NOFOLLOW in Forum Topic External Links?
-
We run a busy aviation website, with lots of members who post external links within our forum. Currently, we implement NOFOLLOW tags on all external links or links to external sites not in our domain portfolio.
Would we benefit from removing the NOFOLLOW attribute? Would we benefit from keeping it?
Your thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
-
I have a blog that gets about six to ten posts per day. Each of those posts has a link to another website. All of these links are do-follow. I do that because the sites that I am linking to are all very high quality and have better content for that subject that I have on my site.
I believe that when you are "linking up" to sites better than yours for a topic that the outgoing links are valuable.
However, I also believe that if you are "linking down" to trash sites and pages of unrelated content then the links can harm your site.
I would never give control of outgoing links on my site to strangers and even when my employees post content I always review the target of every outgoing link myself.
-
Thank you for your responses guys.
I was also asking if there would be any SEO benefit of "DO-FOLLOWING" the links? I.E. Google noticing that the page content doesn't include any NOFOLLOW links?
Most, if not all of the links are to legitamate aviation related websites.
-
Agree with Scott. Almost every forum I've seen that allows followed external links gets spammed so you'll need a strategy to combat that. If the links provide value I'm not sure if following/no-following will make much difference to community behaviour, but they might encourage the more seo-savvy users to post links (and of course, attract the spammers).
At the simplest level you could try requiring javascript from posters, but I suspect you'll need something a bit more sophisticated. There are forum posting and blog commenting tools that try and solve captchas so ultimately, i suspect there will be little alternative but to manually moderate the forum.
-
Are these links going to other great sources of aviation content... or are they simply people linking to personal websites, websites who pay them to grub links, and websites who paid somebody who paid these people to grub links on your site?
My question is... are these people turning your site into a linkfarm? If they are then you better keep the nofollow or heavily moderate.
If you remove the nofollow and word gets out that you have a "do follow" forum then that could be like painting a target on your own behind.
-
The nofollow attribute was created to help discourage spam.
If people post a ton of unrelated links that provide little or no benefit to the page I would leave the nofollows there. But if the links provide value it might be a good idea to allow them to be followed.
Just remember there's a large number of spammers out there that are looking for places to post followed links. Your spam might increase dramatically overnight.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Is Link equity / Link Juice lost to a blocked URL in the same way that it is lost to nofollow link
Hi If there is a link on a page that goes to a URL that is blocked in robots txt - is the link juice lost in the same way as when you add nofollow to a link on a page. Any help would be most appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew-SEO0 -
Link externally from destination pages
Hello, From my destinations pages, is it beneficial to have a link going externally to the hotels my clients are staying in ? In other words is it beneficial to my website or will it hurt me to link external from all my destinations pages to all the hotels my clients are staying in ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
To nofollow or follow internal links, that is the question...
"...Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or..." Okay, I'll drop the Hamlet riff. I'm working on a site with a forum. Top pages may have 20 to 30 answers. Each answer is by a member with an image/link and a name link to their member profile. A member profile may contain alot of info or none. We've noiondexed memeber profile pages, yet we still have these links to member profile pages. Is it better to nofollow these internal links to profile pages or what? Again, with 25 answers on a page and two links per answer to each member profile (image and name), that's a ton of internal links to noindexed pages. Thanks! Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Stock lists - follow of nofollow?
a bit of a catch 22 position here that i could use some advice on please! We look after a few Car dealership sites that have daily (some 3 times a day) stock feeds that add and remove cars form the site, which in turn removes/creates pages for each vehicle. We all know how much search engines like sites that have content that is updated regularly but the frequency it happens on our sites means we are left with lots of indexed pages that are no longer there. now my question is should i nofollow/disallow robots on all the pages that are for the details of the vehicles meaning the list pages will still be updated daily for "new content" or allow google to index everything and manage the errors to redirect to relevant pages? is there a "best practice" way to do this or is it really personal preference?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ben_dpp0 -
How many links home on a page?
We are planning on a mega menu which will have around 300 links and a mega slider which will have around 175 links if our developer has their way. In all I could be looking at over 500 links from the home page. The Mega Menu will flatten the site link structure out but I am worried this slider on the home page which is our 4th most visited page behind our 3 core category pages. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0 -
Can I reduce number of on page links by just adding "no follow" tags to duplicate links
Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text. We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for. I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links. Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization. Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0 -
Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion
Hi, I have been asked to complete some SEO contracting work for an e-commerce store. The Navigation looked a bit unclean so I decided to investigate it first. a) Manual Observation Within the catalogue view, I loaded up the page source and hit Ctrl-F and searched "href", turns out there's 750 odd links on this page, and most of the other sub catalogue and product pages also have about 750 links. Ouch! My SEO knowledge is telling me this is non-optimal. b) Link Sleuth I crawled the site with Xenu Link Sleuth and found 10,000+ pages. I exported into Open Calc and ran a pivot table to 'count' the number of pages per 'site level'. The results looked like this - Level Pages 0 1 1 42 2 860 3 3268 Now this looks more like a pyramid. I think is is because Link Sleuth can only read 1 'layer' of the Nav bar at a time - it doesnt 'hover' and read the rest of the nav bar (like what can be found by searching for "href" on the page source). Question: How are search spiders going to read the site? Like in (1) or in (2). Thankyou!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf0 -
Simple Press forum for wordpress
I'm using a forum plugin called Simple Press, and the rest of my site is looking good with only a few minor errors due to a long url. Anyway, the only 4 major errors I have are these; These 3 links have no titles, so is there somewhere I can give them titles, or do a rel=nofollow? /index.php?sf_ahah=acknowledge /index.php?sf_ahah=permissions /index.php?sf_ahah=tags And then the 3 above plus this one; http://www.societyforethicsand…..?xfeed=all Have no META DESCRIPTION associated with them. So, is there somewhere I can add the meta description for all 4? I have spoken to support, and it turns out the first 3 links with no titles are ajax content for pop ups, instead of waiting for them to work out how to resolve this issue, does anyone know how to stop them coming up as major errors?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CosmikCarrot0