Good or Bad Practice: NoFollow All External Links?

NoFollow All External Links?

  • Good practice

    Votes: 1 7.7%

  • Bad practice

    Votes: 12 92.3%
  • Total voters
    13

Minhftw

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Apr 26, 2017
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Hi everyone,

Got a question - Is it a good or bad practice to Nofollow all external links from your site? Trying to figure out how to correctly link to pages and that question came up.

Appreciate the help! Thanks in advance!
 
I used to do that in the past. I no longer practice nofollow, all my external links now are dofollow. I find myself mostly linking to useful articles/resources, so I don't see any point in nofollowing them.
 
"The nofollow tag is a way publishers can tell search engines not to count some of their links to other pages as “votes” in favor of that content." - Search Engine Land

That's the practice I follow. This is primarily for affiliate links but I'd also consider using it for content that I haven't read but might recommend other people consider because other websites have recommended it.

In general, I use do-follow external links for their purpose - to tell the search engine that I approve of a piece of content and consider it valuable. I doubt it makes a significant difference, but to have zero no-follow links on your website is a little odd in my opinion, although I'm sure you could find plenty of huge websites that purely use do-follow external links even for affiliate links.
 
You aren't going to build any relevance from outbound linking if they are all nofollow
 
I am also in the same line of thinking as Albert. For large mega sites they can get away with nofollow links. Think CNN etc. The rules do not apply to them as they do for most of us.

In my opinion the majority of your links should be do-follow. Then as Prentzz stated for affiliate links or for some eCommerce links no-follow works well.
 
That is interesting. I never thought about the relevance of outbound links having an effect on page seo and how a nofollow link would negate a 'relevancy factor'

Going to test this with a site that is currently all nofollow external links.

As having problems with that site and relevancy in the eyes of google
ie if you do a related:yoursite.com it comes up with nothing.

Hit the switch and make them all follow and see if it pops in search.
 
Nofollow user generated content. Do follow sites you want to legitimately link to (you're citing them for a reason yeah?) - then reach out and tell them you linked and ask them to share on social or whatever.
 
I only link to relevant stuff, so there is no point in using a nofollow tag. If they are worthy enough to be linked to, then they are worthy enough to get some link juice!
 
neoterics said:
I only link to relevant stuff, so there is no point in using a nofollow tag. If they are worthy enough to be linked to, then they are worthy enough to get some link juice!
Click to expand...

Not going to lie, it pissed me off when someone feels I'm a good enough resource to link to and then does a nofollow. Especially when they steal a picture off my site and then give credit to me as the source. Thanks pal...

I'm reality, most sites that do this aren't exactly the highest quality anyway.
 
Yeah, I am nofollowing affiliate links but leaving links to authority sites as dofollow, and just open in new tab so I don't lose my visitor (not that I have many as yet!)
 
I dofollow all of my links except: affiliate links and links to competitors... i just don't want my competition getting any of my linkjuice.
 
Definitely bad practice. There is plenty of evidence that hoarding SEO juice is actually counterproductive. Links should always be natural :smile:
 
Only nofollow those links that you are giving to some shitty website or if is a sponsored post or any affiliate links.

Some IM'ers spread this rumour that no-following all your outbound links helps in preserving page rank or link juice and then everyone after that started following that blindly.

But this is completely false statement.
 
Better for SEO if you have ~10% of nofollow links and dofollow the rest. Google likes diversity
 
This has been settled a long time ago, and I hate to see Google still give preference to sites that are misusing the nofollow tag, although I understand why they do it (keeping SERP quality high and making money). If Forbes (I think) and all of the other sites doing this were to get penalized or de-ranked to some degree, that's a lot of Google search traffic that'll stop coming to Google as a stepping stone to get to those sites.

But the reasons to use nofollow are:
  • If the link is user-generated like a blog comment or forum link, and is non-editorial
  • If the webmaster is linking to the site in a negative light and doesn't condone the other site
  • If there is any monetary incentive for the link, such as a sponsorship or affiliate link
Those are the only reasons. I think sites like Medium and Steemit and those that are strictly editorial content should use dofollow tags and not a sitewide nofollow policy. I'd venture to say that Google probably removes the nofollow from some sites and adds it to others (Wikipedia for instance, or Amazon Affiliate links that weren't nofollowed). But continual and widespread abuse should be dealt with on a domain basis, if you ask me.

No-following all of your external links does nothing for you though. You still lose Page Rank through those links, it just doesn't pass to the site you linked to. It may also hurt you in terms of helping your relevancy, and we know the algorithm has a factor related to outbound links. I suspect the nofollow tag interferes with that too.
 
What you should understand about no-follow links is that it is a way to tell search engines that you don't endorse external links. You got to decide which content you would like to endorse. In my experience, when I write articles with the sole purpose of improving rankings I include some do-follow links and the reason is that I help search engines understand what my content is about. Following sources that are talking about the same topic as your pages could help search engines understand what your site is all about.
 
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