If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
-
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post.
Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website.
Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal?
Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
-
Just a little more info from Google here as well on how Pagerank Sculpting no longer works...
http://www.thesempost.com/google-pagerank-sculpting-still-doesnt-work/
-
I'm with inbound.org, and second what ThompsonPaul says. This email was about not indexing profiles that are incomplete and have thin content, and doesn't have anything to do with outbound links.
My take on links I make out from my own website:
- Nofollow affiliate links
- Nofollow links I don't trust -- but I generally won't link to things I don't trust, or would just make it so there's a space in the URL or it otherwise doesn't link
- Leave most every link followed. It's my site, I'm going to link out to sites I trust. If I have comments, those will be nofollow, as I'm not the author and not endorsing where the comments are linking.
Good info from Matt Cutts here about how nofollow hasn't been used to 'conserve' link equity in some time. https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
-
thank you good sir.
-
As I mention in my other comment, Sandi, no-following links doesn't preserve "SEO juice" at all. That hasn't been the case in many years.
And what Inbound is doing is completely different. They are No-Indexing entire pages that had so little content on them that they had no value, were wasting the site's crawl budget and looked like thin/duplicate content to the search engines. Nothing to do with the links on them at all. (This is actually a best practice for any site, but especially directory-type sites.)
P.
-
No-following links has ABSOLUTELY ZERO EFFECT on preserving "link juice" of a page, Rich. This used to be the case six years ago when no-follow for links was first introduced, but it was being abused so badly that search engines changed this behaviour. (This used to be referred to as PageRank sculpting)
Further to Andy's and Dmytro's comments - Google is clear there are only three circumstances when no-follow should be used:
- you have a commercial relationship with the page you're linking too (paid links, but also many guest post scenarios for example)
- you didn't create the link and therefore can't trust it (e.g. user comments or other user generated content)
- you are linking to an unreliable site (to demonstrate a bad example,for instance)
- (and a bonus fourth) links to administrative-type pages that wouldn't be of any use to a search visitor like a privacy/terms of service or login page).
There's also been considerable discussion that Google in particular considers no-following of all external links a sign of unnatural manipulation that could damage page authority.
So... conceptually a good idea at one time, but no longer valid and potentially harmful.
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
Thanks Andy!
-
Hi Rich,
Don't nofollow for the sake of it. If a link is paid for, then yes, you should nofollow this, but that is probably one of the very few occasions i would suggest you do it.
Perhaps if you have written a blog post and then were asked to inject a link into it, then I would be tempted to nofollow that, but I wouldn't do it to try and retain link juice - that isn't really a tactic these days.
Google wants to see you link to sites externally, as long as it is called for - this will help show your authority as well.
-Andy
-
Hi,
I don't necessarily agree that too many outbound links can harm your own SEO. In fact, Matt Cutts has tons of outbound links on his blog, so as long as links are relevant from a user perspective there shouldn't be any issues.
Back to the follow/nofollow, if you are linking out to trusted and relevant sources, I don't see any reason to nofollow the links. On the other hand, if you have user generated content, I would nofollow external links, because you won't always know where are they linking out.
Hope this helps!
Dmytro
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
-
50 nofollow outbound links is too much?
Hello, I was reading that having many nofollow outbound links is bad for SEO. Could somebody give me an idea how many is "many"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabx0 -
Looking for opinions on structuring meta title tags/page title/menu title/H1
Hi everyone I am hoping a few of you can share your opinions. I have been having conversations (okay, healthy debates) about how to write/structure meta title tag and how to compliment them with the H1, page title, menu name. To help explain the thought processes I will use a pretend keyword. How about "screwdriver". Case: (I made this up) we are redesigning a website for a construction tools manufacturing company (pretend name: ABC Tools) targeting OEMs who are interested in purchasing large quantities of tools. The product categories (to become main menu items) are Screwdrivers, Nails, Drills, and Hammers. (bear with me .... this is just an example I am making up on the fly) K. Circling back to screwdrivers - let's say we have one landing page (a primary category page and in the main menu) listing products and great details about screwdrivers. Focus keywords are screwdriver manufacturer, screwdriver supplier, construction screwdrivers Below are questions being debated. If you are willing ... how would you address these questions? And, can you explain WHY? QUESTION ONE: How would you structure the meta title tag (feel free to write one of your own) Screwdriver Manufacturer - Construction Screwdriver | ABC Tools ABC Tools - US-based Screwdriver Manufacturer Supplier Near You High-Quality Screwdrivers for Construction with ABC Tools QUESTION TWO: how would you write the H1 on the page? Would it match the meta tag? OR, would you write something different using the primary keyword? QUESTION THREE Remembering this is not a blog post ... it is a primary landing page linked to the main navigation. What would the menu title be? (remember the product categories above are how the main menu items are bucketed) Screwdrivers Screwdriver Manufacturer Typically in WordPress, the H1 and the menu title is auto-populated using the page title (not the title tag)... So, if we use Screwdrivers as the page title but we want the H1 to match the meta title tag, would we manually change the H1? Or, have the page title and title tag match, but manually change the menu item?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brenda.Haines1 -
Links / Metadata around Recent Posts etc in Wordpress / Blog - Good SEO Practice?
Hello In a Wordpress blog ( or part of an ecommerce site that runs under wordpress ) it is good to show recent posts in the sidebar on most pages. Obviously the posts aren't going to be relevant to every post , so my questions are: Is having these on the page hurting SEO for the page? Is there good metadata structure to put in there? ( like rel="nofollow" or similar ) Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear
Thanks for your time
Marty0 -
Do I eventually 301 a page on our site that "expires," to a page that's related, but never expires, just to utilize the inbound link juice?
Our company gets inbound links from news websites that write stories about upcoming sporting events. The links we get are pointing to our event / ticket inventory pages on our commerce site. Once the event has passed, that event page is basically a dead page that shows no ticket inventory, and has no content. Also, each “event” page on our site has a unique url, since it’s an event that will eventually expire, as the game gets played, or the event has passed. Example of a url that a news site would link to: mysite.com/tickets/soldier-field/t7493325/nfc-divisional-home-game-chicago bears-vs-tbd-tickets.aspx Would there be any negative ramifications if I set up a 301 from the dead event page to another page on our site, one that is still somewhat related to the product in question, a landing page with content related to the team that just played, or venue they play in all season. Example, I would 301 to: mysite.com/venue/soldier-field tickets.aspx (This would be a live page that never expires.) I don’t know if that’s manipulating things a bit too much.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ticket_King1 -
Linking and non-linking root domains
Hi, Is there any affect on SEO based on the ratio of linking root domains to non-linking root domains and if so what is the affect? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | halloranc0 -
Can too many NoFollow links damage your Google rankings?
I've been trying to recover from a Google algorithm change since Sep 2012, so far without success. I'm now wondering if the nofollow on external links in my blog posts are actually doing me damage. http://www.smartdatinguk.com/blog/ Does anyone have any experience of this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0 -
What is a good, structured link building campaign?
I feel like I've tried everything up to this point. I also survived all of the recent Google updates, including the recent EMD update (my site is an EMD). Also I am in the financial sector. I blog every day, I've made some great infographics. I have a very nice website (much better than the competition's), I've done my on-page SEO. I've done the basic link building too. I've hit good business directories, good blog directories (like Technorati), and infographic directories. I've done a bit of comment linkbuilding but I don't see that being very fruitful. I also have a large twitter following + a twitter tribe that shares all of my blog posts. I can't say I've managed to build any sort of community however. My traffic has grown from 0 to anywhere from 80 to 160 visitors every day in just 3 months, and I am happy with that progress but it seems like I have plateaued. Sure I will continue creating content, but what can I do about link building? That's where the results are probably going to come from. I've read all the articles about it, took advice from LinkBuildingSchool.com... but at this point, I'm not sure how to continue. I dont want to continue going after blog comment links, I want quality. Any advice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MangoMan160 -
Redirect between domains: any real number on how much link juice is lost?
Hi, I'm thinking of rebranding my website and moving it to a new domain. Of course I would implement 301 redirects page to page from old-domain.com to new-domain.com. I wonder if you have any real figure based on your experiments on how much link juice I could lose in the process and if it will take time for Google to re-crawl correctly the new page. I could get some of the backlinks changed as well, so they would point to the new domain. Cutts says it would get changed at least the more important, but how many? which are the more important? Also, what about if I move just a part of the website that has no backlinks? Supposedly it won't have any link juice to pass through but of course all the pages will be hosted on a brand new domain that won't pass domain-power to those internal pages, so will I lose rankings for these pages? Thanks for any help, Best regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SandraMoZ0