Should we nofollow footer social links?

[Twist360]

Like most sites today we have a whole raft of social links in our footer, these are on every page of the site and link out to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc

Should these links be nofollow to avoid juice leaving our site or would you recommend allowing them to be followed to increase the power of these social sites?

Is there a definitive Yay or Na on these social links?

[David-Kley]

We went around and around with this question when we rebuilt our site. The conclusion we came to was: We shoud link out to our social profiles and citation links, since they link back directly to us from a trusted network. It was also determined that linking could be helpful, since Google may not have discovered your social network. This was used to jumpstart the discovery of the profiles we had created and further help Google to validate our location and services.

[seovp]

Hi,

Having these links out to your social profiles can help improve the search for your brand as a whole as your social profiles are more likely to appear on page one for searches of your brand term, rather than some site that you may not want displaying as highly.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi,

You should not nofollow links to your social profiles. Your social profiles can benefit from your links.

This has been answered here on Moz:

http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/community/q/is-it-better-nofollow-or-follow-links-to-external-social-pages

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi