Best practice for listings with outbound links
-
My site contains a number of listings for charities that offer various sporting activities for people to get involved in order to raise money. As part of the listing we provide an outbound link for the user to find out more info about each of the charities and their activities.
Currently these listings are blocked in the robots.txt for fear that we may be viewed as a 'link farm or spam site' (as there are hundreds of charities listed on the scrolling page) but these links out are genuine and provide benefits and are a useful resource for the user and not paid links.
What I'd like to do is make these listings fully crawlable and indexable to increase our search traffic to these listing, but I'm not sure whether this would have a negative impact on our Pagerank with Google potentially viewing all these outbound links as 'bad' or 'paid links',
Would removing the listing pages from our robots.txt and making all the outbound links 'nofollow' be the way forward to allow us to properly index the listings without being penalised as some kind of link farm or spam site? (N.B. I have no interest in passing link juice to the external charity websites)
-
These links sound relevant and extremely wholesome.
Great websites link to other great websites all of the time.
-
To keep it short
If you have any doubts about it and if the only reason is to get your pages into the index then just add nofollow to those links and it will be safe from the points / concerns you've raised. Safe all around.
On the another hand, if those links are really bringing additional value to the pages, to your visitors for those pages the number is irrelevant - you can have as many as you want and nothing will happen.
More then that, outgoing real valuable links will also bring some value in your on page optimisation score for those pages. Linking out is not a bad thing as long as it make sense and everything is genuine.
One hing that is really important is where you link out - if your links are pointing to "bad" sites (whatever bad will mean: spammy usually) then and only then you might have a problem.
if the links are on the same vertical, niche you can proudly link with no issues and the number ris not relevant.
And again, if you have any doubts about all or some of the links just no follow them and you will be safe.
-
To keep it short:
If you have any doubts about it and if the only reason is to get your pages into the index then just add nofollow to those links and it will be safe from the points / concerns you've raised. Safe all around.
On the another hand, if those links are really bringing additional value to the pages, to your visitors for those pages the number is irrelevant - you can have as many as you want and nothing will happen.
More then that, outgoing real valuable links will also bring some value in your on page optimisation score for those pages. Linking out is not a bad thing as long as it make sense and everything is genuine.
One hing that is really important is where you link out - if your links are pointing to "bad" sites (whatever bad will mean: spammy usually) then and only then you might have a problem.
if the links are on the same vertical, niche you can proudly link with no issues and the number ris not relevant.
And again, if you have any doubts about all or some of the links just no follow them and you will be safe.
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
-
Sitemaps: Best Practice
What should and what shouldn't go in the sitemap? In particular, pages like subscribe to our newsletter/ unsubscribe to our newsletter? Is there really any benefit in highlighting those pages to the SEs? Thanks for any advice/ anecdotes 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Best SEO Practices for FAQ Page
Hi all, I'm looking for some tips on best practices for FAQ pages. In particular, is it better to have all questions and answers listed on one page, or should each question have its own page - given that there's enough content for it Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brian-madden0 -
The Consequences & Best Practices In Changing Domains
Working with a long established/organic successful site that, for brand reasons I disagree with, is verging on changing its domain name. Other than 301ing individual pages to their new domain name equivalent, getting canonicals updated, updating SSL certificates, new Google Search Console with old settings, maintaining the old robots.txtetc what else is worth paying attention to? Assuming I do all of that, how bad a hit to organic over what period of time might this result in? 6 months ago we migrated to https and that was hardly felt, but this is really a brand new domain name altogether. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Unpaid Followed Links & Canonical Links from Syndicated Content
I have a user of our syndicated content linking to our detailed source content. The content is being used across a set of related sites and driving good quality traffic. The issue is how they link and what it looks like. We have tens of thousands of new links showing up from more than a dozen domains, hundreds of sub-domains, but all coming from the same IP. The growth rate is exponential. The implementation was supposed to have canonical tags so Google could properly interpret the owner and not have duplicate syndicated content potentially outranking the source. The canonical are links are missing and the links to us are followed. While the links are not paid for, it looks bad to me. I have asked the vendor to no-follow the links and implement the agreed upon canonical tag. We have no warnings from Google, but I want to head that off and do the right thing. Is this the right approach? What would do and what would you you do while waiting on the site owner to make the fixes to reduce the possibility of penguin/google concerns? Blair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlairKuhnen0 -
Spam Links? -115 Domains Sharing the Same IP Address, to Remove or Not Remove Links
Out of 250 domains that link to my site about 115 are from low quality directories that are published by the same company and hosted on the same ip address. Examples of these directories are: -www.keydirectory.net -www.linkwind.com -www.sitepassage.com -www.ubdaily.com -www.linkyard.org A recent site audit from a reputable SEO firm identified 125 toxic links. I assume these are those toxic links. They also identified about another 80 suspicious domains linking to my site. They audit concluded that my site is suffering a partial Penguin penalty due to low quality links. My question is whether it is safe to remove these 125 links from the low quality directories. I am concerned that removing this quantity of links all at once will cause a drop in ranking because the link profile will be thin with only about 125 domains remaining that point to the site. Granted those 125 domains should be of somewhat better quality. I am playing with fire by having these removed. I URGENTLY NEED ADVICE AS THE WEBMASTER HAS INITIATED STEPS TO REMOVE THE 125 LINKS. Thanks everyone!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
What's the best SEO practice for having dynamic content on the same URL?
Let's use this example... www.miniclip.com and there's a function to log in... If you're logged in and a cookie checks that you're logged in and you're on page, let's say, www.miniclip.com/racing-games however the banners being displayed would have more call to action and offers on the page when a user is not logged in to entice them to sign up but the URL would still be www.miniclip.com/racing-games if and if not logged in, what would be the best URL practice for this? just do it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdiRste0 -
Measurement of Link Value
Over the past few months I have encountered webmasters who claim to be using instruments far better than open site explorer but they will not disclose what they are. Are there better ways of determining the value of a link than OSE? Is "link juice" more important than page/domain authority where the link resides? Or vice-vesa. Any help understanding this would be appreciated. I do not want to offend other webmasters but I also do not want to be fooled by them either while negotiating a link exchange with them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Aside from creative link bait, what's a solid link building strategy involve?
All things considered, directories, blogs, articles, press releases, forums, social profiles, student discount pages, etc, what do you consider to be a strong, phased, link building strategy? I'm talking beyond natural/organic link bait, since many larger accounts will not allow you to add content to their website or take 6 months to approve a content strategy. I've got my own list, but would love to hear what the community considers to be a strong, structured, timeline-based strategy for link building.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevewiideman1