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Is it bad to add rel="nofollow" to all OBL?

by Fiddy6
9 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I'm wondering if it's bad practice to add rel="nofollow" to all the outbound links on a site, even those that are to related and authority sites.

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".
#add #bad #obl #relnofollow
  • Profile picture of the author Fiddy6
    any advice here?
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  • Profile picture of the author Fiddy6
    Originally Posted by clickbump View Post

    Hi Fiddy, the main reason to add nofollow to OBL would be when you do not vouch for the link.

    For example, you may be referencing an external page that supports your copy or statement as in "here's a site that exemplifies what I'm talking about..."
    I understand that. I wasn't really asking what nofollow means. I was explaining my situation on how I was hit with an "unnatural links" penalty regarding links on my site to other sites and was wondering that since I haven't done anything to manipulate the system, could it be that maybe the penalty was given cause there's repetitive use of links pointing to the same domains, and on top of that, given the circumstance, would it bad practice to "nofollow" all OBL on the site, whether the content on the other sites can be vouched for or not.

    I'm not "referencing" anything. I'm simply telling people where to get what and providing links to external pages that are mostly webstores. Although not all affiliates, one could easily assume it's an affiliate-based site since 9 out of 10 links point to a webstore where somethign can be bought.
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  • Profile picture of the author hicksdelight
    If I am sending lots to link to one site and have a good reason for it, I normally make one a do follow and all the rest nofollow, just to be safe.

    Saying that I shouldnt be penalized for posting a link to a quality article, even if they are on one site, that site just happens to be really good, isnt that what Matt Cutts wants?
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  • Profile picture of the author misha7878
    Google will still subtract the value of the nofollow link from your overall page juice even with a nofollow, so it is useless to nofollow if the main reason is to save pagerank.
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  • Profile picture of the author retsek
    No you will not get penalized for using nofollow. In fact, they recently answered this question. See video below.

    Basically nofollow should be used for links you don't trust and for links created via user generated content such as forums, blog comments, etc.

    You can't give away or "leak" all your pagerank. Every site has a certain amount of pagerank to spend, keeping or hoarding it doesn't benefit them. Spending it doesn't harm them unless it it's to bad neighborhoods like you've experienced. Contrary to popular belief Wikipedia does still have dofollow links to certain external sites, so it too does spend.

    So my advice is to determine link love on a case by case basis. On my sites, all links are by default nofollow. When I'm linking to known quality sites, I take off the condom and give some link love.

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  • Profile picture of the author stephenwaldo
    Google won't penalize you specifically for having the nofollow tag, but don't think that they won't still know who you're linking to (so they can still tell if you're an affiliate site, for example). Honestly though, from your description it sounds more like a problem that is typical to ecommerce-y sites: thin content. Google's never been much of an ecommerce lover, especially if there is very little unique content. So that's my question - How much of your website is unique?

    Although, now that I think a little bit more about it, I realized that with Google's recent crackdown on blog-networks your site could have somehow gotten thrown into the mix. A typical blog in these networks looks like this: Lots of pages rotating through the home page, only 1 or 2 links per page but there's a link in EVERY page, and lots of categories and possibly also lots of poor quality content. If your site resembles that at all, I could see how they might have suspected you were part of a network.
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  • Profile picture of the author paulgl
    Originally Posted by clickbump View Post

    Hi Fiddy, the main reason to add nofollow to OBL would be when you do not vouch for the link.
    Yeah, what's funny, is that this nonsense about nofollow is that it
    signal's spam, untrusted links. So, why would you fill your
    site up with spam, untrusted links?

    And the reverse is true. If nofollow means a link not trusted, how
    about all those crazy nofollow links people post all over the place?
    Are their sites spamming untrusted links?

    Paul
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    • Profile picture of the author mttorley
      I'm in the midst of dealing with a Greater than 70% drop in google traffic for my wife's AkronOhioMoms.com site. Many things happened at the time of the drop- though not necessarily overlayed with panguin.

      Among unfortunate changes
      • a pile of 404s (that are now fixed)
      • a change in Google Authorship from one account to a new account.
      • the change over to almost all no-follow links (she writes sponsored product reviews, i.e. compensated / paid posts) - about 6 months or more before the drop

      I am wondering if we're getting hit because of the lack of do follow links on her site. It's the right thing to do to make them no-follow, but, is it harming?

      I am guessing we're getting penalized for links generated by giveaway entrants (i.e. put our button on your site, and we'll count that as extra entries' ) that we did a few years ago, maybe they're now haunting us?

      From the video it doesn't sound like our no-follows... comments??
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      • Profile picture of the author mttorley
        suggestions appreciated for this newbie.
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