No-follow links on advertising pages
-
Hi
I run a job board that enables employers to post job vacancies and information about their organisations. These are 'paid for' pages (advertising) on our site.
These link out to their own websites. My question is, would it be better for these links out to their sites to be no-follow?
From my site's perspective, I cannot necessarily dictate the quality of their websites (although the majority are leading firms) as I would in article and feature content, where we do happily link out and refer to other quality sites with information that gives readers further information.
I know that many large job boards do this where they run listings of feeds from other sites, but should we also do this at the page level where the link out is effectively paid for.
What would be the pros and cons if I do or if I don't use no-follow?
I hope this makes sense and look forward to some replies.
Many thanks
-
Great to get this feedback. It gives me food for thought. That there are differing views actually makes me feel a bit easier about things as it shows that it isn't necessarily clear cut.
The advertising content is clearly segmented, so potentially I could test it out on a defined area.
-
It is a little tricky, but I think a link from a paid listing is still a paid link, if you want to push the letter of the law. Since you're not worried about the outbound link-juice, I agree with Keith that you're safer just to nofollow.
-
I am new to the community here too, and I love it!
I would still be careful, whether they are paying for the link or the ad, Google can decide and you could be screwed.
Also, if you can't vouch for the page it is linking to, I wouldn't make it a followed link. Being careful who you link to is important, at the same time I think it is important to link out to high quality sites with relevant content.
To me, if you are questioning it, your gut is already telling you the answer. Besides, the advertisers are there for the job ads, not followed links right?
-
What you raise, is what has been my concern.
We are in a competitive market fighting it out with a lot of sites with similar focus and similar offering, so cross-domain duplicate/near-duplicate content ends up being the main focus for how we optimise this area of our content.
This no-follow thing has just been in the back of my mind as something I should look into just in case we are giving out a negative signal in someway.
And in our case, it is not the link that is paid for. They are paying to post a job vacancy - the link is mechanism for applying or finding out more.
So how does a search engine detect what is paid for and what is not?
This is my first SEOmoz question, so I am really excited to have two people respond so quickly... how wonderful the community here!
-
If you don't no-follow the links, isn't it just paid links which is against TOS? Seems like a big chance you would be taking in getting penalized to me.
-
For you I see no problem leaving the links without nofollow. I hope I could help.
Best Regards,
Naghirniac
-
Thanks for replying so quickly. I will have a read through/watch the WBFs in the links you suggest.
To confirm, I am not worried about passing on link juice to other sites. I just noticed that other sites of a similar ilk take this approach and wondered about the advantages and disadvantages.
From a client perspective, we track the visits to their sites via their links using our own reporting set up, so they know how well we do in terms of meeting their advertising needs.
-
Thanks for replying so quickly. I will have a read through/watch the WBFs in the links you suggest.
To confirm, I am not worried about passing on link juice to other sites. I just noticed that other sites of a similar ilk take this approach and wondered about the advantages and disadvantages.
From a client perspective, we track the visits to their sites via their links using our own reporting set up, so they know how well we do in terms of meeting their advertising needs.
-
This is a very important point, because google change a lot how they threat the nofollow links, and some people stay with old premisses.
The nofollow links lose the benefit of the link juice. In my opinion, for you website, there is no problem to use links without the nofollow.
You should read these posts to help you out:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/nofollow-is-dying-the-impact-of-microblogging-and-nofollow-on-seo
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-dangers-of-nofollow
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-how-do-we-plug-the-nofollow-leak
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
-
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Do bad links to a sub-domain which redirects to our primary domain pass link juice and hurt rankings?
Sometime in the distant past there existed a blog.domain.com for domain.com. This was before we started work for domain.com. During the process of optimizing domain.com we decided to 301 blog.domain.com to www.domain.com. Recently, we discovered that blog.domain.com actually has a lot of bad links pointing towards it. By a lot I mean, 5000+. I am curious to hear people's opinions on the following: 1. Are they passing bad link juice? 2. does Google consider links to a sub-domain being passed through a 301 to be bad links to our primary domain? 3. The best approach to having these links removed?
Technical SEO | | Shredward0 -
Does Google monitor which links are actually followed?
If a link to my site is posted on another site and many people start following that link and they stay on my site for a while, and I also have GA set up, does Google factor that information back into the Google rankings? In other words, are there ways that Google tries to use clicks and bounce rates and other user behavior to determine page rank and domain rank? Best,
Technical SEO | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher1 -
Do pages that are in Googles supplemental index pass link juice?
I was just wondering if a page has been booted into the supplemental index for being a duplicate for example (or for any other reason), does this page pass link juice or not?
Technical SEO | | FishEyeSEO0 -
External Linking & Your sites Link juice
Hey guys, quick question. Does a page lose link juice when it gives link juice? If I link to an outside site, do I lose that same amount of link juice or is it just applied to there site and not removed from mine? I understand that linking to a competitor can in turn help him and hurt me (if he then is seen as more relevant than me to google) but does it have a direct relation to hurting/removing my page link juice? Hope this all makes sense. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
SEOMoz is indicating I have 40 pages with duplicate content, yet it doesn't list the URL's of the pages???
When I look at the Errors and Warnings on my Campaign Overview, I have a lot of "duplicate content" errors. When I view the errors/warnings SEOMoz indicates the number of pages with duplicate content, yet when I go to view them the subsequent page says no pages were found... Any ideas are greatly welcomed! Thanks Marty K.
Technical SEO | | MartinKlausmeier0 -
Why would a link shown on OSE appear differently than the page containing the link?
I recently traded links with a site that I will call www.example.com When I used open site explorer to check the link it came back with a different page authority as www.example.com/index.htm yet the link does appear on the www.example.com page. Why would this be?
Technical SEO | | casper4340 -
Internal Linking
Where is the best information on internal linking. I'm so confused and everything I read says something different. Ahhhh Thanks
Technical SEO | | meardna770