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
-
Common perception is that "nofollow" links still deplete your link juice, but the other site does not benefit.
That being said, there is no correlated data saying that linking to high quality sites will hinder your rankings (if done in moderation, and properly). In fact, the correlation is very minutely in the positive. So, if you think something is good enough to send your customers to, just let the link go free. My only suggestion would be to control your anchor text, and make sure it's not something you would wank to rank for. Ultra safe scenario would be to link with their brand name.
-
Yes, when you link to another site you are passing some of your link juice to them. You can add a nofollow attribute (i.e. rel="nofollow">example link ) to your outgoing links to stop this from happening, but its looked down upon. If you do this within your own site too much this can also be interpreted by Google as page sculpting (another thing frowned upon). I like to think of the thought behind your question as link karma. Next time you post something worthwhile someone may do the same when linking to you. Is that something you really want? If the content is actually worth linking to then you should throw them the link. In the long run if your page is really of value this shouldn't affect your ranking. In some cases, Google even appears to like it when you link to trusted and valuable sources.
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
-
Disavow links old links
We have built a lot of sites and there a few sites we no longer manage or want any association with. When I have looked at webmasters I can see 20 to 200+ odd links back to our site. The page however at source has no reference to our website. I have searched the code but there isn't anything. Is it safe to disavow these or just leave them?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Nofollow links on our site menu
Hi Our site's front page has almost 900 internal links on it (it's an ecommerce site with about 25,000 products). A lot of these are on a pretty involved dropdown menu, which is on every page. I can't really do anything to get this figure down (its outside my remit), but one thing the developers have done is make all the menu links nofollow on the mobile version of the menu (site is responsive) - otherwise there would be even more links! My question is as to whether doing this for the mobile menu is a good idea, in terms of SEO?
Technical SEO | | abisti21 -
On our site by mistake some wrong links were entered and google crawled them. We have fixed those links. But they still show up in Not Found Errors. Should we just mark them as fixed? Or what is the best way to deal with them?
Some parameter was not sent. So the link was read as : null/city, null/country instead cityname/city
Technical SEO | | Lybrate06060 -
Linking without loosing link equity.
Hi, I was wondering if anyone had a solution to linking without loosing link equity? From what I have read using 'no follow' on both internal and external links DOES NOT pass any equity across the link to the link target, but also, the latest thought goes that it DOES loose link equity (as if it were a FOLLOW' link). So is there a method of retaining link equity using another method? Thanks
Technical SEO | | James770 -
If you are organizing the site structure for an ecommerce site, how would you do it?
Should you use not use slashes and use all dashes or use just a few slashes and the rest with dashes? For example, domain.com/category/brand/product-color-etc OR domain.com/anythinghere-color-dimensions-etc Which structure would you rather go for and why?
Technical SEO | | Zookeeper0 -
Will training videos available on the "members only" section of a site contribute to the sites ranking?
Hello, I got asked a question recently as to whether training videos on the deeper pages of a website (that you can only access if you are a member and log in) will help with the sites ranking. On the SEOMoz software these deeper pages have been crawled as far as I can tell with errors reported on pages from the "members only" section of the site, leading me to believe the members only pages and their content will contribute to the sites overall ranking profile. I have suggested uploading the informational videos on the main pages of the site for now, making them accessible to all visitors and putting them in a more obvious place to encourage more sharing and views, however I've also said I would check it out with some experts so any information will be greatly appreciated! Many thanks 🙂 Charlotte
Technical SEO | | CharlotteWaller0 -
Is this a good link?
Found a .gov link to my website www.kars4kids.org. The url it links to is http://www.nyc.gov/cgi-bin/exit.pl?url=http://www.kars4kids.org/ which does eventually redirect to kars4kids. Will search engines see this as a link?
Technical SEO | | Morris770