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
-
Link juice site structure?
If we have a top nav with contact us, about us, delivery, FAQ, Gallery, how to order ect but none of these we want to rank and then we have the usual left hand nav.are we wasting juice with the top nav and would we be better either removing it and putting them further down the page or consolidating them and adding an extra products tab so the product pages are first.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Block Level Link Juice
I need a better understanding of how links in different parts of the page pass juice. Much has been written about how footer links pass less juice than other parts of the page. The question I have is that if a page has a hypothetical 1000 points of Link Juice and can pass on +/-800 points via links, and I have 1 and only 1 link in the footer to another page, does it pass the full 800 points? Or... since footers only pass a small fraction of link juice, it passes lets say 80 points, and the other 720 points stays locked up on the page. This question is a hypothetical - I'm just trying to understand relationships. I don't know if I've explained the question too well, but if someone could answer i it, or point me in the right direction, I would appreciate it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Link Building Question
Hey Moz'ers, I have created several blogs on different domains for the purpose of writing good content articles that contain 2-3 links per article that go back to my website. It has been up for about 3-4 weeks. I am not seeing my results/links showing up in OSE, is this because it still needs more time or is there something else I could be advised to look into? In theory these blogs will only contain 2-3 links from each domain to the site. I was also going to make sure the anchor text per link is different (keyword, brand name, random anchor like click here). Side note: How does this system sound as part of one small aspect to link building? red flags? Thanks for all the responses and advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Where do I start with cleaning up our link profile?
We have just taken the steps to start building links to www.towelsrus.co.uk, I am concerned about the state of external links to the site created by previous companies, i.e are they OK, or doing us harm, could I get more out f whats already in place or should we focus purely on getting new links? We also have about 25 pages that have 302 errors and contain external links to the site. What should i do with these. try and get them re-directed to our site with appropriate anchor text or simply put a 301 re-direct in place? In essence where I start, We want to build and increase traffic in particular for towels, bathrobes, dressing gowns and bolster our position as our positions are fluctuating a little but steadier than they have been. Any help appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Duplicate internal links on page, any benefit to nofollow
Link spam is naturally a hot topic amongst SEO's, particularly post Penguin. While digging around forums etc, I watched a video blog from Matt Cutts posted a while ago that suggests that Google only pays attention to the first instance of a link on the page As most websites will have multiple instances of a links (header, footer and body text), is it beneficial to nofollow the additional instances of the link? Also as the first instance of a link will in most cases be within the header nav, does that then make the content link text critical or can good on page optimisation be pulled from the title attribute? I would appreciate the experiences and thoughts Mozzers thoughts on this thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JustinTaylor880 -
Correcting an unnatural link profile
A site I work with ranked page 1 for a competitive keyphrase until recently. (Not Panda-related as far as we can tell.) We've done extensive on-site tweaking and the page is still parked at 27-32 in the SERPs. We believe the only viable explanation at this point is an unnatural link profile. Over the course of several years the site has racked up a large collection of footer links with anchor text due to business relationships with the sites in question. So the profile is now skewed, with the result as follows: 100,000 domain links (top 10 competitors range 1800-50k) 87% anchor text optimized (competitors 0-41%) 99% follow links (competitors 85-100%) The vast majority of links are footer links We're working on creating more natural, high-value links but this of course takes time. In the short term, two questions: Should we aim to remove or change some of the footer links? If so, do we remove them, or just change anchor text? How many? How many new links should we pursue each month to make a meaningful impact on the profile without being too aggressive? Any other thoughts on how to fix this are also appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdcomms0 -
Link Age as SEO factor?
Hi Guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VividLime
I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspx We will be doing the standard redirects etc However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24s He says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect. Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot' In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space. So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect. -But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about. So the main question:
Is link age factor in rankings ? If I update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?0 -
Google, Links and Javascript
So today I was taking a look at http://www.seomoz.org/top500 page and saw that the AddThis page is currently at the position 19. I think the main reason for that is because their plugin create, through javascript, linkbacks to their page where their share buttons reside. So any page with AddThis installed would easily have 4/5 linbacks to their site, creating that huge amount of linkbacks they have. Ok, that pretty much shows that Google doesn´t care if the link is created in the HTML (on the backend) or through Javascript (frontend). But heres the catch. If someones create a free plugin for wordpress/drupal or any other huge cms platform out there with a feature that linkbacks to the page of the creator of the plugin (thats pretty common, I know) but instead of inserting the link in the plugin source code they put it somewhere else, wich then is loaded with a javascript code (exactly how AddThis works). This would allow the owner of the plugin to change the link showed at anytime he wants. The main reason for that would be, dont know, an URL address update for his blog or businness or something. However that could easily be used to link to whatever tha hell the owner of the plugin wants to. What your thoughts about this, I think this could be easily classified as White or Black hat depending on what the owners do. However, would google think the same way about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bemcapaz0