undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • MozCon
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
    Moz Pro

    Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

    Try it free!
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers

      Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
  4. If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
6
9
9.5k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • Rich_Coffman
    Rich_Coffman last edited by Jul 18, 2016, 2:20 AM

    OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post.

    Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website.

    Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal?

    Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • Andy.Drinkwater
      Andy.Drinkwater @KeriMorgret last edited by Jul 19, 2016, 3:53 PM Jul 19, 2016, 3:53 PM

      Just a little more info from Google here as well on how Pagerank Sculpting no longer works...

      http://www.thesempost.com/google-pagerank-sculpting-still-doesnt-work/

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • KeriMorgret
        KeriMorgret last edited by Jul 19, 2016, 2:40 PM Jul 19, 2016, 2:40 PM

        I'm with inbound.org, and second what ThompsonPaul says. This email was about not indexing profiles that are incomplete and have thin content, and doesn't have anything to do with outbound links.

        My take on links I make out from my own website:

        • Nofollow affiliate links
        • Nofollow links I don't trust -- but I generally won't link to things I don't trust, or would just make it so there's a space in the URL or it otherwise doesn't link
        • Leave most every link followed. It's my site, I'm going to link out to sites I trust. If I have comments, those will be nofollow, as I'm not the author and not endorsing where the comments are linking.

        Good info from Matt Cutts here about how nofollow hasn't been used to 'conserve' link equity in some time. https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

        Andy.Drinkwater 1 Reply Last reply Jul 19, 2016, 3:53 PM Reply Quote 0
        • Rich_Coffman
          Rich_Coffman last edited by Jul 19, 2016, 12:37 PM Jul 19, 2016, 12:37 PM

          thank you good sir.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • ThompsonPaul
            ThompsonPaul last edited by Jul 19, 2016, 2:09 AM Jul 19, 2016, 2:09 AM

            As I mention in my other comment, Sandi, no-following links doesn't preserve "SEO juice" at all. That hasn't been the case in many years.

            And what Inbound is doing is completely different. They are No-Indexing entire pages that had so little content on them that they had no value, were wasting the site's crawl budget and looked like thin/duplicate content to the search engines. Nothing to do with the links on them at all. (This is actually a best practice for any site, but especially directory-type sites.)

            P.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • ThompsonPaul
              ThompsonPaul last edited by Jul 19, 2016, 2:11 AM Jul 19, 2016, 2:02 AM

              No-following links has ABSOLUTELY ZERO EFFECT on preserving "link juice" of a page, Rich. This used to be the case six years ago when no-follow for links was first introduced, but it was being abused so badly that search engines changed this behaviour. (This used to be referred to as PageRank sculpting)

              Further to Andy's and Dmytro's comments - Google is clear there are only three circumstances when no-follow should be used:

              1. you have a commercial relationship with the page you're linking too (paid links, but also many guest post scenarios for example)
              2. you didn't create the link and therefore can't trust it (e.g. user comments or other user generated content)
              3. you are linking to an unreliable site (to demonstrate a bad example,for instance)
              4. (and a bonus fourth) links to administrative-type pages that wouldn't be of any use to a search visitor like a privacy/terms of service or login page).

              There's also been considerable discussion that Google in particular considers no-following of all external links a sign of unnatural manipulation that could damage page authority.

              So... conceptually a good idea at one time, but no longer valid and potentially harmful.

              Hope that helps?

              Paul

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
              • Rich_Coffman
                Rich_Coffman @Andy.Drinkwater last edited by Jul 18, 2016, 2:09 PM Jul 18, 2016, 2:09 PM

                Thanks Andy!

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • Andy.Drinkwater
                  Andy.Drinkwater last edited by Jul 18, 2016, 2:09 PM Jul 18, 2016, 12:53 PM

                  Hi Rich,

                  Don't nofollow for the sake of it. If a link is paid for, then yes, you should nofollow this, but that is probably one of the very few occasions i would suggest you do it.

                  Perhaps if you have written a blog post and then were asked to inject a link into it, then I would be tempted to nofollow that, but I wouldn't do it to try and retain link juice - that isn't really a tactic these days.

                  Google wants to see you link to sites externally, as long as it is called for - this will help show your authority as well.

                  -Andy

                  Rich_Coffman 1 Reply Last reply Jul 18, 2016, 2:09 PM Reply Quote 1
                  • solvid
                    solvid last edited by Jul 18, 2016, 2:09 PM Jul 18, 2016, 5:46 AM

                    Hi,

                    I don't necessarily agree that too many outbound links can harm your own SEO. In fact, Matt Cutts has tons of outbound links on his blog, so as long as links are relevant from a user perspective there shouldn't be any issues.

                    Back to the follow/nofollow, if you are linking out to trusted and relevant sources, I don't see any reason to nofollow the links. On the other hand, if you have user generated content, I would nofollow external links, because you won't always know where are they linking out.

                    Hope this helps!

                    Dmytro

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
                    • 1 / 1
                    1 out of 9
                    • First post
                      1/9
                      Last post

                    Got a burning SEO question?

                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                    Start my free trial


                    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.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • jacob.young.cricut

                      Will I lose Link Juice when implementing a Reverse Proxy?

                      My company is looking at consolidating 5 websites that it has running on magento, wordpress, drupal and a few other platforms on to the same domain. Currently they're all on subdomains but we'd like to consolidate the subdomains to folders for UX and SEO potential. Currently they look like this: shop.example.com blog.example.com uk.example.com us.example.com After the reverse proxy they'll look like this: example.com/uk/ example.com/us/ example.com/us/shop example.com/us/blog I'm curious to know how much link juice will be lost in this switch. I've read a lot about site migration (especially the Moz example). A lot of these guides/case studies just mention using a bunch of 301's but it seems they'd probably be using reveres proxies as well. My questions are: Is a reverse proxy equal to or worse/better than a 301? Should I combine reverse proxy with a 301 or rel canonical tag? When implementing a reverse proxy will I lose link juice = ranking? Thanks so much! Jacob

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 21, 2016, 5:27 PM | jacob.young.cricut
                      0
                    • PeteC12

                      Do I have to many internal links which is diluting link juice to less important pages

                      Hello Mozzers, I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow. My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ? Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated? Any thoughts greatly appreciated thanks Pete

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 22, 2015, 12:48 PM | PeteC12
                      0
                    • McTaggart

                      Membership/subscriber (/customer) only content and SEO best practice

                      Hello Mozzers, I was wondering whether there's any best practice guidance out there re: how to deal with membership/subscriber (existing customer) only content on a website, from an SEO perspective - what is best practice? A few SEOs have told me to make some of the content visible to Google, for SEO purposes, yet I'm really not sure whether this is acceptable / manipulative, and I don't want to upset Google (or users for that matter!) Thanks in advance, Luke

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 19, 2015, 7:10 PM | McTaggart
                      0
                    • SEOBirmingham81

                      <aside>Tag Use</aside>

                      Hi Guys, Just after some clarification - I have recently been told that by placing content in <aside></aside> tags spiders will ignore the content. Is this the case? I always thought that content placed in these tags was to identify related content. To put the query into some context, we have the same content on multiple pages on a site, which is relevant to the main body copy - but could throw up duplicate content issues... Thanks in advance.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 1, 2014, 12:13 PM | SEOBirmingham81
                      1
                    • bestone

                      Redirecting one site to another for link juice

                      I have two sites with same theme - buying cars.  I am going remove one of the sites from being crawled permenantly (ie junkthecars.com) and point domian via 301, to another similar theme site (sellthecars.com). The purpose is to simply pass the SEO link juice from one site to the other as we retire junkthecars.com.... Is a forwarding of the domain  OK and the best way for the search engines to increase the rank of sellthecars.com (we hate to wast the link work done on Junkthecars.com)? What dangers should I look for that could hurt sellthecars.com if we do the redirect at a simple TLD?

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 6, 2013, 10:25 PM | bestone
                      0
                    • TLM

                      Is this link follow or nofollow? Does it pass linkjuice?

                      I have been seeing conflicting opinions about how Google would treat links using 'onclick'. For the example provided below: Would Google follow this link and pass the appropriate linking metrics(it is internal and points to a deeper level in our visnav)? =-=-=-=-=-=-= <div id='<a class="attribute-value">navBoxContainer</a>' class="<a class="attribute-value">textClass</a>"> <div id="<a class="attribute-value">boxTitle</a>" onclick="<a class="attribute-value">location.href='bla</a>h.example.com"> <div class="<a class="attribute-value">boxTitleContent</a>" title="<a class="attribute-value">Text Here</a>"><a href<a class="attribute-value">Text Here</a>"><a ="blah.exam.cpleom">Text Herea>div> ``` =-=-=-=-=-=-= An simple yes/no would be alright, but any detail/explination you could provide would be helpful and very much appreciated. Thank you all for your time and responses.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 7, 2014, 11:56 AM | TLM
                      0
                    • RichFinnSEO

                      Meta Tag Force Page Refresh - Good or Bad?

                      I had recently come across a meta tag that could cause a auto refresh on a users browser when implemented.  I have been using it for a redesign and was curious if there could be any negative effects for using it, here is the code: All input is appreciated. Ciao, Todd Richard

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 14, 2012, 5:07 PM | RichFinnSEO
                      0
                    • Ideas-Money-Art

                      Transfer link juice from old to new site

                      Hi seomozzers, The design team is building a new website for one of our clients. My role is to make sure all the link juice is kept. My first question is, should I just make 301s or is there another technique to preserve all the link juice from the old to new site that I should be focusing on? Second Question is that ok to transfer link juice using dev urls like www.dev2.example.com (new site) or 182.3456.2333? or should I wait the creation of real urls to do link juice transfer? Thank you 🙂

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 24, 2012, 6:48 PM | Ideas-Money-Art
                      0

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    • Digital Marketers
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.