Nofollow Outbound Links on Listings from Travel Sites?
-
We oversee a variety of regional, county, and town level tourism websites, each with hundreds (or even thousands) of places/businesses represented with individual pages. Each page contains a link back to the place's main web presence if available. My fear is that a large portion of these linked to sites are low quality, and may even be spammy. With our budgets there is no way to sort through them and assign nofollows as needed. There are also a number of broken links that we try to stay on top of but at times some slip through due to the sheer number of pages.
I am thinking about adding a nofollow to these outbound links across the board. This would not be all outbound links on the website, just the website links on the listing pages.
I would love to know peoples thoughts on this.
-
Great question! We do often see a positive correlation between the number of followed outbound links and higher rankings (though I'm not sure we've scientifically measured this recently). Anecdotally, we hear this often as well. Most famously when the NYTimes made external links "followed" which was followed by an increase in traffic/rankings.
-
Thanks Cyrus
If external links are a ranking signal, do you think there would be a difference in perceived value whether external links are noFollow or doFollow, or do we expect that to make little difference?
-
It's an interesting perspective. Looking at the pages+links, they all look trustworthy and normally I wouldn't see a reason to nofollow them, especially since they are all editorially controlled by you and your team.
Linking equity is a concern, but I honestly doubt you're saving anything by making them nofollow, especially since Google updated how they handle PageRank sculpting back in 2009.
Not that there aren't legitimate ways to preserve and flow link equity (such as including internal links withing the main body of text instead of sidebar areas/navigation) but in this case I think leaving the links follow won't hurt at all.
-
Cyrus, I was actually looking to answer the statement you mentioned, "though I don't believe we've ever studied the difference between followed and nofollowed in this regard".
We've a really popular post on our site which lists hundreds of Twitter chat hours and links to the Twitter hashtag and the host in each case (http://tillison.co.uk/blog/complete-twitter-chat-hours-directory/).
Across the team, we're disagreeing whether all external links in the post should be nofollow or whether they should remain untagged and therefore dofollow. On the one hand, it feels like we're leaking page equity through every link and want to retain it, of course. On the other, nofollow kinda feels like we trust none of those links and that the page may be less valuable to the Googlebot.
I'm working through the links making them all nofollow, but would be really interested in your perspective on it.
-
Thanks, Cyrus. You have confirmed what my gut was thinking, that it likely wouldn't have much of an impact either way. The idea of testing this has been on my mind for about a year but couldn't get a strong feeling one way or the other. I would imagine that there are very few spammy sites that we are linking to but will try and dig through as time allows. Your spam score tool should help. If needed I will just nofollow specific sites that I believe may fall into this category.
Appreciate your time!
-
Good question.
On one hand, I'm a fan of linking out with, link equity. There's a good correlation with linking out and higher rankings (though I don't believe we've ever studied the difference between followed and nofollowed in this regard) I hate to see links "nofollowed" simply to protect against Google actions, but it is a reality of doing business.
To me, it comes down to how many of the sites are actual spam. "Low quality" is certainly different than spam. If it's a handful of sites out of thousands, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Generally, tourism websites are a much more trustworthy quality than sites in the gambling/adult/pharmaceutical verticals.
Now, on the other hand, if you do choose to nofollow the links, you probably won't see too many negative consequences.
In the end, I think you have to guage how bad the sites are that you're linking to, and make your judgement from there.
-
Partners, for the most part, do not pay to be listed. Those that do are in it for promotional benefits such as being listed first and other advertising perks such as email promotion. Links are never brought into the conversation.
Most of the listings we maintain are in databases and we have an internal team of developers (who built the sites in question) and some back-end tools in our CMS that help us identify the 404s. Lack of updating them is a combination of small digital marketing budgets and client staffing, lack of client assistance identifying where the links should go and political issues where some of the clients do not want us to manage their listings for various reasons. Essentially our hands are tied when it comes to updating listings (though we know that this would have the largest benefit).
Overall it is the number of lower quality websites that we need to link to to ensure that everyone in the region is represented equally. It really comes down to is if I nofollow all of them will it result in a positive impact? Will it have no effect? Or will it perceived as negative since I am essentially nofollowing hundreds or thousands of links on each of these sites?
-
Question is do your customers pay to be listed with you? If so are they using you for the dofollow links? If this is the case then you may lose some of your business by changing it to nofollow.
If they are paying there is also a risk of a Google penalty for paid do follow links.
If you are unable to maintain quality and there is no good reason to have a dofollow, then switch to nofollow.
Are the pages hardcoded? Or is all the data in a database? If it is in a database it would take no time at all to run each domain through a loop and check what response status code you get.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes
This would be a very quick way to find broken links. You may even be able to purchase an api on something like majestic or Moz and run the sites through that as well for a better indication of site quality. If the site has very low DA or Trust Flow, you could also make it nofollow or remove etc...If it is all hardcoded then that would be very hard work all around.
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
-
Some site's links look different on google search. For example Games.com › Flash games › Decoration games How can we do our url's like this?
For example Games.com › Flash games › Decoration games How can we do our url's like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lutfigunduz0 -
Development site is live (and has indexed) alongside live site - what's the best course of action?
Hello Mozzers, I am undertaking a site audit and have just noticed that the developer has left the development site up and it has indexed. They 301d from pages on old site to equivalent pages on new site but seem to have allowed the development site to index, and they haven't switched off the development site. So would the best option be to redirect the development site pages to the homepage of the new site (there is no PR on dev site and there are no links incoming to dev site, so nothing much to lose...)? Or should I request equivalent to equivalent page redirection? Alternatively I can simply ask for the dev site to be switched off and the URLs removed via WMT, I guess... Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
E-commerce site structure & link juice: Bouncing off an idea
Hi guys, Question from a new-comer in SEO. Summary of the situation: potential customers are searching for a generic product category (buy mountainbike) more often than a brand in that category (Specialized MTB). And the latter is searched more often than a specific product ('some specific product from Specialized brand'). Both the brand pages and product pages are not ranking good Then would it be a good idea to have the category pages only link to the brand pages? They may show the products, but the links wouldn't pass link juice. I'm not even sure if that is technically possible, but I wanted to figure out the merit first. I'm hoping this would support the brand pages to rank better as they take in more volume. Please do feel free to teach me!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter850 -
Site rankings steadily decreasing - do I need to remove links?
Since mid-April, our ranking have been steadily declining. Our two main keywords are 'nuts and bolts' and 'bolts and nuts'. 'nuts and bolts' dropped from 7th to 46th in May and has recovered slightly to 28th, and 'bolts and nuts' moved from 7th to 16th, and is today 24th. Ranking on keywords we specialise in have fared better, but they're fairly niche. 'bsw bolts' has moved from 2nd to 4th, and 'imperial bolts' has moved from 1st to 4th. I think my link profile is the issue. I don't think we've been penalised by Penguin directly (I may be wrong, I don't think we'd be page 2 on such a competitive term as 'bolts and nuts' after Penguin if we had been penalised.), but I think what's happened is that sites that link to us have been penalised, resulting in a knock on effect. Does that sound right? Here's my link profile: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com</a> I've been slowly building relevant links with prospective customers and kept up a very basic social media profile - just the odd blog post and sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Do I need to delete all the directory links? We do have links from directories that don't look fantastic, more are shown in Webmaster Tools than are listed here. Some of the directories no longer seem to exist, I take it I don't need to do anything and Google will catch up in those cases. Should I attempt to remove (or disavow) all links with names like best-directory etc? Or should I just concentrate on building better links? I'm not sure where to start! Any advice is greatly appreciated. Best Regards, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone0 -
Site Interlinking - footer and menu - whether to nofollow/remove
Hello, We've got a bunch of interlinking going on between the following sites: nlpca(dot)com thewealthymind(dot)com shop.nlpca(dot)com dynamicspinrelease(dot)com These are all owned and operated by the same people. Some linking is in the footer and some is in the menu or header. Could you take a look and tell me which interlinks you'd recommend nofollowing and which you'd recommend deleting entirely? We can always place a home page single link to replace those sitewides we delete or nofollow. I'm thinking we should delete everything in the footers and nofollow those in the menu or headers, placing a single dofollow link on the home page when deleting/nofollowing a sitewide link.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
I have a general site for my insurance agency. Should I create niche sites too?
I work with several insurance agencies and I get this questions several times each month. Most agencies offer personal and business insurance and in a certain geographic location. I recommend creating a quality general agency site but would they have more success creating other nice sites as well? For example, a niche site about home insurance and one about auto insurance. What would your recommendation be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lagunaitech1 -
Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc. We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did: -We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt -Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index -Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.) -removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site. We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect. There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all. The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com. There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist. The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name. Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new? ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line: "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document." This may be what is happening here. And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it. Confused yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Removed Site-wide links
Hi there, I have recently removed quite a lot of site-wide links leaving the only link on homepage's of some websites, since doing this I have seen a dramatic drop on my keywords, going from position 2-3 to nowhere. Has anyone else experienced anything like this, should I expect to see a return on these keywords? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780