Old massive site, should I nofollow all out going links?

[Nola504]

The company I work for is in the process of rebuilding our entire website profile.

Our biggest site, FrenchQuarter.com ranks pretty well for our main term "French Quarter Hotels" And we use that to drive business directly to our hotel businesses. The site is very old and one I inherited, rebuilding it won't be a priority for another 9 months or so. This site act's as a bit of a directory for the city. There are links everywhere and it's probably passing link juice to a lot of businesses scott free.

In the mean time would it benefit or hurt us if I went through and no-followed most of the links? Would nofollowing links help frenchquarter.com to rank any better than it does? And could I then direct some of that link juice directly at our hotel websites to boost those as well?

My goal is to get our hotel websites to rank 1st page, we get exposure in the locations pack, for 2 of our 5 hotels, but placing below that is impossible with all the competition from the OTA's (expecia, bookit.com, etc) Seems near impossible no matter what my backlink profile looks like.

Thanks for any feedback,

Cyril

[William.Lau]

Theoretically it should benefit you if you nofollow those links based on the fact that you are giving them juice.

Putting follow links to your own hotels will indeed help the rankings because it is a more authoritative link rather than a nofollow link.

Also, because Bookit and Expedia rank better, it doesn't mean you can't have a more captivating title and description. If you are ranking near the others, you can easily just put more attractive titles to get the user's attention.

[EGOL]

The last public statement on how pagerank works on nofollowed links from Matt Cutts is....

"Pagerank on a nofollowed link does not pass to the target site, instead it simply evaporates.  So, if you nofollow the link, your site will gain nothing and the target site will gain nothing."   What you really communicate is.... "they paid us!".... or ... "we don't trust them".

Of course google could change their mind about how they do this and they could have changed it already and not told anybody.

[Nola504]

Thanks for the response EGOL,

I notice our hotels get a lot of backlinks from tripadvisor, of course they are all no follow links. Is tripadvisor communicating that to google as well? A major brand with healthy PA telling google, "we know these guys are who they say they are, but we don't trust them with our brand name"?

[William.Lau]

Majority of large name brands have nofollow on their sites mainly because its not manageable. Think about all these pages and posts they would have to filter and remove and say ok this should follow and this should nofollow.

They don't benefit from it, so they just nofollow all of it. However, I thin TP has a blog or top ten list sometimes, which then they would have a follow link.

This is the majority for most large sites/companies.

[EGOL]

They are being weasels.

They are willing to link to you but they don't want to help power your site.

[Chenzo]

I think the keyword here is variation.

If the ONLY links you have that are followed to sites you are trying to help benefit and nofollow everything else.

No bueno.

I have started to see - if it doesn't make sense, it probably won't rank.

[Nola504]

Hey Chenzo thanks for the reply as well,

In the grand scheme of things I would just like to leverage what we already have from sites we own. If I can squeeze out a bit more link juice by no following competitors, I think that makes sense.

[Vizergy]

Hi Cyril,

As an SEO that specializes in hotels, and has for years, I thought I would share a bit of experience with you.  I can not stress the importance of On Page SEO in our industry.  Links are, of course, important, but On Page can not be ignored.  I hope you don't mind but I took the liberty of quickly going through your site and I have some suggestions that I believe will help you to achieve the rankings you are looking for.  Each page of your website should have a clear and definite focus i.e. the focus for the hotels page should obviously be French Quarter Hotels etc... the page's focus needs to be reflected in each page's Title, Description, alt text, H1 and all through out the content.  No pages should have the same title or description (they all appear to be the same right now).  Unless you are using the keyword tags for internal reporting (we do) you should drop them.  If you do use them clean them up (right now the terms in them are far too broad and there are far to many).  Internal linking should be structured to flow for the user etc... just basic stuff.  With your current link profile and the age of your site a good on page clean up should be all you need.

Good Luck!

[Nola504]

Vizergy,

Thanks for your input. I am definitely aware of the way our on page SEO sucks at the moment. Like I said in opening I inherited this beast about 6 months ago. Our rankings didn't suffer at all through panda and penguin, so I've left it alone, we actually got a boost from it.

This site is a total cluster f**k at the moment, and like I said we are scheduled to over haul it in about 9 months. It's built on a make-shift cms that's integrated with travelocity in some twisted way. It generates some affiliate revenue for us, but the focus is on our brick and mortar businesses. With the summer being a slow time for our industry in this area. I was contemplating a few ways to boost our physical businesses by leveraging this site.

I'm going to take your advice and do a bit of on-page clean up for our hotels section.

Thanks

[Vizergy]

Awesome - Good Luck!