Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
A lot depends on the architecture of your site, though, and how high up in your navigation hierarchy this page and these outbound links are. I wouldn't want to put 30 outbound links on the home page, but further down in the hierarchy, the loss of PageRank isn't much of an issue. The distribution of PageRank is an issue.
You might also do better by organizing the links, adding useful descriptions and introductory text, and spreading them out over multiple pages that really are resource pages.
It's not the page that the links are on that's affected by a lot of links... it's the downstream pages that are affected. The more links you have on a page, the less PR goes to each page linked to from that page.
Yes, some PR recycled back to the home page and then back to the page itself might be lost, but that's really miniscule. The fact that you are linking out, if the destination pages are good ones, is likely to be seen as a positive factor.
I went through each website, extracted the contact information and put them on my page along with a link to the company's website, in case my visitors want more information.
The pages that I'm linking to are very badly designed. Most of them don't have PageRank and 5,000,000+ Alexa ranking.
My website is WordPress based. The page in question is a regular post that is currently on the homepage and in the future will be reachable through search or category navigation. I think, it will be, at most, two clicks away from the homepage.
Currently, I have a small 300-something word article and beneath this article are the links. Do you think I should move the links to other pages and link to those pages from this article? I didn't do that because I wanted everything to be there when somebody lands on this page.
The distribution of PageRank is an issue
Could you expand on this Robert? I have a similar situation. I'd reached the conclusion that PR was more useful as an indicator of good internal navigation (which could help rankings) but not factored in ranking algos itself. Would you agree?
[edited by: Simsi at 11:55 am (utc) on Oct. 11, 2008]
If it helps, it's probably for TrustRank.
p/g
...PR was more useful as an indicator of good internal navigation (which could help rankings) but not factored in ranking algos itself. Would you agree?
PageRank is one of the factors in the ranking algo. You can think of the ranking factors as occurring in two buckets - those that depending on the query terms and those that are query independent. PageRank is a query-independent factor.
The websites that I'm linking to are almost useless for visitors. Knowing how to get in touch with the companies that are being linked to is what matters to my visitors.
If the websites are useless, why are you linking to them?
OTOH, if the visitors want to get in touch with the companies, and you are providing a link to the companies, then the links are not useless, and, IMO, you shouldn't nofollow them.
If these are useful online resources for visitors, I think this approach will in fact hurt the ranking. I think you'd be better off linking to the pages and being part of the web than you would be hoarding PageRank.
I agree, based on my experiences.
Some time ago, in one of my sites, I put some serious effort to develop pages in the level 4 from the root (i.e., www.domain.com/level2/level3/level4.html), but at that time I was too busy to develop the level3 pages (level4.html pages were very rich in content, whereas level3.html were only a collection of links to level4 pages).
After some months, level4 pages started to rank very well for their keywords, some of them very competitive.
I was hesitant to change level3 pages, fearing a drop in the level4 pages.
Some time ago, I worked on some of the level3 pages; I added a lot of relevant content and a lot of external links.
If PageRank were the factor driving level4 pages up, they should drop. Instead, level4 pages retained their rankings, and level3 pages moved up.
Hoarding PageRank is a waste of time.
The fact that you are linking out, if the destination pages are good ones, is likely to be seen as a positive factor.
Do we know for a fact that it is better not to use "nofollow" to relevant pages? Has anyone experimented with this, or has anything to this effect been ever written by a Google employee? Could any of the gurus here elaborate on this a little bit more?
On my site all external links are nofollow. Should I remove the "nofollow" at least for the most relevant sites?
I've been meaning to ask this for a while. I'm glad I found this thread
As for this 30-link page, I'll keep the "nofollow" simply because my website and the websites I'm linking to don't target the same audience. My website and copy is tailored to <widget sellers> and theirs is to <widget buyers>.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:07 am (utc) on Oct. 12, 2008]
[edit reason] Removed specifics [/edit]
Quality outgoing links in the flow of quality text, can certainly be helpful - Google respects pages that use the World Wide Web.
But a simple list of links, even at the foot a quality article, is unlikely to be helpful in that way, and could be positively harmful in more ways than one.
I'd either use nofollow, or remove any but the best of those links, and I'd review all outgoing links on a regular basis. And if I were starting from a blank page, I'd not use lists of links without relevant supporting text, ever.
But I feel the 'leaking pagerank' worry is of very little consequence to a decent web site - other linking factors are much more likely to matter to Google, in my view, totally marginalizing any pagerank issues.
[edited by: Simsi at 4:11 pm (utc) on Oct. 12, 2008]
@Marvin: I think the concensus (above and beyond) is that if the links are good quality and valuable then don't nofollow them.
Simsi, thanks. I added about 20 URLs to my "white list". They are all sites relevant to the topic of my forum, and they are sites respected in the industry. I'm hoping it may have a slight positive impact on my site over time. I will most likely never know for certain, since these things are difficult to measure, but I trust what you guys are saying. Thanks
Also what about target="_blank" links to open a new browser window? Any consensus on whether these are counted the same as a direct link in passing page rank?
In general we use nofollow to redirect Page Ranking WITHIN our site. For instance the "contact us" and "advertise with us" pages, which are uually linked from the bottom of many pages, are not really something we care about ranking highly on the search engines, compared to our home page.
How Google handles multiple links to the same URL on the same page is not completely clear - for instance, tests using unique anchor text sometimes seem to show that the extra links "count", and sometimes seem to show that they don't. But your idea of using nofollow on all but the first one sounds harmless at any rate, just in case some of the PR would otherwise get split away from other links on the page.
It's not worth agonizing over very minor decisions like this, I'd say - just make a decision and move on.
