Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Redirect wordpress from /%post_id%/%postname%/ to /blog/%postname%/
Hi what is the code to redirect wordpress blog from site.com/%post_id%/%postname%/ to site.com/blog/%postname%/ We are moving the site to a new server and new url structure. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Switching from Http to Https, but what about images and image link juice?
Hi Ya'll. I'm transitioning our http version website to https. Important question: Do images have to have 301 redirects? If so, how and where? Please send me a link or explain best practices. Best, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1241 -
SEO Impact of External links in JS tag
We have our JS tag and iframe tag being used over by 100 leading websites. What would be the SEO impact if we added a follow link in the iframe. Would it have any negative impact ? Vivek
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kvivek050 -
Does Disavowing Links Negate Anchor Text, or Just Negates Link Juice
I'm not so sure that disavowing links also discounts the anchor texts from those links. Because nofollow links absolutely still pass anchor text values. And disavowing links is supposed to be akin to nofollowing the links. I wonder because there's a potential client I'm working on an RFP for and they have tons of spammy directory links all using keyword rich anchor texts and they lost 98% of their traffic in Pengiun 1.0 and haven't recovered. I want to know what I'm getting into. And if I just disavow those links, I'm thinking that it won't help the anchor text ratio issues. Can anyone confirm?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiguelSalcido0 -
<loc>tag empty in sitemap, is this ok?</loc>
Hi - our website's sitemap is pretty huge, and I'm trying to generate it with the hreflang= information in it, because we have 11 different language sites all under the .com. I used the Media Flow generator for this purpose, but it returned a lot of entries with a blank tag. Our U.S. website by far has the most pages, so an example of what I'm getting is: Does this look correct???? Doesn't to me but I'm unsure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Is it better "nofollow" or "follow" links to external social pages?
Hello, I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+). if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/ Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do? Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that. Any suggestions are very welcome. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau9 -
Finding broken links / resources by topic
Hi fellow mozzers! In an effort to ensure we're exploring every avenue when launching our new website, I was hoping to find some useful broken links / resources that we could incorporate into our link building. We have used the standard tools for this (W3C, Xenu etc), but they all seem to have the same issue in that they reveal all the missing links on a site (although some don't actually tell you the page they are on), but you still have to sort them to see if the links/ resource is related to your theme. When you're on a niche site, this obviously isn't an issue, but on a site like Mashable (to use the example given in a recent SEOmoz blog) it could result in wading through hundreds of links to find one relevant one right at the end. Is there a tool that allows you to specify what theme links you are looking for from a site, or better yet one that allows you to check multiple sites for multiple missing themed links in one go? Or is the best way to export the list and just search the document for certain keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | themegroup0