Best Practice: Should We Always Make No-Follow for External Links from Blogs?

[mutantspy]

Hi Mozers,

I have few questions:

1. If I am allowing advertising on my blog and people advertising by placing Ads, Contextual links in Posts, Should I make them No-Follow? If Yes, then I might lose a good amount of income coming from Advertising. What is the best practice without loosing Organic rankings.

2. If I make all the External Links No-Follow (simple wordpress plugin can do), then I may not have anyone to advertise on my blog. What is the advantage that I am going to get?

3. Keeping the Do-Follow on all external links, how it will effect my blog? when there is no spam and all quality content on the blog.

Thank you

[EGOL]

1. If I am allowing advertising on my blog and people advertising by placing Ads, Contextual links in Posts, Should I make them No-Follow? If Yes, then I might lose a good amount of income coming from Advertising. What is the best practice without loosing Organic rankings.

Google wants those links to be nofollowed and advertisers want them to be followed.  If you allow them to be followed then you will attract advertisers who are trying to manipulate google and run the risk that google will disapprove of what you are doing.

What I do is run genuine ads such as Adsense and banner ads such as TribalFusion.  The link text in articles and blog posts all deliver visitors to relevant pages on my own site.  This promotes the content that I have worked hard to produce and when someone clicks on of those ads I will earn impression money from the next page that they visit.  I you have a good site you can still make a lot of money by doing things this way.

Another way to earn income is to place a small store on your site and sell the same things that the people who want to advertise on your site are selling.  If they can make a profit by paying you for the ads then you should be able to make even more money because your advertising expense is zero.  I have stores on my sites and sell a lot of relevant items.

2. If I make all the External Links No-Follow (simple wordpress plugin can do), then I may not have anyone to advertise on my blog. What is the advantage that I am going to get?

Get adssense, get Tribal, open a small store.

3. Keeping the Do-Follow on all external links, how it will effect my blog? when there is no spam and all quality content on the blog.

All of the external links on my blog and in my articles are dofollow... but I am linking out to recommended content and not linking out to people who are payin' me.   Every link on my blog and my site goes to another website that is better than mine for the topic that I am linking to.  (These external links are not "anchor text links in articles" they are either links in a "reference" box or links that tell visitors where I obtained information.

[mutantspy]

Thank you EGOL,

Opening a store is very difficult in my niche. I am running a car reviews blog for UK and most of the advertisers are big names like Lexus, Honda, Chevrolet and so on. I was earning good income from adsense, but my account got suspended due to some issue on another blog.

I thought of multiple options and invested most of the income I earn in making the blog look and feel better for the users.

I have another idea in mind and now I am more focused (Thanks to your store idea :-)).

[Trespass]

1. If I am allowing advertising on my blog and people advertising by placing Ads, Contextual links in Posts, Should I make them No-Follow? If Yes, then I might lose a good amount of income coming from Advertising. What is the best practice without loosing Organic rankings.

Hi Ahmad, If the ad is a banner or image and your "advertising partners" are benefiting from relevant traffic then it's not really an issue whether its no follow. However if you are selling contextual links (anchor text) (naughty naughty) in order to boost page rank/rankings for advertisers sites the it would need to be do-follow to pass pr. When it comes to applying no-follow or do-follow I always stick to doing what appears to be "normal". If you are linking out to quality sites then I'd do-follow but if you're linking to a poor quality the no-follow. Although Google are smart enough to detect a poor quality site and you shouldn't be putting your site at risk (selling links/advertising to poor sites) to make a few bucks.

2. If I make all the External Links No-Follow (simple wordpress plugin can do), then I may not have anyone to advertise on my blog. What is the advantage that I am going to get?

Again if you feel like you need to add no-follow there must be a reason. Are the sites you're linking to high quality relevant sites? Or are you simply selling links in order to help other site rank better/pass page rank? It would look a little suspicious to have all external links no-follow, which can be seen as page rank sculpting.

3. Keeping the Do-Follow on all external links, how it will effect my blog? when there is no spam and all quality content on the blog.

External links are part of how Google grades (moz on page reports) a web page. By looking at relevance of the linking site to the site linked to. Having external links to another quality source of information is rewarded. If there is no spam and good quality on your site and you link to another high quality resource, your blog will be fine. It's when you start to link to poor sites, sell links and create a reciprocal relationship with poor quality websites that you can run into trouble.

Hope this helps

Robert

[gfiorelli1]

1. If I am allowing advertising on my blog and people advertising by placing Ads, Contextual links in Posts, Should I make them No-Follow? If Yes, then I might lose a good amount of income coming from Advertising. What is the best practice without loosing Organic rankings.

If you don't want Google hitting you with a penalization (total, which means bouncing you out of the index, or partial, which means quitting you a substantial part of your PageRank), than you should put them as Nofollow.

Be aware that Google is not against selling links or "paid reviews" by themselves, but against using those activities in order to manipulate the rankings.

To your "clients", therefore, you should try to sell your blog because of the link equity passed via followed links/ads, but because the blog has referral traffic value, is targeting their audience, has a great social media activity... hence it can really help them in putting themselves in front of the eyes of that audience that want to gain.

2. If I make all the External Links No-Follow (simple wordpress plugin can do), then I may not have anyone to advertise on my blog. What is the advantage that I am going to get?

Sincerely I would not put all links as nofollowed, but just the banners/text links/ads out of the body and those which are not editorially justified in the posts.

I guess that your blog substantially offers "guest posts" opportunities... If it is so, then I would work on the quality of the posts you publish... also because if you let publishing every single 300 words blog posts a writer can write in 5 minutes, well... your blog won't have a great life and will be easily detected as low quality.

3. Keeping the Do-Follow on all external links, how it will effect my blog? when there is no spam and all quality content on the blog.

Again, see answer 2. An editorial control must always be present.