Do Not Be A Nofollow Sucker
One of my clients was linking out to real and trusted sites from pages on his site and added rel=nofollow to the links because he thought this was helping his site. This is unnecessary.
There’s no reason to put nofollow on editorially approved links.
If you write a blog post and nofollow the links on it your blog for no other reason that to conserve pagerank or think linking out to irrelevant sites will hurt your site, in my experience, you’re misinformed at best.
Google doesn’t penalise you for linking to irrelevant sites if both pages in question are relevant to each other.
Use nofollow only if you don’t want to vouch for the page you’re linking to. I often surmise Google might be taking in the quality or accuracy of your outbound links in some minor way to measure the strength of your trust, so don’t miss out because you are effectively not linking to anybody.
Also consider, the link you make might be the link that heps another REAL site get traffic from Google and satisfy Google’s users – that’s not a bad thing for anybody.
I don’t even use nofollow on blog comments (using the free hobo wordpress plugin for comments) because I editorially and manualy approve all blog comments, and only approve the link after a number of comments from trusted users and if the site in question is a real site of any value.
I have little reason for nofollow these days. I don’t use it to sculpt pagerank, and I don’t use it in any arena where editorial moderation is in play.
I only use it for sites that don’t deserve the link to be search engine friendly and in 99% of the cases if I don’t have any reason to trust a site, I won’t make the link a link at all.
Pet hate – web sites where every outbound link is nofollowed. They aren’t suckers, they’re amadans.
Written by Shaun Anderson
Just had to look up what an ‘amadan’ was. Never heard of it before. With wordpress.com doping redirects on all links if you dont pay them $30 I fear that blog spam on wordpress.org installations will increase. On the one website I run with full do follow – though all comments are moderated, the site gets battered daily with about 300 spam comments. Nofollows not great but it has its place, overusing it seems an excessive waste of time.
Thanks for the comment Mike
My advice for nofollowing (or rather following) blog comments is of course aimed at those with smaller blogs, or one blog, or if you have the time to moderate
Amadan = Scottish for fool or idiot
On the benefits of linking out, Matt Cutts said in his don’t bother pagerank scuplting post that:
“I didn’t say that linking to high-quality sites helped your PageRank, but rather other parts of our system would encourage/reward those links.”
So yes, I think you’re right that “Google might be taking in the quality or accuracy of your outbound links”.
Thanks Malcolm
Thanks for this simple yet another good SEO tip. I think now I can stop reading other blogs for a while and go through all the previous posts. I wonder how many such good tips I have been missing for a while.
I have read elsewhere (don’t recall where) that if you link out to other relevant sites within your niche then the search engines can see the online community in which your site operates – which is obviously beneficial when returning relevant search results.
I’m all for the following of any links that are not spam – there are too many people out there who have become obsessed** with PR and linking and are far too precious with the green bar and what they think it means to their site – hopefully with gradual phase out of the PR indicator and some proof that following your outbound links will help your site, this will change.
** I admit I once went overboard on nofollowing internal links to try and sculpt pagerank, a matter of days before Matt Cutts video came out, gutted.
I also had to look up amadam, and I’m Irish!
Thanks for the tips. I try to follow the same linking strategy – always follow, except when linking out to a possibly dodgy site.