When to use NoFollow

luxer

luxer

In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity
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Question,

What is the current best practice when creating a company media page. Should the links to articles about the company/brand be nofollow?

I am finding conflicting information..
 
luxer said:
Question,

What is the current best practice when creating a company media page. Should the links to articles about the company/brand be nofollow?

I am finding conflicting information..
Click to expand...

I had a similar question. You should probably leave them do follow. Check out @Ryuzaki full answer here on no following links.
 
Hey thanks for your input @Quick but this is very different.

My question is:
If I have a link from say Forbes.com ---> my company that is already in place

Now on my company media page as a social proof I want to show users this article about my company. So I need to link back to the article in Forbes.

Should this link back to Forbes be a nofollow.
 
People seem to fear reciprocal linking, as if they'll get in direct trouble or reduce the power of the links they've already gotten.

There's a big difference between linking like this:
Page on Site 1 <------> Page on Site 2

And linking like this:
Page 1 on Site 1 ------> Page on Site 2 ------> Page 2 on Site 1

Nothing is fact when it comes to the blackbox that is Google's algorithm, but in your case I think that not only are you okay to link from your media page to the pages on other sites, but that you'll make them more valuable.

The first reason is that it's not reciprocal linking. If they started hurting the power of every domain that links to a domain that links back to the first domain, regardless of the pages they link to, their entire algorithm would fall apart.

The second reason is that you'll be pushing link equity to your media page by the fact that it exists and is linked to from around your site. If you link at all, like @Ryuzaki was saying, you'll lose some of that equity. With no-follow, you'll lose it and the posts on the other sites with links back to you will not get the equity. With do-follow, you'll send some power to the pages with links back to you and get some of it back.

So if you link at all, it might as well be do-follow so you get some of the equity back. If you no-follow it, you lose once by letting equity leak out of a no-follow link and you lose the second time by not letting that equity come back to you through the links on the authority sites.

If those sites are no-follow linking to you there's not much you can do about that though. But if they're contextual and no-follow, I'd still power them up by do-follow linking to them.
 
Your scenario is a completely natural link back and I would argue that forcing in a nofollow is actually more manipulative in Google's eyes (trying to hog SEO value) than leaving it be a natural link.
 
There was a pretty interesting article on this topic on Gaps.com:

https://gaps.com/future-of-link-building/

It's all about people mentioning brands to get followed links from their 'in the press' pages while giving nofollow/javascript obfuscated links back in return.

Other tl;dr points:

* Author argues that sites that nofollow all links and therefore don't play their part in the link graph should be treated as if all links to them are nofollow.
* Author argues that all links you put up should be followed (except UGC like wp comments) as you shouldn't be posting them if you don't want to vouch for them

etc etc

He makes his points better than I make them for him, so worth checking out if you like that kind of thing.
 
Steve Brownlie said:
* Author argues that sites that nofollow all links and therefore don't play their part in the link graph should be treated as if all links to them are nofollow.
Click to expand...

I agree with this entirely. Even a site like Wikipedia is heavily moderated and could/should be dofollow after a link has been live for X months. In their case I'd guess Google has made some exceptions and gives them a little weight.

But big sites, like the ones where all of the editorials are always being sold... I don't blame them for going nofollow, but what they really should have done is just made certain accounts all have nofollow, and proven accounts be dofollow.

This broad sweeping attempt at pacifying and keeping them off their backs is even worse than having dofollow's sold on their sites, I think, like @IngvarXH said.

With that being said, that technique in that post is definitely not "The Future of Link Building." That's a click bait title. That technique has been going on since the day I learned about SEO. Mommy bloggers passing out awards and badges, sites with rotating "Top 25 blogs" posts where they remove sites that don't respond and add another till they get all 25 filled up. Then they do it again with a different topic. All nofollow. It's the same old ego bait stuff and the nofollow isn't even a new twist on it.
 
Something to add @Samwise89 is that a lot of large publications now make "contributor" articles nofollow but still allow their columnists and reporters dofollow links.
 
Samwise89 said:
but what they really should have done is just made certain accounts all have nofollow, and proven accounts be dofollow.
Click to expand...

I believe some (if not all) of those big sites already do that. For example, not all HuffPost links are nofollow - I think their internal editorial team has dofollow links in their content. Ex: huffingtonpost.com/entry/paul-ryan-pay-attention_us_5a5f78e4e4b096ecfca9b0eb has outbound links that are dofollow. This may extend to some other "vetted" accounts, too, such as long-standing contributors that somehow passed HuffPost's "qualifications".
 
Since the title of this thread is broad and the actual question is specific, and nobody has answered the broad question, I'll answer it so people needing that information aren't left out.

You only nofollow a link when:
  • It is in user-generated content, like a forum, comment, or article that isn't edited and pre-approved.
  • When you do not condone what's on the other side but still need to reference, like telling people not to go to a certain restaurant because they gave you food poisoning.
  • When you stand to make money from the link, such as affiliate links. Google will treat this no differently than a paid link and you will eventually get a thin content penalty (instead of unnatural links, I'm not sure why they do this).
 
I would absolutely leave them dofollow. If you're nofollowing the links, you're basically telling google that no trust should be given to the external URL. Why would anyone want to give no trust to a page that links back to their own company?

In situations like this, try not to think like an SEO would think. Most real brands aren't worried about sculpting PR, nofollowing links, or reciprocal linking. Just do what you think would look natural, and you'll likely be on the right side of things.
 
I reached out and connected John Mueller from Google. This is what he had to say

"That's ultimately up to you, in the bigger picture, it doesn't make a difference either way."

So...

Talk about being ambiguous, I have decided to leave them dofollow.
 
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