Best practice for listings with outbound links
-
My site contains a number of listings for charities that offer various sporting activities for people to get involved in order to raise money. As part of the listing we provide an outbound link for the user to find out more info about each of the charities and their activities.
Currently these listings are blocked in the robots.txt for fear that we may be viewed as a 'link farm or spam site' (as there are hundreds of charities listed on the scrolling page) but these links out are genuine and provide benefits and are a useful resource for the user and not paid links.
What I'd like to do is make these listings fully crawlable and indexable to increase our search traffic to these listing, but I'm not sure whether this would have a negative impact on our Pagerank with Google potentially viewing all these outbound links as 'bad' or 'paid links',
Would removing the listing pages from our robots.txt and making all the outbound links 'nofollow' be the way forward to allow us to properly index the listings without being penalised as some kind of link farm or spam site? (N.B. I have no interest in passing link juice to the external charity websites)
-
These links sound relevant and extremely wholesome.
Great websites link to other great websites all of the time.
-
To keep it short
If you have any doubts about it and if the only reason is to get your pages into the index then just add nofollow to those links and it will be safe from the points / concerns you've raised. Safe all around.
On the another hand, if those links are really bringing additional value to the pages, to your visitors for those pages the number is irrelevant - you can have as many as you want and nothing will happen.
More then that, outgoing real valuable links will also bring some value in your on page optimisation score for those pages. Linking out is not a bad thing as long as it make sense and everything is genuine.
One hing that is really important is where you link out - if your links are pointing to "bad" sites (whatever bad will mean: spammy usually) then and only then you might have a problem.
if the links are on the same vertical, niche you can proudly link with no issues and the number ris not relevant.
And again, if you have any doubts about all or some of the links just no follow them and you will be safe.
-
To keep it short:
If you have any doubts about it and if the only reason is to get your pages into the index then just add nofollow to those links and it will be safe from the points / concerns you've raised. Safe all around.
On the another hand, if those links are really bringing additional value to the pages, to your visitors for those pages the number is irrelevant - you can have as many as you want and nothing will happen.
More then that, outgoing real valuable links will also bring some value in your on page optimisation score for those pages. Linking out is not a bad thing as long as it make sense and everything is genuine.
One hing that is really important is where you link out - if your links are pointing to "bad" sites (whatever bad will mean: spammy usually) then and only then you might have a problem.
if the links are on the same vertical, niche you can proudly link with no issues and the number ris not relevant.
And again, if you have any doubts about all or some of the links just no follow them and you will be safe.
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
-
Are footer links important?
We currently display a list of links in the footer of our site to help boost SEO. They were put in place years ago and in a recent discuss with our UX team they requested we remove them from the site. Do footer links have any value? Or is this an old dated practice that no longer works? If we remove the footer links should we expect to see if have an impact on our SEO traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mivito0 -
To list or not to list? Products that contain basic info only, yet show off product depth...
Some of our products on our site only have 40 characters of description... each item/category is it's own unique web page with basic info like Brand, Model, What it is, Price, & Quantity in stock. For searchers knowing what they want, they can quickly find us via the basic info & see that we have it in stock. But for someone surfing our site, it's not all that attractive or informative as you are scrolling down the category list. Collecting the picture & info can be a slow and time consuming process, but something we'd love to be all caught up on one day. Would it be wiser to take these pages off, or keep them on until they are fully updated with pic & more detail? (My thought is that even though they don't contain a lot of individual detail depth, they still add a substantial quantity of basic related content to the category page that they reside in. This basic info on these items are also given a chance to burn into the web search engines over a longer period of time. As time goes by and their content is improved, they will get re-crawled/re-indexed with their new information depth. Also, even though they don't look all that pretty, it shows off our product depth... if we only listed the items that looked spectacular, then a lot of our categories would only contain a wimpy 3 out of 30 items that we actually have for sale. That feels like a huge misrepresentation of how much selection we actually have to offer. But perhaps this is wrong thinking?) Thanks, Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_McLeish0 -
Links from new sites with no link juice
Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site? I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site. I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase, then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing0 -
Does the number of links on a page metric include repeated links?
Just wondering if the number of links on the page metric includes links that are repeated? So, if I had 100 links to one page would this count as 100 or 1 link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornwall
If it's the former does this mean more links to one page adds weight? Thanks0 -
What's the best internal linking strategy for articles and on-site resources?
We recently added an education center to our site with articles and information about our products and industry. What is the best way to link to and from that content? There are two options I'm considering: Link to articles from category and subcategory pages under a section called "related articles" and link back to these category and subcategory pages from the articles: category page <<--------->> education center article education center article <<---------->> subcategory page Only link from the articles to the category and subcategory pages: education center article ---------->> category page education center article ---------->> subcategory page Would #1 dilute the SEO value of the category and subcategory pages? I want to offer shoppers links to more information if they need it, but this may also take them away from the products. Has anyone tested this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0 -
How to promote some links on google
Hi our site is http://www.mycarhelpline.com If people search on our site in Google by typing - Mycarhelpline they see links - why mycarhelpline, contact us and about us how can we put some other key pages by replacing above pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Link to domain
Let's say i want to rank for rental car service and purchases a domain rental-car-service and creates a site http://www.rental-car-service.com There will be few persons who won't use anchor text to link to the site, but will simply link using URL ( in this case http://www.rental-car-service.com ) So, will a link to http://www.rental-car-service.com from another site using http://www.rental-car-service.com as anchor text help the keyword rental car service ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Increasing Internal Links But Avoiding a Link Farm
I'm looking to create a page about Widgets and all of the more specific names for Widgets we sell: ABC Brand Widgets, XYZ Brand Widgets, Big Widgets, Small Widgets, Green Widgets, Blue Widgets, etc. I'd like my Widget page to give a brief explanation about each kind of Widget with a link deeper into my site that gives more detail and allows you to purchase. The problem is I have a lot of Widgets and this could get messy: ABC Green Widgets, Small XYZ Widgets, many combinations. I can see my Widget page teetering on being a link farm if I start throwing in all of these combos. So where should I stop? How much do I do? I've read more than 100 links on a page being considered a link farm, is that a hardline number or a general guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10