Does Yelp pass link juice?

[tvkiley]

This is probably a profoundly obvious question, but I can't seem to find an explicit answer on the internet, so I'll ask it here:

Yelp's links out to local business websites are not nofollow'd, but they go through a javascript-based redirect. My understanding is that javascript redirected links do not pass link juice, so a link from a yelp profile will not directly impact my page authority; however, it looks like yelp does use nofollow judiciously for internal links, so I don't understand why they would allow follow for these "useless" outbound links.

Do yelp's javascript-redirected links pass link juice?

[Dr-Pete]

Just curious - where do you see the JS redirects? I'm seeing server-side redirects, but the interesting thing is that the return a 200 (not a 301 or 302), which could suggest they pass link-juice.

My gut sense is that Miriam's right - they probably mask direct link-juice but are still very valuable as a citation, especially for local search.

[MiriamEllis]

Hello Tyler!

What an interesting question! Not one I've seen asked before and I don't have an authoritative answer for you. I did find a couple of mentions of this out on the web.

Here's one from http://www.tastyplacement.com/6-best-free-local-business-directories-for-backlinks-customers-hits

4. Yelp.com. Yelp is popular (a fair number of visitors) and its pages rank well in the search engines. So, a listing here might earn you some supplemental results in a Google search. It’s review-based, and there are a lot of “interactive” features you’ll want to skip if you just want to list your business. Valuable and free. One limitation: Yelp does not give dofollow (a link that passes valuable pagerank to the target site) backlinks.

And a discussion at Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/jburq/acquiring_citations_from_directories_yelp_hotfrog/

I tend to think of the value of sites like Yelp as being in their quality as a citation and their ability to host conversation (hopefully positive) about your business. I am going to ask one of our super SEOs to step in and give you an opinion on this. It's a very good question!

Miriam

[Kotkov]

Oficially, no it does not pass link juice, BUT google is smart enough so you will gain smth from this link. + you can get some good traffic. It's always good to have your business listed on sites like yelp.

[MRCSearch]

Not a clue. I'd guess they're nofollowing the internal links to better architect what internal pages are ranking, but maybe they intended profile links to pass juice, and implementation wasn't what they'd thought it be.

[tvkiley]

Thanks for the answer! Can you think of any reason why yelp doesn't nofollow these links? They seem to nofollow a lot of links within their own site, so it seems strange that these links are not nofollow'd.

[MRCSearch]

I'm 99.9% positive the answer is no, they do not pass link juice. JS-redirected links are all hinky like that.