NOFOLLOW in Forum Topic External Links?

[Peter264]

We run a busy aviation website, with lots of members who post external links within our forum.  Currently, we implement NOFOLLOW tags on all external links or links to external sites not in our domain portfolio.

Would we benefit from removing the NOFOLLOW attribute?  Would we benefit from keeping it?

Your thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[Bartell]

The nofollow attribute was created to help discourage spam.

If people post a ton of unrelated links that provide little or no benefit to the page I would leave the nofollows there. But if the links provide value it might be a good idea to allow them to be followed.

Just remember there's a large number of spammers out there that are looking for places to post followed links. Your spam might increase dramatically overnight.

[EGOL]

Are these links going to other great sources of aviation content... or are they simply people linking to personal websites, websites who pay them to grub links, and websites who paid somebody who paid these people to grub links on your site?

My question is... are these people turning your site into a linkfarm?  If they are then you better keep the nofollow or heavily moderate.

If you remove the nofollow and word gets out that you have a "do follow" forum then that could be like painting a target on your own behind.

[JaspalX]

Agree with Scott. Almost every forum I've seen that allows followed external links gets spammed so you'll need a strategy to combat that. If the links provide value I'm not sure if following/no-following will make much difference to community behaviour, but they might encourage the more seo-savvy users to post links (and of course, attract the spammers).

At the simplest level you could try requiring javascript from posters, but I suspect you'll need something a bit more sophisticated. There are forum posting and blog commenting tools that try and solve captchas so ultimately, i suspect there will be little alternative but to manually moderate the forum.

[Peter264]

Thank you for your responses guys.

I was also asking if there would be any SEO benefit of "DO-FOLLOWING" the links?  I.E. Google noticing that the page content doesn't include any NOFOLLOW links?

Most, if not all of the links are to legitamate aviation related websites.

[EGOL]

I have a blog that gets about six to ten posts per day.  Each of those posts has a link to another website.  All of these links are do-follow.  I do that because the sites that I am linking to are all very high quality and have better content for that subject that I have on my site.

I believe that when you are "linking up" to sites better than yours for a topic that the outgoing links are valuable.

However, I also believe that if you are "linking down" to trash sites and pages of unrelated content then the links can harm your site.

I would never give control of outgoing links on my site to strangers and even when my employees post content I always review the target of every outgoing link myself.