Should event write-ups be nofollow?
-
Hi guys,
tl:dr - Should articles discussing a company's event (offline content) be nofollow?
My company hosts a number of events across the year, during which we invite a selection of bloggers, journalists and interested parties from across the UK. During these events we show them the "behind the scenes" of our company as well as the manufacturing process and give them an amazing experience surrounded by our products.
We never (ever) ask for write-ups or links, and leave the day entirely open every time. If people ask about articles or links, we always say it's entirely up to them if they wish to talk about their experiences.
So, my question is: should any follow-up articles (for example reviews of the day, which bloggers will want to talk about) be nofollow? They're not reviewing any products, nor have they been paid or incentivised to talk about their experience.
One could argue the event itself is incentive, however if this is the case then surely providing content is equally incentivising... The only difference is that the content we're providing is offline?
Would be good to get people's thoughts on this!
-
During these events we show them the "behind the scenes" of our company as well as the manufacturing process and give them an amazing experience surrounded by our products.
I believe that that qualifies as promotional--you are giving them a perk that others don't normally get. So, those links should probably be tagged as nofollow links. The post or article that is written should include an explanation that the writer was invited to the event--which would be clear when reading what they posted.
Keep in mind nofollow links aren't always a bad thing--it's logical that your site have both links that have nofollow them and links that don't have nofollow on them. It's ultimately up to the individual blogger or author/site to decide, though, and I wouldn't obsess over these links.
-
In my opinion, people have been way too quick to slap nofollow on just about everything - out of envy ("do not give them juice!"), out of fear ("I cannot influence that great content on that page - it might change and even be illegal!") or various other reasons.
Would you say you have to nofollow a link given from a football fan who was invited to a VIP lounge for one game (after some raffle or whatever)? Would you say, you have to nofollow links from fair visitors who were given some goodie, enjoyed it and mentioned you with link?
I feel rather strongly about the - pardon my directness - idiocy to slap nofollow on just about anything. In my opinion they belong on exactly two links: those you directly paid for; and those you want to actively distance yourself from.
Then again, the real question might be how google sees those links, their context etc.. If you get punished for those links, I'd think that was a misjudgement - which does not help you in that moment; so if those links look very much paid for ... But as I said: you did not pay or ask for them, they are freely given. Stated generally, I see no problem from those links being just normal links. Let us not forget that there used to be just "links" - and that few people overall have ever heard of "nofollow" and "follow".
Regards
Nico
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
-
Should I nofollow/noindex the outgoing links in a news aggregator website?
We have a news aggregator site that has 2 types of pages: First Type:
Technical SEO | | undaranfahujakia
Category pages like economic, sports or political news and we intend to do SEO on these category pages to get organic traffic. These pages have pagination and show the latest and most viewed news on the corresponding category. Second Type:
News headlines from other sites are displayed on the category pages. The user will be directed to that news page on the main site by clicking on a link. These links are outgoing links and we redirect them by JavaScript (not 301).
In fact these are our websites articles that just have titles (linked to destination) and meta descriptions (reads from news RSS). Question:
Should we have to nofollow/noindex the second type of links? In fact, since the crawl budget of websites is limited, isn't it better to spend this budget on the pages we have invested in (first type)?0 -
Adding directories to robots nofollow cause pages to have Blocked Resources
In order to eliminate duplicate/missing title tag errors for a directory (and sub-directories) under www that contain our third-party chat scripts, I added the parent directory to the robots disallow list. We are now receiving a blocked resource error (in Webmaster Tools) on all of the pages that have a link to a javascript (for live chat) in the parent directory. My host is suggesting that the warning is only a notice and we can leave things as is without worrying about the page being de-ranked/penalized. I am wondering if this is true or if we should remove the one directory that contains the js from the robots file and find another way to resolve the duplicate title tags?
Technical SEO | | miamiman1000 -
Doubleclick and NoFollow
Hi, I'm trying to work out whether a group of links to my site are Follow or NoFollow. There is no rel=noFollow on the link but they do appear to go through Doubleclick (the link begins with this http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/), will this automatically cut-off any link juice? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | whis0 -
Meta-robots Nofollow
I don't understand Meta-robots Nofollow. Wordpress has my homepage set to this according to SEOMoz tool. Is this really bad?
Technical SEO | | hopkinspat1 -
Does hidden text, which appears for an onclick event, get indexed by Google and what SEO impact does this have?
I'm trying to simplify a conversion process with an onclick event to show text rather than having a completely separate page, but wondering if this is going to negatively impact on SEO, especially considering it's hidden text. I've seen a couple of things out there where you could position the text off the screen and the onclick results in it coming on.
Technical SEO | | JuiceBoxOM0 -
How do i implement event tracking
Hi, Please excuse me for being too simplistic or dumb. I haven't had any experience in Event tracking so far. So, Please help me out I want to track how many persons have clicked on "subscribe for Newsletter" button on website - http://bit.ly/w7iwdh Pls can anyone paste here the code to implement this ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
What is URL Enforce Writer & How it can be write.
Hi, What is URL enforce writer to write existing web page URL's. Currently a website pages having underscore in it, I would like to use hyphen (-) in between the words. Here is URL: http://www.cleanitsupply.com/t-Janitorial_Supplies_New_York_City.aspx Please suggest me how I can use URL enforce write to re-write URL's without 301. Your quick answers will be appreciated. Note: This page having back external backlinks. Thanks
Technical SEO | | younus0 -
Website Page Structuring and URL re writing - need helpful resources
Hello, I am not technically very sound and I need some good articles that teach me how to think about and go about website pages structuring and url rewriting that is seo friendly. I will be most obliged if some of you great seomoz-ers can pitch in with help. Regards, Talha ZigZag Solutions
Technical SEO | | TopGearMedia0