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.
Is it Okay to Nofollow all External Links
-
So, we all "nofollow" most of the external links or all external links to hold back the page rank. Is it correct? As per Google, only non-trusty and paid links must be nofollow. Is it all same about external links and nofollow now?
-
So, we all "nofollow" most of the external links or all external links to hold back the page rank.
Nofollowing links does not mean you retain link juice or page rank. That page rank gets dropped rather than being transferred to another location.
Is it all same about external links and nofollow now?
I don't understand your question but if you mean should all external links be nofollow, the answer is no. As Google has suggested, you should still tag trustworthy destination links with the follow attribute.
-
The link from Alick300 is extremelly credible that comes from John Mueller from Google. However, I would look at these 2 links as well:
https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/long-term-outgoing-link-experiment/ (an interesting expirement) https://moz.com/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo-whiteboard-friday (Is External Linking Good For SEO? - Whiteboard Friday)
They both go into some additional details.
-
Hi,
According to Google there Isn't an SEO advantage to linking externally.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-external-links-20951.html
I would also suggest you to read this old thread @ https://moz.com/community/q/outbound-links-to-authority-sites (see first reply).
Hope this helps.
Thanks
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
-
Are All Paid Links and Submissions Bad?
My company was recently approached by a website dedicated to delivering information and insights about our industry. They asked us if we wanted to pay for a "company profile" where they would summarize our company, add a followed link to our site, and promote a giveaway for us. This website is very authoritative and definitely provides helpful use to its audience. How can this website get away with paid submissions like this? Doesn't that go against everything Google preaches? If I were to pay for a profile with them, would I request for a "nofollow" link back to my site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jampaper1 -
Should You Link Back from Client's Website?
We had a discussion in the office today, about if it can help or hurt you to link back to your site from one that you optimize, host, or manage. A few ideas that were mentioned: HURT:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David-Kley
1. The website is not directly related to your niche, therefore Google will treat it as a link exchange or spammy link.
2. Links back to you are often not surrounded by related text about your services, and looks out of place to users and Search Engines. HELP:
1. On good (higher PR, reputable domain) domains, a link back can add authority, even if the site is not directly related to your services.
2. Allows high ranking sites to show users who the provider is, potentially creating a new client, and a followed incoming link on anchor text you can choose. So, what do you think? Test results would be appreciated, as we are trying to get real data. Benefits and cons if you have an opinion.2 -
How do you change the 6 links under your website in Google?
Hello everyone, I have no idea how to ask this question, so I'm going to give it a shot and hopefully someone can help me!! My company is called Eteach, so when you type in Eteach into Google, we come in the top position (phew!) but there are 6 links that appear underneath it (I've added a picture to show what I mean). How do you change these links?? I don't even know what to call them, so if there is a particular name for these then please let me know! They seem to be an organic rank rather than PPC...but if I'm wrong then do correct me! Thanks! zorIsxH.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Footer Link in International Parent Company Websites Causing Penalty?
Still waiting to look at the analytics for the timeframe, but we do know that the top keyword dropped on or about April 23, 2012 from the #1 ranking in Google - something they had held for years, and traffic dropped over 15% that month and further slips since. Just looked at Google Webmaster Tools and see over 2.3MM backlinks from "sister" compainies from their footers. One has over 700,000, the rest about 50,000 on average and all going to the home page, and all using the same anchor text, which is both a branded keyword, as well as a generic keyword, the same one they ranked #1 for. They are all "nofollows" but we are trying to confirm if the nofollow was before or after they got hit, but regardless, Google has found them. To also add, most of sites are from their international sites, so .de, .pl, .es, .nl and other Eurpean country extensions. Of course based on this, I would assume the footer links and timing, was result of the Penguin update and spam. The one issue, is that the other US "sister" companies listed in the same footer, did not see a drop, in fact some had increase traffic. And one of them has the same issue with the brand name, where it is both a brand name and a generic keyword. The only note that I will make about any of the other domains is that they do not drive the traffic this one used to. There is at least a 100,000+ visitor difference among the main site, and this additional sister sites also listed in the footer. I think I'm on the right track with the footer links, even though the other sites that have the same footer links do not seem to be suffering as much, but wanted to see if anyone else had a different opinion or theory. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LeverSEO
Jen Davis0 -
Disavow - Broken links
I have a client who dealt with an SEO that created not great links for their site. http://www.golfamigos.co.uk/ When I drilled down in opensiteexplorer there are quite a few links where the sites do not exist anymore - so I thought I could test out Disavow out on them .. maybe just about 6 - then we are building good quality links to try and tackle this problem with a more positive approach. I just wondered what the consensus was?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lauratagdigital0 -
Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow
Hi Mozzers I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it. So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes, I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*. So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs) If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow? PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks, Chris Captivate.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DROIDSTERS0 -
Link Building using Badges
In light of penguin update, is link building using badges(like "I love SEOMOZ" badge) still considered a white hat tactic? I have read old posts on SEOMOZ blog about this topic and wondering if this method is still effective. Look forward to feedback from MOZers.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Amjath0 -
Deny visitors by referrer in .htaccess to clean up spammy links?
I want to lead off by saying that I do not recommend trying this. My gut tells me that this is a bad idea, but I want to start a conversation about why. Since penguin a few weeks ago, one of the most common topics of conversation in almost every SEO/Webmaster forum is "how to remove spammy links". As Ryan Kent pointed out, it is almost impossible to remove all of these links, as these webmasters and previous link builders rarely respond. This is particularly concerning given that he also points out that Google is very adamant that ALL of these links are removed. After a handful of sleepless nights and some research, I found out that you can block traffic from specific referring sites using your.htaccess file. My thinking is that by blocking traffic from the domains with the spammy links, you could prevent Google from crawling from those sites to yours, thus indicating that you do not want to take credit for the link. I think there are two parts to the conversation... Would this work? Google would still see the link on the offending domain, but by blocking that domain are you preventing any strength or penalty associated with that domain from impacting your site? If for whatever reason this would nto work, would a tweak in the algorithm by Google to allow this practice be beneficial to both Google and the SEO community? This would certainly save those of us tasked with cleaning up previous work by shoddy link builders a lot of time and allow us to focus on what Google wants in creating high quality sites. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | highlyrelevant0