite Google's processing of the disavow file. I was told by the staff at Link Detox that with Boost Google will process the disavow within a week. Do you have any idea if this claim is valid??? It would be great if it were true. -We never experienced any manual penalty from Google. Will uploading a disavow help us under the circumstances? Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it!!! Alan p2S6H7l
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Should I remove all vendor links (link farm concerns)?
I have a web site that has been around for a long time. The industry we serve includes many, many small vendors and - back in the day - we decided to allow those vendors to submit their details, including a link to their own web site, for inclusion on our pages. These vendor listings were presented in location (state) pages as well as more granular pages within our industry (we called them "topics). I don't think it's important any more but 100% of the vendors listed were submitted by the vendors themselves, rather than us "hunting down" links for inclusion or automating this in any way. Some of the vendors (I'd guess maybe 10-15%) link back to us but many of these sites are mom-and-pop sites and would have extremely low authority. Today the list of vendors is in the thousands (US only). But the database is old and not maintained in any meaningful way. We have many broken links and I believe, rightly or wrongly, we are considered a link farm by the search engines. The pages on which these vendors are listed use dynamic URLs of the form: \vendors<state>-<topic>. The combination of states and topics means we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage 🙂 So, not good.</topic></state> We understand that this model is broken. Our plan is to simply remove these pages (with the list of vendors) from our site. That's a simple fix but I want to be sure we're not doing anything wring here, from an SEO perspective. Is this as simple as that - just removing these page? How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs? For example, I could spend effort making sure that \vendors\California- <topic>(and for all states) goes to a general "topic" page (which still has relevance, but won't have any vendors listed)</topic> I know there is no distinct answer to this, but what expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO? Anyway, before I go down this path I thought I'd check here in case I miss something. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Research on building links to a website
Hi building a brand new site with no domain authority. I have created all the content and now want to start building links to the website. Mostly through guest posting, niche directories, broken link building and other whitehat methods. Anyway i was wondering if anyone has seen any good research on the way you should link to a brand new website or any site for that matter. Like in terms of % you should focus at the homepage, inner pages, anchor distribution, internal link structure, etc. A good start would be looking at successful competitors, but i wanted to see if anyone knows any studies on this. My goal is to build a link profile which meets the standards of Google and that lasts! Thanks, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mikey0080 -
Is this link being indexed?
link text Deadline: Monday, Sep 30, 2013 link text I appreciate the help guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameswalkerson0 -
One Way Links vs Two Way Links
Hi, Was speaking to a client today and got asked how damaging two way links are. i.e. domaina.com links to domainb.com and domainb.com links back to domaina.com. I need a nice simple layman's explanation of if/how damaging they are compared to one way links. And please don't answer with you lose link juice as I have a job explaining link juice.... I am explaining things to a non techie! Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Soft 404 problem
I have a soft 404 problem in webmaster tools for http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/feed and I'm not sure why. I read on here that if it is a main content page it should be fixed but I don't know how. I've tried to 301 redirect the page to http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/ but the redirect doesn't appear to be working? how do I fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
How Google treat internal links with rel="nofollow"?
Today, I was reading about NoFollow on Wikipedia. Following statement is over my head and not able to understand with proper manner. "Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page)." It's all about indexing and ranking for specific keywords for hyperlink text during external links. I aware about that section. It may not generate in relevant result during any keyword on Google web search. But, what about internal links? I have defined rel="nofollow" attribute on too many internal links. I have archive blog post of Randfish with same subject. I read following question over there. Q. Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love? [In 2007] A: Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
_
(Matt's precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.) Matt has given excellent answer on following question. [In 2011] Q: Should internal links use rel="nofollow"? A:Matt said: "I don't know how to make it more concrete than that." I use nofollow for each internal link that points to an internal page that has the meta name="robots" content="noindex" tag. Why should I waste Googlebot's ressources and those of my server if in the end the target must not be indexed? As far as I can say and since years, this does not cause any problems at all. For internal page anchors (links with the hash mark in front like "#top", the answer is "no", of course. I am still using nofollow attributes on my website. So, what is current trend? Will it require to use nofollow attribute for internal pages?0 -
Value of Newspaper Comment Links
Although most newspaper comment sections are a no-follow zone, I have noticed that some comments I have posted with links end up being followed. The comments are participatory and the links relevant and even add to the conversation. My theory is that some comments are monitored and if the editors are looking to encourage discussion and don't feel like your spamming, why not take the no follow off. I do plan on doing some testing with poor, spammy comments on the same papers but am encouraged and would like to know what other people have found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phogan0