Should we Nofollow Social Links?

[JH_OffLimits]

I've been asked the question of whether if we should nofollow all of our social links, would this be a wise thing to do?

I'm not exactly getting a clear answer from search results and thought you guys would be best to ask

Thanks in advance.

[sarahwalsh]

Many social media pages link to businesses; for example, on LinkedIn, someone might link to your company's blog post; this is perfectly fine; it can help more people to discover your business's content marketing and products that you sell, so your website gets more shoppers on it.

We use Facebook to promote our garden office company within Bristol, England to help promote our summerhouses on Facebook, its helped us to sell many more of our products.

[tir17]

@swifttr

Google doesn't utilize or recommend using the rel="me" attribute, wouldn't ask anyone to try it out.

[Domain-Matty]

@swifttr Google does not use "rel me" microformats

[swifttr]

Instead of using rel="nofollow" you should use rel="me" if you're linking to your own social media pages. This allows you to explicitly tell Google that you're not just linking to those pages, but you actually control them.
By placing ‘rel=me’ attributes on all your links to your social media profiles (from your own website), it will help search engines like Google understand and have confidence that your social profiles are actually your brand.
Source: [https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/52877/should-i-use-rel-nofollow-for-social-media-links](link url)

[ZollB]

I think all social media links should be nofollowed!

Do you think that your social media profile will benefit if you link to it with dofollow? No! Who will benefit from it? The social media platforms and your competitors! You and your website won't get any benefit from it, rather them!
In Google you will always want your website to be first, not your social media pages.
Anyone who want to find your social media pages will find it anyway.
You nofollow all external links except social media pages? Why do you give any credit to them? Then people wonder why Facebook rules the internet...

[tir17]

Hey Matty @domain-matty that's a great test but I think in your scenario the social links are in the footer of the site passing the majority of the massive link juice.

If the same links are do-follow directly through some blog anchor text and posts from your site, it will have very little to no effect on the external link juice passed from your site to your social page.

[Domain-Matty]

@tir17 Google is not actually as smart as some may think in this respect. I tested the concept out on my own site. I had social links built into my site template and not as an addon or a plugin. When I did a link audit for the first time I found my site was passing off thousands of dofollow links off to social media sites and I was truly alarmed. I very rarely allow my site to pass off any of my domain authority so over 95% of my external links I had marked as nofollow. I have a DA40 site with some really good niche link pointing at me however, I was perplexed to find in testing if I actually gave a site a keyword targeted link it has very little effect. So I then nofollowed the thousands of external dofollow links my site was passing off to social media. It was then after a about a period of two weeks the sites I tested with keyword tagreted dofollow links actually jumped. An actual sign my link juice was in fact highly diluted.

[seobrighton]

@jh_offlimits as you can see here and from your own research, it's unlikely that you'll get a clear answer to this question. As with many SEO related questions, the answer usually starts with "Well it depends..."

It mostly depends on what your reasons are for doing it. Take a look at this article for more info about follow vs nofollow.

Another factor that might be worth considering is if the social links are the only external links on a given page or a site. Adding nofollow to them may not be the best idea...

"Nofollowed links are also part of a natural link profile and a site with no nofollowed links looks odd." source = https://www.searchenginejournal.com/when-to-use-nofollow-on-links/

...you could always link out to somewhere else with a "dofollow" to balance things out.

See this old thread for more thoughts about that.

Also think about the anchor text of those links and how/if that may affect things.

[Domain-Matty]

Google is smart enough to work these things out. That is a good point. However, remember the more dofollow links your site hands out. The less power each external dofollow link will give.

Best to nofollow your all your social links. And save the dofollow links for the sites you choose to pass your link juice to.

Lets talk a little bit more about this subject and give an example.

Here we have two identical websites with an identical backlink profile

Site 1 DA50
Site 2 DA50 Sites

Site 1 is giving out 1000 dofollow links
Site2 is giving out 10 dofollow links

If your website was to get a link from either of these sites. You will get more ranking power from site 2 because they are passing off less links.

Another example.

Site 1 DA50
Site 2 DA90

Site 1 (DA50) is passing off 50 dofollow links
Site 2 (DA90) is passing off 10,000 dofollow links

Which site would give you more ranking power?

Answer. Site 1 (DA50)

[tir17]

Hey,

I would suggest if you're linking to your own social links to you own accounts or property pages, you do not have to mark them as no-follow. Google is smart enough to figure out your site or brand presence on social media, you can even check the same in the knowledge graph.

If you're planning to link to other social accounts or channels outside of your property, for example to an author's social media channel page or account, who is not in your organization, such links should definitely be no-follow.

[Domain-Matty]

The problem here is link dilution. The more dofollow links your site gives out. The less powerful your site becomes.

So if you have 100 posts on your site with 4 different dofollow social links on each post. Your site is passing off a passive amount of your own authority and diluting the power of the links that you choose pass authority. Also, when your site is giving off heaps of dofollow links. It does not have as much ranking power. Its best to nofollow all social links on your website if you wish to preserve your own domain authority, SERP and link equity

[jasongmcmahon]

I agree with Andreas explanation of Google rules on using nofollow /

[josellamazares]

Hi,

In my opinion that is not negative for the SEO of your website because you are linking to sites with more authority than your website. That's positive, besides being able to increase your social traffic, those are positive signals for Google. When you go to link to sites that do not want to transmit your authority or that you just do not see them safe to the user experience you can use the nofollow tag.

I hope it helps

Regards

[paints-n-design]

Thats a really good question and I can only tell you my own point of view. Even in SEO-world in done and not done. I just think like this:

According to Google, use nofollow for

• not trustworthy pages you link to
• paid links
• crawl prioritization

So one and two  is not the case (hopefully I can trust your socials). 
To Point three, some webmasters really want to safe "PR" or "DA" with not passing it to pages using nofollow. This is not working, the PR is just send to nirvana. You can't save it, it is divided by links - no matter if the are followed or not. So the only reason in point 3 is - you don't want Search Engines to notfollow and notindex your socials (last is done if you nofollow them or not) - so my Point of View:

I just use nofollow in cases Google says I should (you can btw read it here https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en). Socials is not one of these cases, so I use Follow .

Add: Comments and User-Generated-Content is also a good Idea of using nofollow - dont know if Google mentions that on the given Page)