NoFollow tag for external links: Good or bad?
-
I have a few sites that have tens of thousands of links on them (most of them are sourcing images that happen to be external links).
I know that it's a good thing to externally link to reputable sources, but is it smart to place the nofollow tag on ALL external links? I'm sure there is a good chance that external links from posts from years ago are pointing to sites that may now be penalized. I feel as though nofollowing all the external links could come off as unnatural.
What are the pros and cons of placing the nofollow tag on ALL external links, and also if I leave it as is and don't put the nofollow tag on them.
Thanks.
-
I don't think nofollowing lots of links would be unnatural, as it doesn't strike me as a quick "hack" to boost your rankings. If nofollow was taken off lots of links then that might be something Google would pay attention to as PageRank would then be passed to these links.
If you can't endorse / trust the links then nofollowing them is what Google recommends:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en&ref_topic=2371375
If you want to be extremely cautious then you could add nofollow to the links on some of the websites, and see if anything bad happens before doing the rest.
George
-
102,
No harm is going to come to your site if you nofollow all of those. If there's some likelihood that a good many of those links are pointing to sites that are penalized and I had to do all or nothing, I'd nofollow all of them.
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
-
Inbound Linking
Hello, I manage a company that owns a bunch of schools (20) websites. They would like to create on each website a page which shows their schools in all the locations. Will this be ok as far as white hat practices and inbound linking?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brightvessel0 -
Good vs Bad Web directories
Hi this blog post Rand mentions a list of bad web directories - I asked couple of years ago if there is an updated list as some of these (Alive Directory for example) do not seem to be blacklisted anymore and are coming up in Google searches etc? It seems due to old age of the blog post (7 years ago ) the comments are not responded to. Would anyone be able to advise if which of these good directories to use? https://moz.com/blog/what-makes-a-good-web-directory-and-why-google-penalized-dozens-of-bad-ones
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse0 -
NoFollow Rules, Inconsistent?
I'm a bit confused on what the actual "rules" are when it comes to including dofollow backlinks from widgets. When sites like YouTube offer embed codes, don't those include dofollow backlinks in them? And when sites like Facebook offer widgets, don't those too include dofollow backlinks in them? Back in December we released a WordPress plugin, seen here. A few weeks later we saw our rankings plummet. We were told by our SEO consultant that because our link profile changed so drastically over the course of a few weeks, that Google took that as unnatural link building. I have two thoughts on this. First, our plugin is directly related to our site. And it's taking content from our site. Therefore, if another publisher chooses to use our content, does that not mean that they are indeed endorsing our site, and therefore the backlink should be dofollow? Second, what is the difference between a dofollow in our WP plugin, and a dofollow in Facebook's widget? Why does one get you penalized while the other boosts your authority?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JABacchetta0 -
Black linking exploitation
Hi all After watching our ranking for some primary keywords drop on Google from page 1 to 20 and then totally off the charts in relatively short period I've recently discovered through moz tools that our website along with other competitor sites are victims to black linking (may have the terminology wrong). Two primary words are anchor linked to our domain (www.solargain.com.au) being sex & b$tch through over 4000 compromised sites - mostly Wordpress - many which are high profile sites. Searching through the source code through half a dozen compromised sites I noticed that competitors are also linked using other derogatory terms, but the patterns indicate batch or clustered processing. The hacker has left some evidence as to whom they are representing as I can see some credible discussion forums which contain negative feedback on one particular supplier also among the links. Although this is pretty good evidence to why our ranking has dropped there are some interesting questions: A) is there any way to rectify the 4000 or so black links, mass removal or other. (Doesn't sound feasible)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mannydog
B) some competitors who dominate organic ranking through better optimization don't seem to be affected or apparently affected as much as our site at least. Which questions how much we are affected as a direct result from this hack.
C) is there action or support for industrial espionage?
D) can you request from google to ignore the inbound links and would they not have a duty of care to do so? I'm fairly new to this ugly side of the Internet and would like to know how to approach recovery and moving forward. Thoughts ideas very welcome. Thanks in advance.0 -
Noindexing Thin Content Pages: Good or Bad?
If you have massive pages with super thin content (such as pagination pages) and you noindex them, once they are removed from googles index (and if these pages aren't viewable to the user and/or don't get any traffic) is it smart to completely remove them (404?) or is there any valid reason that they should be kept? If you noindex them, should you keep all URLs in the sitemap so that google will recrawl and notice the noindex tag? If you noindex them, and then remove the sitemap, can Google still recrawl and recognize the noindex tag on their own?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
All pages going through 302 redirect - bad?
So, our web development company did something I don't agree with and I need a second opinion. Most of our pages are statically cached (the CMS creates .html files), which is required because of our traffic volume. To get geotargeting to work, they've set up every page to 302 redirect to a geodetection script, and back to the geotargeted version of the page. Eg: www.example.com/category 302 redirects to www.example.com/geodetect.hp?ip=ip_address. Then that page 302 redirects back to either www.example.com/category, or www.example.com/geo/category for the geo-targeted version. **So all of our pages - thousands - go through a double 302 redirect. It's fairly invisible to the user, and 302 is more appropriate than 301 in this case, but it really worries me. I've done lots of research and can't find anything specifically saying this is bad, but I can't imagine Google being happy with this. ** Thoughts? Is this bad for SEO? Is there a better way (keeping in mind all of our files are statically generated)? Is this perfectly fine?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dholowiski0 -
Webmaster Tools Showing Bad Links Removed Over 60 Days Ago
Hello, One of my clients received the notorious message from Google about unnatural links late last March. We've removed several hundred (if not thousands) of links, and resubmitted several times for reconsideration, only to continue with responses that state that we still have unnatural links. Looking through the "links to your site" in google webmaster tools, there are several hundred sites / pages listed, from which we removed our link over 60 days ago. If you click each link to view the site / page, they contain nothing, viewable or hidden, regarding our website / address. I was wondering if this (outdated / inaccurate) list is the same as the one their employees use to analyze the current status of bad links, and if so how long it will take to reflect up-to-date information. In other words, even though we've removed the bad links, how long do we need to wait until we can expect a clean resubmission for reconsideration. Any help / advice would be greatly appreciated -
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Bromtec0 -
Can I be penalized for offering incentives for links and social followers?
A competitor of mine is using contest/loyalty software like ContestBurner or PunchTab to generate social followers and links. This has been very successful, and over the past several months his rankings have improved. Does anyone know if Google is "OK" with this type of program? I'm trying to decide if I should start one myself.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dfeemster1