Is it bad to add rel="nofollow" to all OBL?
- SEO |
One of my sites was recently penalized by Google for "artificial or unnatural links pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank." Now, I never took part in any shady link schemes to help people build backlinks, but one look at one site and you might of thought that was the case. The site is a "buyers guide". So, basically, I find a product online related to the niche, post a description about it, and inform the reader where they can get it. That being said, every post contains an outbound link either to either a related blog where I originally discovered the product, or to a webstore where the product is readily available for purchase. Majority of the time, these items are coming from the same retailers. So, for example, there may be 100 links on the site point to 100 different pages on Newegg.com and another 200 pointing to pages on Staples.com. It's important to add that none of these outbound links had a rel="nofollow" tag, nor where they all affiliate links. Most though were to some sort of webstore/retail outlet, affiliated or not.
In the eyes of a BOT looking for sites participating in link schemes to manipulate PageRank, I don't know if maybe the fact that all these "dofollow" links pointing to the same domains appeared to be "artificial or unnatural" and set off some sort of alarm that got my site penalized....I mean, how many sites out there have a few hundred links pointing to another site without some sort of black hat practice going on.
Knowing I haven't participated in any sort of link schemes to risk the integrity of my site or help anybody else build theres, the only answer I can come up with as to why my site was penalized is cause I had all those outbound links and none of them had a rel="nofollow" attribute attached to them.
We're talking around 6,500 posts, each with an outbound link going somewhere (never to a bad neighborhood).
This brings me to my question. Is it bad practice to add rel="nofollow" to every single outbound link. Will Google look at it like, "this guy is trying to hog all the PageRank", or will they give me a pat on the back and say "good job".
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