No-follow links on advertising pages

[CelestialChook]

Hi

I run a job board that enables employers to post job vacancies and information about their organisations. These are 'paid for' pages (advertising) on our site.

These link out to their own websites. My question is, would it be better for these links out to their sites to be no-follow?

From my site's perspective, I cannot necessarily dictate the quality of their websites (although the majority are leading firms) as I would in article and feature content, where we do happily link out and refer to other quality sites with information that gives readers further information.

I know that many large job boards do this where they run listings of feeds from other sites, but should we also do this at the page level where the link out is effectively paid for.

What would be the pros and cons if I do or if I don't use no-follow?

I hope this makes sense and look forward to some replies.

Many thanks

[CelestialChook]

Great to get this feedback. It gives me food for thought. That there are differing views actually makes me feel a bit easier about things as it shows that it isn't necessarily clear cut.

The advertising content is clearly segmented, so potentially I could test it out on a defined area.

[Dr-Pete]

It is a little tricky, but I think a link from a paid listing is still a paid link, if you want to push the letter of the law. Since you're not worried about the outbound link-juice, I agree with Keith that you're safer just to nofollow.

[kbloemendaal]

I am new to the community here too, and I love it!

I would still be careful, whether they are paying for the link or the ad, Google can decide and you could be screwed.

Also, if you can't vouch for the page it is linking to, I wouldn't make it a followed link. Being careful who you link to is important, at the same time I think it is important to link out to high quality sites with relevant content.

To me, if you are questioning it, your gut is already telling you the answer. Besides, the advertisers are there for the job ads, not followed links right?

[CelestialChook]

What you raise, is what has been my concern.

We are in a competitive market fighting it out with a lot of sites with similar focus and similar offering, so cross-domain duplicate/near-duplicate content ends up being the main focus for how we optimise this area of our content.

This no-follow thing has just been in the back of my mind as something I should look into just in case we are giving out a negative signal in someway.

And in our case, it is not the link that is paid for. They are paying to post a job vacancy - the link is mechanism for applying or finding out more.

So how does a search engine detect what is paid for and what is not?

This is my first SEOmoz  question, so I am really excited to have two people respond so quickly... how wonderful the community here!

[kbloemendaal]

If you don't no-follow the links, isn't it just paid links which is against TOS? Seems like a big chance you would be taking in getting penalized to me.

[Naghirniac]

For you I see no problem leaving the links without nofollow. I hope I could help.

Best Regards,

Naghirniac

[CelestialChook]

Thanks for replying so quickly. I will have a read through/watch the WBFs in  the links you suggest.

To confirm, I am not worried about passing on link juice to other sites. I just noticed that other sites of a similar ilk take this approach and wondered about the advantages and disadvantages.

From a client perspective, we track the visits to their sites via their links using our own reporting set up, so they know how well we do in terms of meeting their advertising needs.

[CelestialChook]

Thanks for replying so quickly. I will have a read through/watch the WBFs in  the links you suggest.

To confirm, I am not worried about passing on link juice to other sites. I just noticed that other sites of a similar ilk take this approach and wondered about the advantages and disadvantages.

From a client perspective, we track the visits to their sites via their links using our own reporting set up, so they know how well we do in terms of meeting their advertising needs.

[Naghirniac]

This is a very important point, because google change a lot how they threat the nofollow links, and some people stay with old premisses.

The nofollow links lose the benefit of the link juice. In my opinion, for you website, there is no problem to use links without the nofollow.

You should read these posts to help you out:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/nofollow-is-dying-the-impact-of-microblogging-and-nofollow-on-seo

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-dangers-of-nofollow

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-how-do-we-plug-the-nofollow-leak